Building Guidewire's Future in the Cloud

Summary

Guidewire, a leading property and casualty insurance platform, has undergone a significant cloud transformation over the past five years. The company, which started with ClaimCenter and evolved to include PolicyCenter and billing, now serves 400 global customers. Facing challenges in team coordination and technology adaptation, Guidewire rebuilt its organization and embraced agile methodologies, Kubernetes, and containerization. This strategic shift has enabled faster product delivery, innovative insurance solutions, and a robust, scalable cloud platform that enhances customer engagement and operational efficiency.

Takeaways

• 🌟 Guidewire is the leading global platform for property and casualty insurance, with a history starting from the early 2000s with its product ClaimCenter.
• 📈 The company has evolved significantly, expanding its offerings to include PolicyCenter and billing, and now serves around 400 customers worldwide.
• ☁️ Guidewire's mission to transition to the cloud was a major challenge and opportunity, setting them apart from many other companies in the industry.
• 🤝 The speaker's joining of Guidewire was influenced by the chance to work with Diego and validate their prior experience in building cloud platforms.
• 🔍 The speaker's initial engagement with Guidewire involved giving a talk on agile to the development team, highlighting the company's ongoing transformation.
• 🏢 Guidewire's deep understanding of its market allows it to anticipate and innovate for the needs of its customers in the property and casualty insurance space.
• 🔄 The company faced organizational challenges with a scattered team that needed to be unified to operate more effectively under a single vision.
• 🧐 The speaker conducted extensive interviews in their first 90 days to understand the company's challenges and rebuilt the organization from the ground up.
• 💡 Guidewire's cloud transformation involved not just technology but also a cultural shift, affecting how the company does business and its overall company DNA.
• 🔄 The transition to the cloud required a change in mindset from periodic releases to continuous delivery of value to customers every two weeks.
• 🛠️ Technical challenges included dealing with a monolithic application built in the early 2000s and adapting it for a cloud-native environment using Kubernetes and containerization.

Q & A

What is the primary focus of Guidewire's business?

Guidewire primarily serves the property and casualty insurance market worldwide, providing a deep understanding of this specific B2B business and its technological needs.

What was the initial product that Guidewire started with?

Guidewire started with a product on claim called ClaimCenter, which later evolved to include PolicyCenter and billing solutions.

How has Guidewire's approach to technology evolved over time?

Guidewire has evolved from its initial product offerings to embracing cloud technologies, aiming to transform its platform to the cloud, which is a significant and challenging transition in the industry.

What was the motivation for Guidewire's shift towards cloud technology?

The motivation was to innovate and stay ahead in the market by transforming their platform to the cloud, a move that not many companies have been able to accomplish.

What challenges did Guidewire face during its cloud transformation?

Challenges included increasing talent density in cloud technologies, building discipline in software development for the cloud, and managing the transition from a monolithic application to a cloud-native architecture.

How did Guidewire address the issue of a scattered team during the transformation?

The company conducted extensive interviews with around 200 people across the organization to understand the challenges and then rebuilt the organization from the ground up to operate as one team.

What was the strategy for Guidewire's cloud platform in relation to its existing product, InsuranceSuite?

The strategy was to anchor the cloud transition on top of the existing InsuranceSuite product, leveraging AWS infrastructure, without rebuilding from scratch.

How did Guidewire manage the cultural shift required for the cloud transformation?

The company focused on continuous delivery of value to customers, changing the mindset from traditional release cycles to a faster cadence that aligns with agile practices.

What role did data play in Guidewire's cloud transformation?

Data became a critical component, with the new platform enabling the aggregation and analysis of data across all customers while maintaining regulatory and security compliance.

What was the significance of the first customer going live on Guidewire's cloud platform?

It marked a significant milestone, validating the success of the cloud platform and the team's efforts in building and transitioning to the new system.

How has Guidewire's approach to product development changed with the cloud platform?

Product development has shifted towards continuous delivery, enabling the release of new features and updates to customers every two weeks, as opposed to the previous two-year release cycle.

What is the concept of hybrid tenancy as implemented by Guidewire?

Hybrid tenancy in Guidewire's context refers to running a single-tenanted core insurance application on a multi-tenanted platform, which interfaces with other multi-tenanted third-party ecosystem players and partners.

What is ATMOS, and how does it fit into Guidewire's cloud strategy?

ATMOS is Guidewire's own platform as a service, built on Kubernetes, which amalgamates the best of available technologies for the insurance domain within the Guidewire context.

How has the cloud transformation impacted Guidewire's product management team?

The product management team has had to adapt to new procedures and processes for continuous delivery, ensuring that value is delivered every sprint and that customers can continuously uptake new features and products.

What are some of the future technologies and strategies Guidewire is considering for its platform?

Guidewire is looking into technologies such as AI, ML, Golang, Python, and data analytics, as well as exploring more intent-based systems for easier management of clusters and deployments.

How does Guidewire maintain a balance between stability and innovation?

Guidewire maintains stability by deeply understanding its market and not constantly pivoting, while fostering a culture of innovation that encourages data-driven changes for improvement's sake.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 Guidewire's Cloud Transformation Journey

Guidewire, the leading property and casualty insurance platform, embarked on a transformative journey to the cloud. Founded in 2000, the company initially offered ClaimCenter and later expanded to PolicyCenter and billing. With a global customer base of around 400, the company's mission to transition to the cloud was both intriguing and challenging. The speaker's experience and the company's deep market understanding were pivotal in this endeavor. The speaker joined Guidewire to validate their cloud platform building skills and was particularly drawn to the company's significant transformation. The initial interaction with Guidewire was as a guest speaker on agile development, revealing a company in the midst of change. The speaker's first 90 days involved extensive interviews to understand existing challenges, leading to a complete organizational rebuild. Key challenges included increasing talent density in cloud technologies and building discipline for cloud software development. The speaker emphasized the importance of consensus on problems and a strategic approach to tackling them, which significantly contributed to the company's progress.

05:01

🌟 Accelerating Market Presence with Cloud Solutions

The speaker discusses the transition to cloud technology at Guidewire, highlighting the acceleration in market approach, product development, and customer service. Joining in 2018, the speaker was part of a successful self-managed customer model based on a monolithic application built in the early 2000s. The cloud transition required a strategy that preserved past investments while enabling a move to a more agile, cloud-optimized infrastructure. Guidewire chose to build on AWS and leveraged the speaker's experience in platforms like Cloud Foundry and microservices architecture to shape their cloud platform. The vision was to innovate faster, be more agile, and enable customers to achieve previously cumbersome tasks more easily. The product management team embraced the challenge of continuous delivery and the ability to measure customer uptake of features in the cloud. The technical challenge was to move from a monolithic architecture to a cloud-native solution, made possible by Kubernetes and containerization, leading to the development of Guidewire's hybrid tenancy model and the ATMOS platform.

10:02

🛠️ Navigating Technical and Data Challenges in the Cloud

The speaker reflects on the complexities of transitioning Guidewire's core applications to the cloud, which were robust but difficult to upgrade. The challenge was to maintain regulatory and information security compliance while delivering analytics products. The speaker's role was to ensure the cloud platform's foundation and to facilitate the first customer go-live, which was a significant milestone. The team's ability to work together during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite being physically separated, demonstrated the platform's resilience. The speaker also emphasizes the pride in building a team from scratch with expertise in cloud computing, contributing to open source, and reducing the time from ideation to production significantly. The use of Kubernetes and other open source tools improved application density and performance, leading to cost reduction and reliability improvements. Guidewire's Advanced Product Designer and cloud microservices were introduced to streamline product implementation and market launch for customers.

15:03

🌐 Embracing Innovation and Digital Transformation

The speaker outlines Guidewire's ability to build and deliver new value to customers through their cloud platform, which was a significant shift from their previous limitations. The company is exploring new technologies to simplify cluster management and is moving towards intent-based systems for easier operations. Guidewire is committed to maintaining its use of EKS and focusing on security and a secure software supply chain. The company is also migrating to a new code generation platform, expanding beyond Spring Boot and Java to include Golang, Python, and integrating AI and ML capabilities. The wealth of data now accessible through the cloud platform opens up opportunities for AI and ML models to improve business and the world. The speaker also discusses the importance of digital transformation, noting how customers have embraced Guidewire's vision and the company's ability to provide modern, cutting-edge tools to its developers.

20:05

🤝 Cultivating a Culture of Innovation and Teamwork

The speaker highlights the importance of Guidewire's culture of innovation, where engineers can directly impact the transformation process. The company's size allows every employee to have a significant role, and the culture encourages innovation and data-driven change for the betterment of the industry and customers. The speaker emphasizes the flexibility required to adapt to new technologies and operational modes, noting that Guidewire operates at the pace of a startup while maintaining stability. The company's focus on one market allows for deep understanding and targeted improvements without the need for constant pivoting. The speaker also discusses the rewarding aspect of working with a gratifying team and the company's low attrition rate, which reflects the positive work environment. Guidewire's past achievements are unique, and the speaker is excited about the potential for future success.

Keywords

💡Guidewire

Guidewire is a leading provider of software products to the property and casualty insurance industry. It is the main subject of the video script, as the speakers discuss its evolution and transformation to a cloud-based platform. The company's journey from its early days with products like ClaimCenter to its current focus on cloud technology is a central theme of the video.

💡Cloud transformation

Cloud transformation refers to the process of moving applications, services, and infrastructure to cloud computing environments. In the video, this concept is critical as it discusses Guidewire's shift to a cloud-based platform, which is a significant part of the company's strategic direction and a key challenge for its team.

💡ClaimCenter

ClaimCenter is one of the initial products developed by Guidewire, focused on the claims process in insurance. It is mentioned in the script as the starting point of Guidewire's product evolution, highlighting the company's growth from a single product to a comprehensive insurance platform.

💡PolicyCenter

PolicyCenter is another product in Guidewire's suite, which manages insurance policies. The script mentions the gradual expansion of Guidewire's offerings from ClaimCenter to include PolicyCenter, showcasing the company's development into a full-service insurance software provider.

💡Agile methodology

Agile methodology is a project management and product development approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and rapid iterations. The script refers to the speaker's talk about agile to the development team at Guidewire, indicating a shift towards more adaptive and efficient development practices.

💡Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is an open-source cloud application platform, which is mentioned in the script as part of the speaker's background. It is relevant to the video's theme as it represents the speaker's expertise in building platforms that are foundational to Guidewire's cloud transformation.

💡Hybrid tenancy

Hybrid tenancy is an architectural approach that combines elements of single-tenancy and multi-tenancy. In the context of the video, it is used to describe Guidewire's cloud platform strategy, allowing for the efficient use of resources while maintaining the performance and isolation needs of individual customers.

💡ATMOS

ATMOS is Guidewire's own platform as a service (PaaS), which is mentioned in the script as a key component of their cloud infrastructure. It represents the company's innovation in creating a tailored solution that combines the best of existing technologies for the insurance domain.

💡Monolith

A monolith, in software architecture, refers to a single, large, and indivisible block of code that performs many functions. In the script, the challenge of transitioning Guidewire's monolithic application, built in the early 2000s, to a cloud-native environment is discussed, emphasizing the need for modernization.

💡Microservices architecture

Microservices architecture is a design approach that structures an application as a collection of small, loosely coupled services. The script mentions the speaker's experience in converting monoliths to microservices, which is instrumental in Guidewire's cloud platform development and its ability to deliver features more flexibly.

💡Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery is the practice of automating the steps that follow software changes, allowing for the rapid and continuous delivery of software to customers. The script discusses the shift in Guidewire's mindset towards continuous delivery, which is a core part of their cloud transformation and agile practices.

Highlights

Guidewire is the largest property and casualty insurance platform globally, with a mission to transform to the cloud.

The company's evolution from ClaimCenter to PolicyCenter and billing signifies its growth and service expansion.

Guidewire serves around 400 customers worldwide, emphasizing its global presence and customer base.

The company's cloud transformation was both interesting and challenging, setting it apart from many others in the industry.

Diego's leadership and the opportunity to validate cloud platform building were significant factors in joining Guidewire.

Agile methodologies were introduced to the development team, indicating a shift towards more flexible development practices.

Guidewire's deep understanding of the property and casualty insurance market allows for innovative product development.

The company's large, distributed team faced challenges in operating as a unified entity, highlighting the need for organizational restructuring.

The rebuilding of the organization from the ground up was a significant strategic move to address internal challenges.

The increase in talent density in cloud technologies was a key challenge and area of focus during the transformation.

The transition from a five-member team to over a hundred reflects the company's rapid growth and development.

Creating a consensus on the problems faced was a crucial initial step in the transformation process.

The shift towards continuous delivery of value to customers marked a significant change in Guidewire's approach.

The successful cloud transition required both a technological and cultural transformation within the company.

The decision to anchor the cloud transition on top of the existing InsuranceSuite product was a strategic choice to preserve customer investment.

The introduction of Advanced Product Designer and cloud microservices has revolutionized how insurance products are designed and brought to market.

The successful adoption of the cloud platform by customers within a single release period is a testament to its effectiveness and user-friendliness.

Guidewire's low attrition rate and the desire of former employees to return reflect the positive work culture and environment.

The company's focus on innovation, flexibility, and data-driven decision-making sets it apart in the industry.

The potential for leveraging AI and ML models with the wealth of data available on the platform is an exciting prospect for future developments.

Transcripts

Guidewire is the largest property and casualty insurance platform in the world.

The company was founded in early 2000.

We started with the product on claim called ClaimCenter,

and then we evolved gradually to PolicyCenter and billing.

Today, we have around 400 customers worldwide.

The mission of Guidewire to transform to the cloud

was very interesting and challenging.

Not many companies have able to do something like that,

so I was very excited about trying to do that.

All my experience to that day

prepared me in the best possible way for the challenge.

I primarily joined because of Diego.

Jokes apart, it was also an opportunity for me to validate

the things that I'd done prior to joining Guidewire

in terms of building out cloud platforms.

Plus, this was an enormous challenge at the same time for me,

which I thought I shouldn't give up on.

My first experience with Guidewire was actually

when a friend of mine asked me to come in and give a talk.

I came in, I gave a talk to the development team about agile.

That was when I first realized this was a company that was really in the middle of a big transformation.

The more I got to know the company,

the more it seemed like here's a company that's got

20 years of experience and is really successful

and is now doing this really big transformation,

and that felt like a super interesting challenge to me.

I'd been with Guidewire already for quite a few years

when the whole cloud journey and transition began.

I was of course super excited to be pulled into the team with Diego

and to be a part of that initial journey

and then seeing it through over the last five years.

One of the things I personally love about Guidewire

is that we serve one market:

property and casualty insurance worldwide.

We have a deep understanding of our market.

It's a B2B business, so we know who all of our customers and potential customers are,

and we engage with them frequently,

and we have deep, deep partnerships.

We understand our customers' business,

we understand their priorities,

and more importantly, we understand all of the technological innovations

that are required to power that business.

So we can even see ahead and build things that they're not even asking for yet.

We got a very large team distributed around the world

in predominantly six location between U.S. and Europe.

But that team was very scattered.

It was not operating as one team.

You can think in terms of, for example, the digital team

and the core team to be completely independent.

That was one of the biggest issue that we had at that point.

In the first 90 days, I interviewed around 200 people bottom-up into the entire organization

to ask questions and understand

what has been the sort of challenge until that point.

After that, I decided to rebuild the organization ground-up.

With regards to the challenges that we faced,

there primarily are two types.

One was people, the other was technology.

With regards to people, we had a lot of talented people here in Guidewire,

but then how do we make sure that we increase

the talent density in terms of the cloud technologies

and the transformation that we needed?

The challenges at the team level was about how do we build discipline,

building out a software for the cloud?

And that needed a lot of measurements.

We needed the ability to know the direction we are going,

how we are building it out,

how do we validate these software as they get built out.

We've moved from a five member team when I joined

to more than a hundred right now,

so I think we're doing pretty good.

When you go through a transformation,

different people have a different point of view on how

to implement a transformation.

But typically everybody agrees on what the problems are.

So my focus in the first 90 days was to create a consensus of the problem that we were facing.

Then together with my team, I came up with an approach

and an implementation on how to sort of tackle the top 10 problems,

and that was taken very favorably.

From there, we got to where we are today.

In terms of the cloud transformation, what really interested me was

both the transformation of the technology

and also the transformation of the culture.

I'd been in a company before that did that,

and I found it to be a really fascinating turn

in the way a company handles itself,

because it's not just about the technology.

It's also about how you do business,

about the DNA of the whole company.

Before the cloud transition,

we were developing in two week sprints,

but we were not delivering that value to customers

until we did a release, which was about two years.

What we needed to do to pivot is to change our mindset

into continuous delivery of value to our customers,

not just to the source code repository.

So we needed to be able to, as a PM team,

to plan, prioritize, and do discovery

at a much faster cadence

and to also box that into deliverables

that we could put into production

and show to customers every two weeks.

In the beginning, there were some challenges.

You don't take a team that's used to delivering

on a two-year schedule and put them on a two-week schedule in terms of product delivery

without some road bumps and so on.

The important thing though is that we could see that once we achieved this,

and once we were able to get into a really good rhythm and cadence of doing this,

we would rapidly accelerate how we went to market

and how we developed our products

and what we could do for our customers,

and that's what kept everybody inspired and engaged.

I joined around 2018.

Guidewire got to that point with a large success

on self-managed customers with, by and large, a monolithic application

architected and built in the early 2000s.

It was a perfect solution back then.

But in this cloud transition,

that was not the best approach.

Coming up with a strategy that was enabling the transition,

but at the same time preserving the investment

that our customers have made across the years

was the most important challenge.

We have decided from the very beginning

that the transition was not a sort of rebuild,

but we wanted to anchor our transition on top of the existing product - InsuranceSuite.

Then the second decision was that we would build that on top of AWS infrastructure.

So that was the starting piece of the vision and the strategy.

My background has been building out platforms,

an open source platform called Cloud Foundry.

I also had experiences building,

converting monoliths to microservices architecture,

which has helped me shape the direction of how we build our cloud platform.

My role in the cloud vision transformation was around the product.

Diego brought me in to help define the MVP.

He wanted that kind of agile mindset that would say,

"I don't need to overengineer. I don't need to overdesign

because I can do a release every two weeks.

I just wanna deliver the minimum requirement

and then iterate."

About two years into my stay here at Guidewire,

Diego asked me to take over operations

for the same reason as well.

He wasn't just looking for a technology shift,

he was also looking for a cultural shift.

We had to stop thinking about it as our goal is to get the customer live and then move on.

Instead, it was our goal is to get the customer live

and then continue to operate the customer at scale

and with a stable and consistent service level.

We had this vision to release software multiple times per year.

The vision from the very beginning was:

How can we innovate faster?

How can we be more agile?

How can we build more capability?

How can we enable our customer to do things

that until that day were not possible

or very cumbersome to them to execute?

The product management team was probably

equally parts terrified and excited about this new cloud vision.

We started with the vision that Diego shared.

And then we really started to focus on how could we change our procedures

and our processes to do continuous delivery,

make sure that we were delivering value every time that we finished a sprint.

This idea that we could pivot to a world

where customers were continuously able to uptake

and we had analytics in the cloud to measure

uptake of our features, uptake of our products,

how they're being adopted, how they're being used,

it's just super energizing and exciting

for the product management team.

The biggest technical challenge was the monolith,

a solution that was architected and built very successfully,

but in the early 2000s was not exactly the perfect infrastructure

for moving into a cloud architecture moving forward.

In the past that would have been very, very difficult,

but new technology came to support us in this transition.

Most notably, Kubernetes and containerization.

So we leveraged those two,

and we decided to build what we call hybrid tenancy.

That basically is a mix of single-tenant and multi-tenant.

It became clear that from a skillset perspective

and from a team perspective, I needed to upskill what was my team back then.

Anoop was the best person I knew

that had that right level of knowledge

to enable this vision of container and Kubernetes.

What is hybrid tenancy?

It has different connotations in different contexts,

but in our context, it's about running

a single-tenanted core insurance application

on a multi-tenanted platform,

which interfaced with other multi-tenanted

third party ecosystem players and partners.

There was nothing that did all of these things for us.

We had to build our own operators,

build it out on Kubernetes,

and we built our own platform as a service called ATMOS,

which amalgamates the best of what is there out in the world right now

for the insurance domain within the Guidewire context.

In terms of technical challenges,

I think there were two really interesting things to me.

The first was how to run InsuranceSuite,

which is Guidewire's flagship product, in the cloud.

InsuranceSuite was built over the last 20 years.

It's got a lot of components that were not meant to run in the cloud

and we had to find new and creative ways to run them cloud native.

The second big transformation that I found challenging was around data.

Guidewire has an incredible amount of data.

Previously, that data was available one customer at a time.

And now, we wanted to figure out how to make that data available

across all customers

while still maintaining all regulatory compliance,

information security compliance,

but still being able to deliver

really great analytics products.

One of the things I love about working at Guidewire as a product manager

is that we have deep business and technical challenges

that we have to face with our customers.

They have incredibly complex IT infrastructures.

We need to fit into that,

but also help them optimize all of the services around them

so that they can innovate and move their business forward.

Our core applications are super robust and scalable

and really easy to customize.

But the downside is that that made them incredibly hard to upgrade.

It took us two years to actually push out a release to customers,

and then what we found is it would often take them

five to seven years to take that upgrade.

I have my personal favorite

and my moment that I would recall forever.

What about you, Julie?

What is one thing that stands out on those five years?

First of all, props.

The cloud platform, right?

That's the foundation for all of our success now.

For me, the most memorable events in the past five years have been

when we built out our cloud platform

and getting our first customer on the cloud platform.

Having that first customer go live was just incredible.

I think seeing the teams

and the various teams starting to work together was really, really cool.

But if I can just call out one thing specific was during COVID.

Like we launched this platform January 1st

2020, yeah.

And then three months later, I got shut in my garage for two years

and like we didn't see each other.

And yet somehow, we still- - It worked.

We still made the platform work.

I remember December 13th, 2019,

that was when the first customer put their first hand on the platform.

So that day, I really remember.

So that just makes me very proud and kind of remember that as a kind of milestone.

But what makes me very proud in general is the team that we built, right?

When we started this journey five years ago,

not many people could spell cloud computing.

We didn't have the knowledge.

We had fantastic developers and engineers in multiple areas,

but we were not experts in that area.

And in a matter of a few years, we've been able to build that expertise,

build a platform,

start to go into the direction of open source.

We were so much not on the map,

and now we start to contribute to open source.

That has kind of changed completely the perception

of Guidewire and how we play in this space.

We were thinking when we are going to have 10 customers running on the same platform,

and all the 10 customers will take the benefit of that upgrade at the same time,

that was milestone number one.

The second aspect was to do exactly what we're doing on the platform

at the application level.

We had this vision of upgrading all our customers to the latest

ski resort release every four months

and being able to shift all the customers to the latest release

at the same time.

Today, we have more than 120 customers running on the platform.

We used Kubernetes as the basis of our core orchestrator within our platform.

We've built a lot of extensions to Kubernetes,

and that is our secret sauce.

So we use the power of Kubernetes, the power of containers,

and other open source tools

all the way from Federation,

SAML Federation, Okta, Okta Hub, et cetera.

Along with using these technologies,

we also were able to improve our density of running applications

or customers in a single cluster,

giving them the same performance as it would have been if they were running it in their data centers,

which means that we had a reduced cost profile

and improved reliability.

Insurance products are the lifeblood of the insurance industry.

When we talk about insurance products,

that's things like your homeowner's policy,

your auto policy, a small business policy.

Every insurance company designs those products differently,

and they want the flexibility

to constantly tweak them and take them to market.

We've introduced a tool called Advanced Product Designer

that allows them to do that,

and then we built a whole host of cloud microservices on top of that

to implement rating and pricing,

automation, digital, data,

really pushing the boundaries

of how quickly customers can go to market with their products.

I'm not sure I would've said that on year one,

and maybe not even on year two, but four years in,

things are going really well.

From a product perspective,

we've delivered the majority of features that we wanted to,

and we are seeing customers happy with the feature set of the platform.

They're always gonna ask for more, but we haven't had a customer point out,

"Ah, I can't use your platform unless you have this."

From an operations perspective, I think we're doing quite well.

We've hit our SLA targets every month for the last four years.

The big point at which I realized how smooth things were going

was when I heard on Monday that two customers went live that weekend,

and I didn't even know.

From a product perspective, Julie,

what makes you excited about what we can now do on top of this platform?

How is the opportunity looking forward?

First thing I'm gonna say is that we can now build

and deliver to our customers

not only value in our existing products, but net new things.

That was very difficult to do.

We didn't launch a net new application product in many, many years.

And now we can very easily.

We are looking at some really cool technologies and areas

that we wanna operate and make it easy for our SRE folks to manage clusters.

We are at upward of 51 clusters right now.

It's not an easy job trying to maintain all of these

and our developers to know about where to deploy things.

We are gonna go away from the Kubernetes.

We have declarative systems to more intent-based systems,

so it'll become a lot more easier for people to-

- Okay, but tell us, are we sticking with EKS

or are we going to go native Kubernetes?

- You're on the record.

- We're gonna stick with EKS for the time being,

and I think it's a great tool that AWS has given us,

but there are a lot more technologies,

like we'll be looking at security,

secure software supply chain for our customers

all through end to end.

We are migrating into a new code generation platform over Backstage.

We'll be able to handle a lot more than just Spring Boot and Java.

than just Spring Boot and Java.

We are gonna go to Golang. We are gonna go to Python.

We are gonna go to data, AI, and ML.

All of those things are things that are gonna be coming in.

How about you, Gal?

Still in the garage?

Still in the garage, yes.

I'll have a bigger garage,

but the last few words that Anoop said,

it's the data, right?

Insurance is a world that runs on data, right?

And previously, each carrier was an isolated data set.

And with what we've done now, we've built the platform

and now the data platform that we have on top of that

is amazing, right?

Obviously, we wanna help our customers improve their bottom line.

That's our goal, but even things like seeing what climate change is doing to the world

through insurance claims, right?

That's incredibly fascinating.

And to have that power at our fingertips is incredible, right?

I think that wealth of data and what we can do with it.

- And what we can learn from it.

- And what we can learn from it. - And what we can learn from it.

Again, to improve business world and to improve the world.

That, to me, is super exciting.

We always had this vision

that data will have played a critical role

into the evolution of our solution.

And now having access to all this information,

the fact that we built a cloud platform,

that we stream every transaction, we store every transaction,

now we are in the best position to take advantage of anything that AI is going to introduce

and everything that has to do with an ML model.

The road ahead is gonna be very, very interesting.

But Julie, when you're being like the person responsible

for our Jutro digital transformation this year,

what has been, from a customer perspective, the journey, and just to finish off

on something that is really close to my heart,

because making the solution digitally native

was like one of the first goals.

Yeah, it's been amazing to see how customers have really embraced,

I would say, our vision, but it's also their vision, right?

We heard their feedback on how important digital engagement was to them

and how they needed our help.

More and more, they're competing with eyeballs

for their customers who are used to things like Facebook and Instagram

that have these amazing digital experiences.

After a year or two of hard work,

it's been really great to see

how customers are already adopting it,

and we'll have someone going live within one release of us going GA.

One of the other things that we did across this transformation that is not trivial,

the vast majority of our developer works with something that is very modern

and very cutting edge compared to five, six years ago.

If I can add to that, 'cause I mean, in previous companies that I've worked at,

there's always been disagreements

between development and sales and customer success,

and that's pretty normal.

The teams that we have here are willing to work with one another

and ask questions and be like,

"Why do you want that?"

"Well, I'm trying to do this."

It just makes your life a lot easier.

Christophe, that is our leader in Poland,

he told me that one of the unique things about Guidewire is that

every development center contributes equally.

I have teams now across Toronto,

Birmingham, San Mateo, and Bangalore in India.

Every center that we started off,

we made sure that they had equal say in the product that they were building.

It was never a satellite to begin with,

because then, everybody feels a little part

of the product that they've built.

They feel that pride,

and that's not easy to replicate otherwise.

Guidewire is unique in general.

It is a combination of size and culture.

We are not a hundred thousand employee company,

and we are at the size into which every single engineer,

every single product manager, and every single employee in general

has a direct impact into this transformation.

We always wanted to have

engineers capable to push their code into production, to have an impact.

"And so I did this, and this is in use."

Going from that ideation into production stage, we've reduced that from,

what was it, two years before for our product, down to

people can push and get it out in a release in a matter of weeks.

It's amazing.

But one major ingredient that I'd like to add is also the culture of innovation.

We've seeded that to a large extent

because of the speed at which you can push things out.

People that are gonna be very successful at Guidewire

are people that can put their full focus on a problem

and keep on going after it.

And change is constant.

We are constantly changing our stack. We are constantly improving things.

So being able to come up to speed fast is very important.

But doing that in a very rational way, right?

That's data-driven.

It's not change for change's sake.

It's change for improvement's sake.

Change for improvements,

being aware of how the industry is going,

how can we improve that

for the benefits of our customers and for our own teams.

I wanna add to that the flexibility of thinking, right?

And the flexibility of operating.

You have new technologies coming out every year

and you have to determine which ones you're gonna use and which ones you're not.

You have new modes of operations,

you have to be flexible, and if you're not,

you're just not gonna thrive here.

We're a publicly-traded company

that we try to sort of operate at the rhythm of a startup.

What I think is good at Guidewire and unique is that

we've been able to maintain a level of stability across the project.

And so developers had the time to sort of

find a solution for a problem.

We serve one market. We understand that market deeply,

and we're not constantly chasing another thing and pivoting.

We talked about the product, the journey, the product ahead.

How about the company? How about working here?

What's exciting you every day to come here?

One of my favorite things about Guidewire

is you talked about moving the company forward.

We took a really high functioning engineering team

and we brought them forward

and we added in all these new team members to be successful.

And we argued and we debated and we disagreed,

but we got here and now we're just so poised to do so many more important things.

Like, I think it's the people.

I think it's just the beginning.

We've got to a platform.

And this platform is just gonna be like something that we can jump off of.

We are solving some real world challenges and these are different.

Building out the team is awesome,

and I can't think of a better team I've worked with anywhere.

So those are things that makes me stay at Guidewire.

Yeah, same here.

I mean, the team and the people I work with,

it's just the kind of team that we work with here,

I've found to be very gratifying.

I come to work and I enjoy interacting with these people.

What is always very rewarding is that even when people leave Guidewire,

they leave Guidewire maybe for a bigger opportunity,

for something different to do.

If we as a team could positively influence a career

independently of where this career will evolve.

it's always very fulfilling, right?

And what is very unique at Guidewire is that

more often than not, people come back.

I was gonna say that.

I've lost count of how many people have reached out to me on LinkedIn and said,

"Hey, I think I'm ready to come back."

And most of the time, when they come back

it's a win-win situation, right?

It's like they know more things.

- They're bringing new skills. - They bring new skills back.

But at the same time, they're going to look back

to that unique team that they left at some point and they want to be back.

I just wanna point out in the past few years, we probably have the lowest attrition too.

So that definitely speaks volumes to the type of work that we are doing here.

This is also a combination of,

if you find a way to work in a good environment and make it interesting,

then attrition is inevitably low, right?

That I think is what propelled us where we are today.

What we've been able to achieve in the last 20 years

is pretty unique.

What we're going to be able to achieve in the next few years

is going to be equally unique.