What Live is, is not Important. Why we Built it, is.

What Live is, is not Important. Why we Built it, is.

Mike Burn

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When we embarked upon building what eventually became known as Guidewire Live, we started with our customers. What problems were they struggling with and what unique assets could we bring to bear to help them solve those problems? We didn’t think a lot about what to call it or what category it fit into. But naturally, people asked and so we needed to come up with some answers: It’s a network. It’s a hosted platform of apps. It’s a community of insurers. Yet with every conversation, we found that explaining Guidewire Live is a bit like trying to explain the game of baseball: It’s a team sport. It’s the national pastime. It’s four bases, white lines, and a small ball. The more we got into the weeds, the more the overall meaning would get lost. Is somebody asking you what Live is? Here’s an answer you can use: “What Live is doesn’t matter. What’s important is why we built it.”

We built Guidewire Live because we want to help our customers innovate faster.

You’ve got a business to run, customers to serve, and vendors to manage. New technologies and data sources are exciting but curating all the tools and content can be time consuming. You don’t have the time to spare. More important than showing you the latest new technology, you want your partners to make those technologies “pluggable” – you want them to work within context of your business and connect with the systems you already have, like your core system. You want mapping visualizations, better analytical tools, and predictive models. And because we built InsuranceSuite, Guidewire Live enables these peripheral solutions to be integrated to, experimented with, and even thrown away without any upfront risk or cost. We are constantly working on new apps and partnerships which will be available to you immediately. All you have to do is select the apps that will help you run your business better; our job is to make sure they bring you the value you expect.

We built Guidewire Live to enable our customers to know things that nobody else can know.

What would be possible if you had scores of property/casualty insurers all using the same core system, sharing a common data model and technology platform? On our team, that’s the question we ask ourselves every day. Three years ago, we started our offline claims benchmarking program which provided more accurate and granular comparative analysis than available elsewhere – neither from consultants nor from other data providers. The launch of Guidewire Live made that analysis real time; enabling you to look at your data and aggregated benchmarks using today’s data. We’re actively working on merging third party data and increasing our scope to encompass data from PolicyCenter and BillingCenter. As great as that sounds, here’s the best part: it’s only available to you, our customers. You did the hard work when you implemented your InsuranceSuite system(s); we like to think of this as a part of your reward.

We built Guidewire Live because we believe that your legacy replacement was the project to end all projects. Literally.

Replacing your decades old legacy mainframe system is hard work and there are no shortcuts – it simply must be done. But once you’re done with that, we believe that everything else should be easier. Implementation of new technologies, integration of third party data sources, improvements to your existing processes – we believe many of them should be possible without a major IT project and, in many cases, without an IT effort at all. Even better than project accelerators, you’ve told us you want instant-on. Using the Live apps today, you can view your claims and policies on a map with weather overlays; you can benchmark your operational performance against your peers using today’s data – all without an IT project. And with every new app we release, our team is thinking about how to make them as close to instant-on as possible.

In summary, Guidewire Live is not an abstract concept. We built Guidewire Live because we believe that our customers’ core system investments should result in tangible competitive advantages and Guidewire Live is one of the ways we are making those competitive advantages more tangible. It exists only to serve you, our customers. For a marketer, it’s a dream and a nightmare. We want to complicate it, explain it, and even imagine it has some grandiose industry implications. Perhaps it does. But what it is doesn’t matter to us and I’d suggest that it shouldn’t matter to you. What you should care about is why we built it.

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