Guidewire Connections 2022

Clients can build the products their own customers need. Guidewire’s commitment to cloud, microservices and a new approach to upgrades.
Attendees at the recent Guidewire Connections event were eager to discuss plans. High on the agenda were the Cloud, modernisation, and transformation projects. What are the possibilities that Guidewire offers its customers?
The push to pure cloud
“ It is increasingly untenable for us to continue to innovate and invest in the on-premises instances of Guidewire”. Guidewire CEO Mike Rosenbaum emphasised the company’s commitment to bringing 100% of its customers onto cloud.
Guidewire is an AWS Partner with AWS Financial Services Competency designation. Guidewire cloud offers customers the opportunity to speed up the delivery of new products and the realisation of value, and to become more agile to respond to their customers’ demands. Many customers will now be considering their cloud strategies and readiness because of this announcement.
New approaches to upgrades
We’re also seeing Guidewire move away from a monolithic approach towards microservices and other small apps. This allows Guidewire to regularly deliver new functionalities based around microservices, rather than intermittently rolling out major new service features.
Essentially, it is moving from the idea of upgrading its products to updating them. This continuous improvement model is more straightforward for customers compared to the full upgrade approach.
Once customers have transitioned to cloud, the update process is significantly faster and easier. It can be facilitated through automated tools. This approach also allows updates to be released a great deal faster and lets Guidewire be more responsive to customer demands.
This aligns with Guidewire’s move towards a model of providing early access to new features. This allows customers to test new capabilities and provide feedback before the update is optimized and more widely released to all customers.
This improves time to market – which in turn, helps customers get their own products to market faster – and makes sure that updates are well aligned with what customers need.
Exposing the core gives greater flexibility
As well as the shift to micro-architectures, we are also seeing that cloud adoption is enabling discussions to move away from what the individual elements of the suite offer. Now it’s possible to leverage the entire ecosystem around the core by exposing some of the layers of the core module.
This facilitates much easier integration with third-party ISVs through micro-APIs and a cloud platform to access data in near-real time. Which improves the flexibility of the platform, empowers the customer to engage digitally with third parties to build products that their customers need and allows them to benefit from self-service on the infrastructure platform.
If you’d like to discuss how GFT could help you harness the benefits of Guidewire’s capabilities and become more agile, please contact us.