Make Painful Upgrades a Thing of the Past with Update Automation for InsuranceNow

In the world of insurance technology, few words carry more of an emotional reaction than “upgrade.” While staying ahead of the curve is crucial for insurers looking to adapt to ever-evolving market demands, upgrades have historically been multi-year efforts that distracted large portions of the IT and business units from their core duties, preventing development in other areas. This dilemma — how often to upgrade to capitalize on new features while limiting organizational disruption — has been challenging organizations for decades.

Guidewire tackled this challenge head-on in 2022 with the launch of fast updates for InsuranceSuite as part of the Flaine release, Announced during the keynote at Connections 2022, fast updates leverage automated testing and tooling to enable customers to upgrade in weeks instead of months (or even years). By Connections 2023, customers were reporting that their updates to Garmisch and Hakuba had, in fact, been completed in a matter of weeks—with one customer completing an update in under a week!

With the Innsbruck release, we’re leveraging the success of fast updates by bringing update automation to customers running InsuranceNow on Guidewire Cloud.

How Does it Work?

Fast updates start with the concept of layers. InsuranceNow has two distinct layers that are treated differently during updates. The first is the Guidewire layer, which contains the delivered runtime artifacts that are not meant to be modified. The second is the customer layer, which includes the set of files meant to be extended and modified by our InsuranceNow customers. This would include things like the user interface, custom code, and integrations.

With two distinct layers, we’re able to implement updates differently by layer. Updating the Guidewire layer can be largely automated, so it will work just as it did before the update. When a new release goes generally available (GA), the fully-tested and validated new version can be delivered to each customer’s repository within a few days after the GA date. The customer can then perform user acceptance testing (UAT), accept the release, and enable new features on their own timeline and based on their own priorities.

To speed up the testing and validation on the customer side, Guidewire is extending its automated testing framework to our InsuranceNow customers to build additional tests and shorten the UAT cycle by making it less manual. Guidewire will run any tests customers create for their environment, enabling any identified issues within the customer layer to be reported to the customer along with the release. Our InsuranceSuite customers following a similar path are finding that this process enables them to handle any conflicting coding issues with their initial update, which makes subsequent and future updates even faster.

Update Automation is currently an Early Access feature in Innsbruck. Once generally available, fast updates will be standard for all customers running InsuranceNow on Guidewire Cloud Platform.

For more information on InsuranceNow or to schedule a demo, please visit the InsuranceNow page on our website. For customers looking for additional information on Update Automation, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.