Guidewire Announces Release of Guidewire PolicyCenter 3.0

At the ISOTech 2008 Conference, Guidewire Software®, Inc., a leading global provider of solutions for property/casualty insurers, today announced the release and immediate availability of Guidewire PolicyCenter® 3.0, a comprehensive all lines underwriting and policy administration system. Guidewire PolicyCenter 3.0 is a 100% web-based system-of-record optimized to: make it easier for producers to do business with insurance carriers with responsive collaboration, improve underwriting results leveraging business rules-driven automation and process management, and bring new products to market quickly through core policy system flexibility. Several PolicyCenter 3.0 implementations are currently underway, adding to a growing customer base that includes a wide range of carriers such as CNA, The Co-operators and Guild Insurance.

“Guidewire has a track record of delivering well architected and highly configurable, property/casualty core systems,” said Donald Light, senior analyst at Celent, an insurance research and consulting firm. “Many carriers are looking for policy administration systems with significant new business capabilities. PolicyCenter 3.0 combines underwriting and policy management functionality in a modern system.”

This third major release of PolicyCenter consolidates a large number of refinements reflecting real-world implementation and production experiences of insurers engaged in an early customer program over the past three years. Featured enhancements in version 3.0 include:

• Flexible producer administration model -- enabling carriers to work with a full range of distribution channel models and producer organization structures;

• Enhanced account and contact management -- supporting insurers adopting customer-centric sales and service processes;

• More productive user experience -- speeding and simplifying tasks through careful leverage of rich internet application technologies, driven by Guidewire’s dedicated usability engineering expertise;

• Simplified out-of-sequence endorsement handling -- empowering any user to easily and safely process complex policy changes; and

• Refined data management layer -- facilitating carrier-specific data model extensions without compromising database performance, operability or upgradability.

Guidewire PolicyCenter provides property/casualty insurers a modern, flexible system for managing the end-to-end policy lifecycle. Designed to support both personal and commercial lines (including workers compensation), PolicyCenter streamlines insurers’ front and back office processes, from new business submission and quoting through policy renewals. PolicyCenter is available as part of the Guidewire Insurance Suite™ or it can be integrated with legacy systems or third party applications, providing insurers with flexible options for their legacy renewal initiatives.

“Our job at Guidewire is to ensure that our customers have the best business technology solutions possible to address the challenges of optimizing their mission-critical core operations in a fiercely competitive, ever changing environment,” said Ken Branson, vice president, Engineering, Guidewire Software. “PolicyCenter 3.0 brings us a big step closer to achieving this and with ongoing support and input from leading insurers we will continue to refine and enhance all of our products to ensure they are the best that they can be.”