Welcome to Guidewire Live Blogs

There will be a new and regular series of blogs where members of the Guidewire Live team will be blogging our experiences and opinions on all things Guidewire Live and beyond. We hope you’ll engage with us and give us your thoughts too.

Initially we’ll talk about how Guidewire Live came to be, a look at how we spent the last 8 months of our lives building from a nascent idea to a full blown launched product, and continue to blog what we see happening in the Live community keeping you up to date with conferences and events as we travel around the country and world. I think it’s always interesting to understand where something came from; we hope it’ll give you some context and appreciation of what, how, why…

We’re going to try and keep the tone light but informative… oh and short, so you’ll only have to spend a minute or two a week to find out what we’ve been up to.

You’ll probably also pick up on the personalities of the bloggers. First there is Eugene Lee, many of you have already met him, heard of him or if physically within 300 yards actually heard him, a shrinking violet he is not. A Bay Area native with an effervescent and energetic character Eugene came to Guidewire in 2008 with a background in manufacturing and started our Value Consulting practice. When he started, it was hard to believe an insurance company would ask Guidewire, a software company, to help them build a business case. And now, with over 50 business cases completed, it’s hard to imagine why you wouldn’t. Out of the Value Consulting work, Eugene started a benchmarking program to much internal skepticism - on the last run 50% of live ClaimCenter customers participated. (Are you noticing a theme here?) And out of benchmarking was born Guidewire Live – you won’t believe some of the stories we’ll tell you, but true they are!

Secondly, Mike Burn (me), I came to Guidewire in 2007 which seems an immeasurable number of desk moves ago which have been filled with numerous roles and positions… for my sins I have a background primarily in insurance and have been following the adage of “Go West, young man, Go West and grow up with the country” - moving from the UK (I’m a Geordie for those that care and goes a long way to explaining my irreverence), to Toronto, Austin, San Antonio and finally after some financial suicide ending up in San Francisco. My role on the Live team is that of a jack-of-all-trades, which now includes blogger-in-chief.

We hope you find the blogs we produce enjoyable and informative.