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Guidewire Software Inc. (GWRE) reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2025, significantly surpassing Wall Street expectations with an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.88 against a forecast of $0.41. The company’s revenue reached $294 million, outpacing the anticipated $286.33 million. Following these strong results, Guidewire’s stock rose by 1.37% in after-hours trading, closing at $216.14. According to InvestingPro data, the company’s current valuation appears elevated compared to its Fair Value, with 10 analysts recently revising their earnings expectations upward for the upcoming period.
Key Takeaways
- Guidewire’s EPS of $0.88 exceeded the forecast by more than double.
- Revenue grew by 22% year-over-year, driven by subscription and support services.
- Stock price increased by 1.37% in after-hours trading.
- The company raised its annual recurring revenue (ARR) outlook.
- Strong performance in cloud deals and global expansion efforts.
Company Performance
Guidewire demonstrated robust performance in Q2 2025, driven by a 22% year-over-year increase in total revenue. The company closed 17 new cloud deals and expanded its global footprint with notable wins in Canada, APAC, and EMEA regions. The growth in subscription and support revenue, which rose by 32%, underscored Guidewire’s successful transition to cloud-based solutions.
Financial Highlights
- Total revenue: $294 million, up 22% year-over-year
- Subscription and support revenue: $182 million, 32% year-over-year growth
- Gross profit: $192 million, 27% year-over-year growth
- Operating profit: $46 million
- Cash and cash equivalents: Over $1.2 billion
- Operating cash flow: $32 million
Earnings vs. Forecast
Guidewire’s EPS of $0.88 significantly outperformed the forecasted $0.41, marking a surprise percentage of over 114%. This beat reflects the company’s strong operational execution and strategic investments in cloud technology. The revenue of $294 million also surpassed expectations, contributing to the positive market reaction.
Market Reaction
Following the earnings announcement, Guidewire’s stock rose by 1.37% in after-hours trading, reaching $216.14. This movement reflects investor confidence in the company’s growth trajectory and its ability to exceed market expectations. The stock is trading near its 52-week high of $219.59, indicating strong market sentiment. InvestingPro data shows an impressive one-year total return of 98.92%, with the stock up 29.42% year-to-date. Discover more market-beating opportunities with InvestingPro’s comprehensive stock analysis tools and ProPicks.
Outlook & Guidance
Guidewire raised its annual recurring revenue (ARR) outlook to $1,012-1,022 million, representing a growth of 17-18%. The company expects total revenue for the year to be between $1,178 and $1,186 million, with subscription revenue projected to reach $660 million. Guidewire also announced a $60 million investment in the Japanese market over the next five years.
Executive Commentary
CEO Mike Rosenbaum highlighted the company’s global expansion, stating, "Insurers all over the world are increasingly recognizing the maturity, flexibility, and proven capabilities of Guidewire Cloud Platform." He also emphasized the strategic importance of the Japanese market, asserting, "We’re committed to this market for the long haul."
Risks and Challenges
- Potential economic downturns affecting client budgets.
- Increased competition in the cloud-based insurance software market.
- Challenges in executing large-scale cloud migrations.
- Dependence on successful global expansion for sustained growth.
- Regulatory changes in key markets impacting operations.
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the potential of generative AI in insurance technology, Guidewire’s strategy for the Japanese market, and the implications of the Quanti acquisition. CEO Rosenbaum addressed these queries by highlighting the company’s focus on innovation and market-specific strategies to drive growth and customer success.
Full transcript - Guidewire Software Inc (GWRE) Q3 2025:
Grace, Conference Call Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Guidewire third quarter of fiscal twenty twenty five financial results conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be posted on our Investor Relations page later today. I would now like to turn the call over to Alex Hughes, vice president of investor relations. Thank you, Alex. You may begin.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Thank you, Grace. Hello, everyone. With me today is Mike Rosenbaum, chief executive officer and Jeff Cooper, chief financial officer, as well as John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, who will be available for the Q and A portion of today’s call. A complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued today as well as in our related Form eight ks furnished to the SEC, both of which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Today’s call is being recorded and a replay will be available following its conclusion.
Statements today include forward looking ones regarding our financial results, product, customer demand, operations, the impact of local, national and geopolitical events on our business and other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions and are based on management’s current expectation as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any date. Please refer to the press release and the risk factors and documents we file with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10 ks and our prior and forthcoming quarterly reports on Form 10 Q filed and to be filed with the SEC for information on risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. We also will refer to certain non GAAP financial measures to provide additional information to investors. All commentary on margins, profitability and expenses are on a non GAAP basis unless stated otherwise.
A reconciliation of non GAAP to GAAP measures is provided in our press release. Reconciliations and additional data are also posted in the supplement on our IR website. Finally, similar to last quarter, we’re conducting this earnings call via Zoom audio rather than a telebridge. This means we’ll manage the Q and A portion of today’s call internally with the help of Grace, who you just heard from, and me managing Q and A. Please be patient if we encounter a short pause in any of the handoffs during Q and A.
And with that, I’ll now turn it over to Mike.
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Thanks, Alex. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Before we get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge and congratulate the entire Guidewire team for the hard work and exceptional execution that went into delivering another amazing quarter. Our results in Q3 and year to date clearly demonstrate the accelerating momentum we’re seeing as more insurers recognize how critical it is to have a flexible and agile core system. Guidewire Cloud Platform is now well established and proven and we’re in an excellent position to continue driving growth, efficiencies, innovation and better insurance outcomes for our customers.
Let me start by sharing some highlights from the quarter. First, I’ll touch on sales, where we had a record Q3. The sales activity we delivered was actually the third best quarter in our history. We closed 17 cloud deals, 14 for at least one of our InsuranceSuite applications and three for InsuranceNow. We saw particular strength at the high end of the market, closing seven core system deals with Tier one insurers and three with Tier two insurers, again proving the maturity and robustness of our platform and validating our long standing strategy to focus on the unique demands of this segment of the market.
Our sales success resulted in ARR of $960,000,000 allowing us to raise our full year outlook. We are solidly on track to exceed $1,000,000,000 in ARR this year, which was a collective ambition we established a number of years ago. We will be thrilled to surpass this milestone, but more excited about the overall momentum in the business. Our growth this quarter was broad based and multi dimensional with nine cloud migrations, five net new deals and three expansions. I’m also excited about the traction we’ve established with InsuranceNow.
This quarter, we closed three net new InsuranceNow wins, including two of the largest ever on this product. Our success with InsuranceNow highlights our ability to effectively serve insurers across all segments and tiers. Additionally, our international momentum continues to build with a significant cloud expansion in Canada and cloud wins in APAC and EMEA. With respect to the deals we closed in the quarter, I’d like to point out a few encouraging themes. We continue to see insurers looking to replace rigid systems with more agile platforms that allow them to deploy new products and lines of business faster.
Advanced Product Designer along with pre integrated solutions from our marketplace were key to winning multiple deals this quarter, including several large insurers in The United States with a great new win in Latin America. Our consistent positive referenceability continues to spur both expansion activity and new cloud wins. This included a Tier one personal lines insurer in The United States, who after successfully deploying ClaimCenter on cloud is now expanding to InsuranceSuite. We also had great new expansion wins in Europe, and I was pleased to see a new Cloud win in Japan where the success of another local Cloud project played a key role. And finally, the work we did previously to establish a large framework deal with Zurich Group is now paying off, where we executed two more deals, one with Zurich Switzerland who adopted PolicyCenter and BillingCenter, as well as a multibillion dollar subsidiary who adopted the full insurance suite.
We also continue to make progress with our data and analytics offerings. In Q3, we secured our first Guidewire Industry Intelligence sale. This is a new pre built market validated predictive model embedded directly into our ClaimCenter workflow. This is a model trained and validated based on contributed anonymized data and only possible based on our cloud deployments. This is a first important step towards what we believe will ultimately not just be a great source of new revenue, but more so an added and unique benefit associated with running on our cloud platform.
A second highlight from the quarter is the continued momentum across our customer success, cloud ops and professional services orgs, which is helping to drive excellent platform referenceability. We had another 10 customers go live on Guidewire Cloud Platform in the quarter, including Santa Lucia, Cepain’s leading family protection insurer and Cincinnati Insurance Company, the flagship subsidiary of Cincinnati Financial. The last few months have also been busy for us in the marketing and international event front. In March, we kicked off the first of three regional insurance forums in Paris, welcoming more than 200 attendees from customers and prospects across 16 countries. This gathering, our largest ever in Europe, focused on discussing the future of insurance and exploring ways the industry can continue to innovate and improve.
Several customers shared their experiences, including Lee Dainty, commercial claims director at RSA Insurance, who described how RSA’s move to Guidewire Cloud has streamlined claims processing, improved transparency and positioned RSA ahead of its peers in The UK. We also heard from Beloa, a multiline insurer headquartered in Switzerland, who spoke about how Guidewire Cloud has driven better service and increased efficiency in its k two program. We’re over 99% straight through processing. And BSafe, a Polish microinsurance specialist, shared how they utilized Advanced Product Designer to rapidly launch a new product in four days, fulfilling a critical commitment to their distribution partner. The forum was an opportunity for us to reaffirm our commitment to the European market, our commitment to partnering with European marketplace providers to drive local innovation, and our commitment to maintaining a rigorous comply to maintaining rigorous compliance with evolving European regulations like Solvency II, GDPR, and DORA.
In May, we hosted two more regional insurance forums, one in Tokyo and one in Sydney, welcoming more than one hundred and fifty and one hundred and seventy attendees respectively, making them also our largest ever events in these regions. At the Tokyo Forum, we announced a major step forward in our commitment to the Japanese market, an investment of approximately $60,000,000 over the next five years that extends and enhances our existing local operations, talent, innovation and partnerships. We were also excited to hear from our first cloud customer in Japan who shared how they are using Guidewire Cloud to drive innovation and modernize their operations. At our forum in Sydney, Neil Morgan, COO of IAG, shared a powerful story about the role of technology in crisis. After a series of severe weather events in Auckland, IHE faced a surge of 48,000 claims, including 4,000 written off vehicles.
One team member using Guidewire ClaimCenter integrated with an intelligent automation tool to build a bot that cut claim processing time from twenty minutes to just ninety seconds, a change that freed up teams to focus on supporting customers when it mattered most. Together, these three events demonstrated how we’re delivering on our global strategy through deep local partnerships, innovation, and track record of execution excellence. But for me, the real highlight of the past few months was a developer summit we held in Bangalore, India. We put on our first developer event last year in Bangalore and we’re surprised at the positive reception and interest. This year, we were blown away with over 1,500 developers attending from nearly 60 partners and customers.
The size of this event is something I think worth noting. We talk about the scale of our partner community and the scale of our certified ecosystem of developers and Guidewire professionals, but to see 1,500 people all come together in one room to learn and enhance their careers and ability to support Guidewire programs more effectively was inspiring. Every attendee was encouraged to bring a laptop, and we had the opportunity to share in a very hands on keyboard sort of way the new platform advancements and features with the technical practitioners really driving the innovation and execution in our community. We shared new capabilities around upgrade safe development for insurance suite extensions, new migration technology to support upgrades to our advanced product designer, new components and capabilities in our Jutro front end web experience platform, new AI cogen capabilities supporting Jutro, integration applications and GoSU extensions. We shared new approaches to full cycle business intelligence with our cloud data platform, Data Studio and Explore dashboard and reporting suite, as well as the ability to use all of this to easily generate, test, and deploy predictive models on our platform.
Finally, and maybe most interesting in the long term, we showed developers where we’re headed in terms of supporting virtual cloud based instances of Guidewire they can use to develop against our complete cloud platform or even host custom applications and workloads all on the Guidewire cloud platform. I have been very focused lately on the potential positive impacts generative AI will have on Guidewire and the insurance industry. And I think generally this event encapsulated a lot of the potential for increased program velocity that might provide a boost to Guidewire, but more so the innovation agenda in the insurance industry. And in the midst of all of this, we completed our acquisition of Quanti, a cutting edge provider of pricing and rating technology based in Poland. Since closing the acquisition, we’ve been hard at work planning the integration of Quanti into our broader technology portfolio and expect to share more specific plans about this area of our product strategy in future calls.
In summary, Q3 was a historic quarter for Guidewire and highlights strong market momentum across every tier and every region of the P and C industry. Insurers all over the world are increasingly recognizing the maturity, flexibility and proven capabilities of Guidewire Cloud Platform. I could not be more pleased with our strategic position heading into our Q4 as I think we are well placed to continue our cloud transformation and mission to support efforts to modernize and power innovation in our industry. So with that, I’ll turn it over to Jeff to discuss the financials in more detail.
Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer, Guidewire: Thanks, Mike. We had an incredible Q3 and we look forward to building on this positive momentum. Strong demand for our cloud offering helped ARR finish at $960,000,000 ahead of expectations. Additionally, as Mike noted, we had a strong sales quarter, both in terms of deal counts and deal sizes. It is clear as our market our cloud market leadership position is now established that insurers are more willing to make large commitments.
This is a strong vote of confidence, and we aspire to exceed customer expectations and drive successful outcomes with this critical work. Total revenue was $294,000,000 up 22% year over year and above the high end of our outlook. Subscription and support revenue finished Q3 at $182,000,000 reflecting 32% year over year growth and our continued InsuranceSuite cloud momentum. Services revenue finished at $54,000,000 and benefited from strong services bookings that translated into higher utilization rates. Turning to profitability for the third quarter, which we will discuss on a non GAAP basis, gross profit was $192,000,000 representing 27% year over year growth.
Overall gross margin was 65%. Subscription and support gross margin was 71% compared to 66% a year ago. In the quarter, we benefited from approximately $4,000,000 in credits from our cloud service provider, which positively impacted our gross margin. More generally, and I know I’ve been saying this for a while, I am thrilled with our progression on the gross margin line and the benefits of the platform investments that are now being realized to a healthy degree. Services gross margin was 13% compared to 10% a year ago.
We are very pleased with our profitability progression in our services org. Most importantly, the services org, in combination with our partners and our customers, continues to deliver successful outcomes in the form of go lives and cloud updates. This is foundational to our long term success. We finished Q3 with operating profit of $46,000,000 This finished ahead of our expectations, primarily due to higher revenue and higher gross profit than expectations. Last quarter, we mentioned that we expected some hiring acceleration in the back half of the year and we have seen this materialize.
This growth includes our new employees from the acquisition of Quanti. We are excited about adding the team at Quanti to accelerate our ambition in the pricing domain. This acquisition added an immaterial amount of ARR in the quarter and 23 employees, with the majority of the new employees located in Poland. As you may know, Poland was already an important development center for us, and we now have over a 40 employees in Poland. We’re excited about the expertise that we are adding and the fit with our existing product development motion.
Our respective teams are already working well together. We ended the quarter with over 1,200,000,000 in cash, cash equivalents and investments. Operating cash flow ended the quarter at $32,000,000 which was ahead of our expectations due to strong collections in the quarter. We settled at maturity our twenty twenty five converts, which resulted in a $100,000,000 cash outlay, including accrued interest. And we realized net share accretion of approximately 26,000 shares as the shares issued to bondholders upon maturity were less than the shares we received from the call spread we purchased in 2018 in conjunction with issuing our twenty twenty five converts.
Now let me go through our updated outlook for fiscal year twenty twenty five. Starting with the top line. Given our strong performance year to date, we are raising our ARR outlook to $1,012,000,000 to 1,022,000,000.000 which reflects growth of 17% to 18% year over year. In addition to higher sales momentum, we are also seeing record low ARR attrition percentages and record high ARR ramping activity. As a reminder, our ARR outlook assumes foreign currency exchange rates as of the end of our last fiscal year, and we update ARR exchange rates at year end.
If we update ARR today based on current exchange rates, then we would see an approximately $8,000,000 positive adjustment. We will certainly quantify this at year end and we’ll continue to monitor FX rates throughout the remainder of the fiscal year. For total revenue in fiscal twenty twenty five, we now expect between $1,178,000,000 and $1,186,000,000 We expect approximately $660,000,000 in subscription revenue and $724,000,000 in subscription and support revenue. Given higher than expected services bookings year to date, we now expect services revenue to be approximately $215,000,000 Turning to margins and profitability, which we’ll discuss on a non GAAP basis, we now expect subscription support gross margin to be between 6970% for the year. In Q4, we are expecting 68% subscription and support gross margins as we are seeing the impacts of recent go live events, and we do not expect to realize any material credits from our cloud service provider.
In general, we remain a bit ahead of schedule as we work towards our longer term margin targets and continue to feel confident in our gross margin progression. Our FY ’20 ’20 ’5 expectations for services margin and total gross margins remain unchanged at 1265% respectively. We are lifting our outlook for operating income primarily as a result of our revenue outlook. We expect GAAP operating income of between 20,000,000 and $28,000,000 and non GAAP operating income of between 187,000,000 and $195,000,000 for the fiscal year. We expect stock based compensation to be approximately $162,000,000 representing 11% year over year growth.
This is a bit higher than our prior forecast due to the acquisition of Quanti and lower employee attrition than our model assumed. We are increasing our outlook for cash flow from operations for the year to be between $255,000,000 and $275,000,000 due to stronger than expected revenue and collections combined with strong expense discipline. In summary, it was a fantastic third quarter, and we are excited for Q4. Alex, you can now open the call for questions.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Great. Thanks, Jeff. Okay, everyone. We’ll go to questions now. For those of you in the panel who do want to ask a question, just come to the raise your hand in the prompt in Zoom.
And with that, our first question is going to come from Alexey Gulov, JPMorgan. Go ahead, Alexey.
Alexey Gulov, Analyst, JPMorgan: Thank you, Alex. And Jeff, my congratulations with amazing results. Jeff, it has now become, almost like a tradition for you to provide, your view on fully ramped ARR outlook during 3Q earnings. Think you’ve done it two years in a row. Would you be able to share your thoughts this year?
What do you expect for fully ramped ARR?
Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. So thanks, Alexey. Yeah. Momentum is really strong, and we feel great about our position going into q four. As you know, q four is always critical as we close out the year and calculate fully ramped ARR results, and I think most folks understand kinda how important q four is.
That said, I feel confident that we can see fully ramped ARR grow at levels consistent with what we’ve seen more recently. As a reminder, we grew fully ramped ARR 1719% on a constant currency basis respectively. So, you know, kind of maintaining that upper teens level of of fully ramped ARR growth feels like we’re we’re headed in that direction. But, you know, I just wanna make sure I add that q four is always our largest sales quarter. Fully ramped ARR, in particular, depends on, larger, commitments, multiyear commitments.
And those large deals can can be very binary in nature. And so we have a range of outcomes that can be quite quite wide as we model out different scenarios. But kinda getting into that, maintaining upper teens, fully ramped ARR growth would be a tremendous outcome for us to do that three years in a row, and that’s the that’s the direction we’re working towards.
Alexey Gulov, Analyst, JPMorgan: Thank you very much, Jeff. And, Mike, could I ask you a question about the the Japanese market? It seems that you’re progressing really well. What is the secret sauce? What is helping you to win cloud deals in that market, and how are those customers viewing US software?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. Thanks for the question. I appreciate it because, the trip to Japan this quarter and the event that I described, it was a real highlight for us. It was also exciting for us to be able to, announce this financial commitment to the region. I think that’s probably the keyword.
I think we see a tremendous opportunity in the Japanese market, both directly for direct written premium and serving the customers as they operate primarily in that market. But you also have some very concentrated big multinational players that we have relationships with all over the world. And we want to make sure that we are serving those customers effectively in every geography in which they, in which they operate insurance businesses. I think the keyword is commitment. We’re committed to this market for the long haul.
You know, I can’t say whatever it takes, but that’s the attitude, you know, is we’re we’re going to show up. We’re going to show up with the best possible platform, and we’re gonna make the investments necessary to ensure that that platform is fit for purpose, in what those, companies need, you know, for the next ten, twenty, thirty years of their existence in the Japanese market. And I think we’re uniquely positioned to do that. I don’t think that there’s any other P and C platform, core system platform that is, that is honestly capable of serving the market the way Guidewire is. It it takes a very significant investment for us to, you know, show up year after year after year and deliver this for them, but we’re gonna do it.
And I think that that’s what was behind that, you know, that press release and the commitment that we made. It’s also about delivering successfully. Right? It’s about being there with those, partners as they do these projects and ensuring, especially now with cloud, that, you know, that these that we have the follow through and that it’s successful. The Japanese market doesn’t move as fast as other markets.
But when they move, they move with determination. And I intend to ensure that Guidewire is positioned to be there when they’re ready. And and like I said, I I want to be the P and C platform for Japan for the next twenty, thirty years.
Alexey Gulov, Analyst, JPMorgan: Thank you for this answer, Amli.
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: Yes. Thank you.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Thanks, Alexey. So our next question comes from Adam Hotchkiss at Goldman Sachs.
Adam Hotchkiss, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thanks so much for taking the questions, guys. I guess just to start, I know when we had it in the past talked about fiscal twenty twenty five ARR guidance, it felt like you had messaged that the ARR cadence was substantially weighted towards Q4, given your visibility on the backlog and when that was coming live in the total ARR. Obviously, with the Q3 outperformance, it would be just good to understand whether there was any pull forward from Q4 relative to your expectations Or if it was just a stronger quarter given more demand at the top of the funnel? Would appreciate any color there.
Thank you.
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. I’ll I’ll give you my perspective quickly, and then Jeff can chime in if he wants. You know, it was obviously a great q three. And, you know but we we have momentum across every tier and every component of the business right now. We we, feel good about the the potential in q four, and that relates to being able to pass through, a portion of the outperform in Q3 into the increased guidance for Q4.
And so I just would say, like, we feel we’ve got a lot of work to do. We need to execute execute these transactions, and it’s a very, very big quarter for us. But generally, we feel great about the momentum. So yes, let me actually John’s here, and we pointed that out in the at beginning of the call. He’s here, and I’ll give you a perspective on the Q4 outlook.
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. I’ll I’ll just add that, you know, Mike mentioned that the the quarter was broad based and multidimensional. I I think it’s really about execution. I I’ll comment that the team as the team as the quarter came to a close, the execution I would expect a couple of the deals to find their way into q four, quite frankly. But David Laker and his team, sales team around the globe, and the solution advisory team just did a a really good job of executing all the way up to the last minute of the quarter and making sure that what was available within the quarter stayed within the quarter.
So I don’t I didn’t see or feel any any pull forward nor any singular outsized event.
Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. And and just to pile on there a little bit from how we modeled it, Adam, as John hit it on the head, it’s my view and kind of how I was expecting the quarter to play out. There were some of these deals that I expected to slide into Q4, and we’re just seeing very high close rates and very strong execution. So we saw a bit less of that. So kind of not necessarily pull forwards, but kind of those deals didn’t kind of naturally pass into Q4.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: All right. Thanks, Adam. We’re now going to go to Dylan Becker of William Blair.
Dylan Becker, Analyst, William Blair: Hey, gentlemen. Appreciate the question, and congrats on the terrific results here. Maybe, Mike or John, you. I know Jeff called out kind of the the larger contracts, and we’ve seen kind of the validation of the platform starting to play play out here. I wonder to what extent are your conversations starting to have that kind of
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: more
Dylan Becker, Analyst, William Blair: holistic consolidation type of story around it where you can be kind of that singular end to end vendor to help solve a lot of that kinda disparate legacy complexity, that we’ve we’ve be become so accustomed to knowing here.
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: Great. Dylan, thanks for the question. The, what I would I would harken back to the conversation on proof points. And with many of these with many of these carriers, with that first cloud proof point and the cloud updates that follow fast behind that, it really opens up this conversation around what’s the next line of business, what’s the next geography, what’s the next segment of business to go after. And in the quarter, we saw what would amount to two, I think, pretty critical strategic takeouts of what would have been more modern competitors.
And it plays to that question you’re asking, which is earning the right to broaden the broaden the, the reach of the conversation to get warm introductions into other lines of business and other segments and other geographies is proving out. In a few cases, it starts to become very much a conversation about, at some point in the future, what does an aligned destination look like where Guidewire is really part of the strategic fabric of that carrier’s planning going forward. And more and more, we’re having those conversations and more and more, we’re putting the teams in place in the geographies to meet those carriers where they are to have that conversation. So it’s a good point. We’re seeing some momentum there.
It’s still a long, long way to go, a lot of opportunity, and a lot of hard work ahead.
Dylan Becker, Analyst, William Blair: Sure. No. Totally fair. I appreciate the color there, John. Maybe, for you, Mike.
As there’s been a lot of talk around kind of the different insurance segments as well too, right, with the hardening rate environment and the inflationary pressures that are being put on consumers and risk exposure. How do you think about, the opportunity for a system like Guidewire to help kind of narrow what seems to be maybe a widening coverage gap to help solve that problem? And and maybe how that plays into another lever of potential kind of premium growth from an industry perspective?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. It’s a great question. I think what the word I like to use with respect to this question is agility. The more agility that we can provide insurance companies and the developers, actuaries, IT teams that are thinking about how do they structure their products, how do they take their products to market, how are they pricing their products, and how are what kinds of rate structures are they applying to these products. Being able to do that faster is going to enable the insurance industry to learn more about how to best close that coverage gap, how to best take this incredible financial instrument to market as effectively as possible.
We are seeing pretty significant shifts towards excess and specialty away from admitted lines. And this is also kind of puts pressure on the technology structures within these insurance companies. And so when we can provide a platform that basically takes that IT risk, that technology execution risk out of the equation, it allows those companies to just execute like insurance companies. And it allows us to play a role, honestly, that makes a lot of people pretty excited here at Guidewire around bringing insurance to every every business, homeowner, locale in the world that needs it, and that’s pretty exciting. So, you know, I think that, you know, behind what we call, like, the reference ability and the success stories of all these cloud implementations, there’s a degree of agility that we’re delivering that is genuinely new and unique in the industry, and that’s going to continue to help, close the the the coverage gap that you described.
So that’s a big part of it. Thanks for the question.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Thanks, Dylan. Our next question is going to come from Ken Wong of Oppenheimer and Company.
Ken Wong, Analyst, Oppenheimer and Company: Great. A question for John or Mike. I think earlier, it was mentioned record low attrition, record high ramping activity. How much of that do you think is a dynamic of your core market just really leaning into modernizing versus you know, perhaps internal initiatives and execution that you guys have been have been laying the the groundwork on?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Let me let me give you a quick answer, and then I want I wanna let John comment on it. I would say they’re kinda separate. The ramp activity is associated with the success of prior years and just the follow through of the agreements kind of flowing into the business model. The most important thing at Guidewire is customer success. It’s ensuring that no matter what, we’re doing everything that we can possibly do to ensure that these programs are successful.
This is an incredibly durable industry with an incredibly durable use case. And if we can deliver software that works on a platform that works, we’re going to end up with a durable revenue stream supporting that value for a customer. That’s the most important thing in our company and it will it has been part of the company since day one. It will be part of the company forever. You know?
And that’s what my take on what’s driving that care that that financial, measure.
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: Now the we oftentimes talk about the maturing cloud platform, but sometimes we don’t talk enough about the maturing cloud operations and the and the professionals and the teams that work every day to be as responsive as possible around the world to work with customers, solve issues, and unlock new opportunities. And our ability to work with run the core systems of these companies and and that team’s development and cloud ops customer success and our technical advisory team has really come a long way and working closer and closer with customers to remove any daylight between interpretation of issues and opportunity to solve problems. And that’s really helped a ton in maintaining alignment on that on the attrition rate.
Ken Wong, Analyst, Oppenheimer and Company: Got it. Fantastic. And then Jeff, just in terms of the pace of investments, talked up how second half will continue, what the investment levels. How are you thinking about going forward? Are you guys seeing the ROI where it might make sense to to extend the investment cycle?
Or or is this more of a kind of a one year catch up after years of of putting investments in the cloud platform?
Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer, Guidewire: Yes. I mean, I think that this year has played out pretty consistently with how we planned, although the hiring was a little bit more back end weighted than we originally expected. The addition of the Quanti team is exciting for us as the pricing ambition has been something we’ve been thinking about for a long time. We certainly see a very healthy backdrop for investment as we look at our market. The way we’ve thought about this and approached this is that we already have the largest investments in the industry.
We have the biggest engineering team. We have the biggest and most professional sales team. And we’re appropriately resourced to address the market opportunity in front of us and still deliver new products and capabilities to the market. We still foundationally believe that. We’re always assessing our plans.
And this quarter is when we do a kind of a deeper dive into how we think about some of the long range planning, and we’ll we’ll assess kinda how we think about our investment posture. But as of now, you know, the message is is as you think through how we’ve talked about our longer term goals historically, we feel very confident that we can, you know, operate and kind of meet the moment while kind of maintaining those existing, investment profiles that we talked about previously.
Ken Wong, Analyst, Oppenheimer and Company: Alright. Appreciate the color there, Jeff. Alright.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Thanks, Ken. And just a reminder for those in the panel, if you do wanna ask a question, be sure to raise your hand. Our next question comes from Michael Turrin at Wells Fargo.
David Hungar, Analyst, Wells Fargo: Thanks. Hi. It’s David Hungar on
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: for Michael Turrin tonight. You guys touched on the Gen AI possibilities in prepared remarks and the benefits that could trickle down to Guidewire. Is there anything specific worth highlighting here that has resonated most with customers as of today? Thanks.
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: As opposed to call out particular features, I would say, you know, we’re we’re taking a very broad, call it a broad based, broad spectrum approach to facilitating generative AI use cases across the product suite, across claims center, across policy center. There’s numerous opportunities in the claims workflow for applying, and building and applying these features to improve process efficiency for, for insurance companies. There’s also a very clear use case around what’s called submission intake and the triage of inbound interest for underwriting processes and where generative AI can play a role call it, summarizing and assessing an inbound request for a quote relative to a carrier’s ability to write that risk. But then probably another area that’s worth highlighting that’s just obviously very clear is developer productivity and using the using LLMs to, facilitate the creation of, you know, maybe not just specifically code, but test cases and the other kind of components of what goes into a development project on a platform like Guidewire. Across all of those three things, we’re seeing a lot of positive feedback from our customer base and our developers about what they’d like to see from us and what they’re where these things could be put to use in order to drive efficiencies into the programs and also the operations of our customers.
So there’s a lot of areas and but those are the three things that I’d say are probably most interesting right now.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Okay. Thank you. Our next question goes to, Aaron Timson.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire0: Thanks, guys. Can you help us think about the pricing methodology and possible uplift for Guidewire Industry Intelligence, whether that first sale is a beta version or it’s something available to all customers? And if that’s something you anticipate landing with smaller insurers improving that or something where you can land with tier ones and tier twos off the bat?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah, so great question. And I think first of all the applicability of it relates to what’s the model predict and whether or not it lines up to the line of business and the specifics of what that customer writes. We took a pretty broad approach to this first one and to try to touch as many of the as much of the customer base as we could. But we have a long kind of pipeline for different predictive models that we think might work and are working through the process of validating those and building those out. And so over time, there’ll be more models that might be more applicable to different use cases, different lines of business across the customer base.
For sure, this is something that, you know, there there’s this sort of, you know, there’s this sort of, you to target smaller insurance companies with a larger collective data asset than they have on their own. So if you’re a huge insurance company, you’ve got a lot of data, you’ve got enough data to be able to create one of these predictive models on your own. But if you’re a smaller insurance company and you don’t have that scope of data, you’re kind of stuck. And this is where Guidewire and this Intel model can really play a positive role and give them a sort of head start zero day capability that otherwise would take years to develop. So that helps in terms of smaller carriers.
It also helps for bigger carriers who are jumping into new lines of business or new territories where they don’t have that data track record to draw from and create the predictive models they need to be as efficient as possible. And so hopefully that gives you a sense of like where we are and how this is going to roll out and the applicability of it. Over time though I’d be I’m very hopeful that this is something that we’ve got enough models and enough use cases where the majority of cloud customers are finding a way to participate in this, product line with us.
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: The I’ll just add one thing there, which is, you know, the the field team and the way we interact with customers, there’s a lot of optimism about where industry intel can go for us. Because where we’ve got real foundational proof points on operations and agility and running core systems, getting closer to the pricing and the indemnity management of our customers puts us more in the in the C suite conversation. And that’s really, that’s really an area where we can push the envelope a little bit, talk more about insurance results rather than operational outcomes, and, and that’s opened up a whole new channel of conversation for us and access to maybe buyers we haven’t traditionally sold to as often.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire0: That’s really helpful. And then I want to follow-up on Alexei’s question on the Japanese market. Can you talk a little bit about the regulatory changes in the Japanese market related to cross holding that are expected to lead to P and C insurers having more capital on hand? And what the potential benefits to Guidewire are whether through an increased willingness to make transformational technological investments with that additional capital or for you to win market share through M and A if that’s how they choose to utilize the additional capital? Thank you.
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. Thanks for the question. I think, you know, as Mike mentioned, Japan, we’re we’re gonna be in that market relevant, investing with the talent and the capabilities and the solutions to be relevant in that market for the long haul. Really pleased with how that team has developed. I I am not in a position to really get too deep too deep into the, into the regulatory environment there.
I’d have to pull in the Japanese team to answer that question specifically. But I do believe that our ability to answer with our investments in in, policy core processing, our ability to answer both the core processing problem there and the, capital allocation opportunity there is very real. The it is the acquisitions that come from Japan will continue to be a big part of the global insurance market, and the dynamics of the Japanese market will, to your point, influence and increase the rate of investment outside of Japan. And we think we’re in a really good position given multicurrency, multi multilocation, and multiline of business capabilities to be that partner for them going forward.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Thanks, Aaron. Alright. Our next question is gonna come from Alex Sklar at RBC.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire1: Thank you. Jeff, just a question for you. Just just looking at that mix of ARR growth, you called out strong ramp activity. Can you talk about how this year’s bookings have looked from a ramp shape standpoint relative to the last couple of years? How much of that third quarter ARR growth actually came from ramps versus that record activity?
And then I had a follow-up. Thanks.
Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. So in terms of the overall ramp activity, it’s always very hard to comment on the year until we get to Q4 because Q4 will drive kind of how we think about that cohort. In general, if you look at the activity in Q3, the one thing I’ve noticed is that we are seeing some longer durated activity. So we did see a couple deals that were longer than five years. And in some cases, we have ramps that even beyond year fives year five.
Our definition of fully ramped ARR, it caps at year five, so we don’t we don’t consider things that that occur after year five until that moves into the next next five year window. But in general, ramps are kinda similar to what we’d expect, bigger commitments, longer, durated deals. But the overall slope of the ramps, there’s nothing to highlight, and q four will have a large impact on it. With respect to ARR growth and where it’s coming from, it was pretty balanced. We are seeing very healthy ARR coming off of the backlog in Q4.
We talked a bit about that last quarter. So that dynamic is still very real for us. And then in Q3, saw some very healthy contribution from new deal activity in the quarter that, as Mike noted, it was a record Q3 for us.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Okay. Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Pickert at Stifel.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire2: Thank you very much for yep. Thank you very much for taking my questions, and congratulations on the quarter. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Quanti acquisition. What’s the incremental functionality that you see them bringing to the table? And is it something that should appeal to all of your customers or just a subset of some?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. Thanks for the thanks very much for the question. As I said on the prepared remarks, I think, you know, what should expect us to be to provide more detail over time about where this will fit into the, you know, the company’s product strategy, but I’ll give you a quick answer. You know, they they they provide a pricing and rating technology that we think is going to be ultimately applicable to every customer. Exactly how that rolls out across all the lines of business at Guidewire and how it fits into the existing products suite, like I said, that’s work we’re still doing right now.
But, you know, this is a great team of people who are, really excited about supporting a a use case that’s a little bit beyond what we traditionally have focused on with with Guidewire. Think of, like, what we’ve done traditionally as taking the output, the pricing strategy from an actuary and and running it efficiently in production to provide real time rates when you need to rate a new quote. This this pushes us into the design of the pricing strategy strategy and, you know, and then seamlessly connects the output of what those actuarial teams wanna run-in production to the actual production rating system. That provides a huge amount of flexibility and agility to those teams and to those insurance companies that want to make more real time changes. Now the applicability of that specifically depends, you know, kind of on what region you’re operating in and the different lines of business that you’re supporting.
But but the general technology in terms of, like, providing a workbench for actuaries to build prices with, bring in lots of different data sources and run scenarios and come up with rate routines and rate strategies that make sense for the risk that they want to underwrite, that’s what we’re really excited about. And that’s a key component to us delivering on this concept that we’re going to bring more agility to an insurance company, enable them to change their rates, change their rules, change their, prices, change their product definitions as fast as the businesses want them to be changed and kinda take away the, you know, the concept that there’s a bottleneck on the technology side. We think we can deliver a platform, a seamless platform using Quanti and the rest of the Guidewire cloud platform to deliver that agility to the market. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of a sense. And like I said, there’s gonna be a lot more to come from us over the next few months and quarters on this subject.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire2: Okay. Terrific. And then secondly, you continue to show nice subscription gross margin expansion over 70%, you know, once again, but still a long ways from the 80% long term target. What incremental steps do you think could be made to add another thousand basis points to that margin over time?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah.
Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer, Guidewire: Sure. You know, we’re we’re continuing to invest in our platform. The engineering team is continuing to build more and more automation. And then it’s just some of this is just a function of us adding scale, customers getting to fully ramped outcomes from an ARR perspective, and the model just maturing. So, you know, as we look through, I don’t think there’s any heroic steps that needs to take place in order for us to get there.
It’s just the continued blocking and tackling and kind of adding more and more scale to the platform that we’ve already built.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Great. Thanks, Matthew. So our last question is going to come from Tyler Radke at Citi.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire3: Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. You you hit on your, developer day that you hosted. Sounds like it was a good success, earlier this year. And I’m I’m just curious how you’re seeing your customers, leverage AI, AgenTeq AI, specifically around some of the, you know, code completion for modernizing these legacy systems.
Obviously, you know, a lot of the big tier ones have, you know, COBOL and and mainframe systems with with a ton of legacy codes. But, like, what type of improvements in that modernization process have you seen thus far? And, you know, what I guess, what are you doing from a product perspective, to sort of enable some of those, features in your own solution?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. Thanks very much for the question. So, yeah, there there’s a lot of, I’d say, interesting, I know, theoretical assessment of whether or not generative AI can tackle these mainframe conversions. And I think, you you should we we think of these things. I think of these things.
Maybe you should think of these things as potentials. And certainly, there’s positive signal that this this might occur. I would say practically, you know, what’s really happening right now is things that are more surface level. So think like building the scaffolding for an integration between Guidewire and another public or private API, something that’s more discreet. And this is something like just works, building the front end code associated with portals or our Jutro development framework where you’re taking Guidewire and exposing it to a public website.
This is creating test cases associated with code that you’re writing on our platform. And these kinds of use cases are driving a tremendous it drives a tremendous amount of cost in the ecosystem and in the implementation programs. And it’s really directly pointing towards positive outcomes in terms of actually deploying these techniques against these types of use cases. So certainly, the COBOL mainframe conversion, you know, those kinds of things are, you know, like I said, you know, there’s there’s signal pointing towards that potential. But we’re also seeing a lot of other use cases that do represent very significant components of a of a Guidewire implementation that we’re seeing a lot of positive results from.
And I would say like that’s as much of where the excitement is right now as anything else. The other thing that you just have to generally be careful of with respect to these modernization programs is very often what we are doing with Guidewire is we are helping a company reinvent their business process to be more modern and enable them to break the mold of what they’re tied to with their COBOL based mainframe. And so you don’t necessarily want a magic button that instantiates the broken business process into a modern system. You do actually want to take the time to think about what’s the new way that we’re going to architect our products? What’s the new way that we’re going to architect our claims processes?
What’s the new way we’re going to engage with our customers with new digital channels? And to do that, you need a modern platform, but you need to take the time to rethink your business process and modernize your company holistically. And so, yeah, that that magic press a button and everything converts is maybe tantalizing, but it isn’t necessarily gonna deliver the agile modern insurance company that everybody really wants.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Great. Thanks, Tyler. I’m actually seeing one more question from Rishi Azuluria at RBC.
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Hey, Rishi.
David Hungar, Analyst, Wells Fargo: Oh oh, wonderful. Thanks so much for squeezing me in. Really great to see, continued momentum in the business, especially in a tough macro environment. Maybe I wanna start, Mike, you’ve made some comments on some of the success you’re seeing in insurance now. I recall when you kinda started as CEO, that was one of your priorities of kind of rebuilding the product and and and modernizing it.
Maybe can you talk about what’s driving some of the success that you’re seeing in insurance now, whether that’s product specifically, go to market execution, just the the industry itself, being ready for that. And maybe just alongside that, as we think about kind of the potential handoff, how how do you balance the strategy of wanting to work with these customers? But at a certain point, should they grow up, to be big enough to maybe be cast classified as tier one, tier two, or even, you know, tier three kind of at the borderlines, what that handoff to, you know, IS cloud looks like? Thanks so much.
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Yeah. Thanks for the question. First, just touching on the last part of your question. We actually have a number of customers that are running both InsuranceNow and InsuranceSuite for different lines of business, different use cases where it’s more more suited, let’s say, for a smaller line of business that, you know, wants less customization, less configuration capabilities, just the InsuranceNow platform fits. So we see all kinds of use cases in the customer base.
I think that, you know, we just we’ve had the team, our team and it has executed extremely well with respect to the InsuranceNow product. We’ve done a great job getting the product where it needs to be. We’ve done a great job collaborating with our teams on the platform side to be able to run InsuranceNow on the Guidewire Cloud platform and drive efficiencies there. That gives us some confidence that we can take that product to market aggressively in that lower tiers of The U. S.
Insurance market. Strategically, that gives us a lot gives me a lot of confidence that we’re we’re basically not we don’t have any blind spots. We’re paying attention to every single segment of the market and every single potential competitor and making sure we’re competitive in winning business and not leaving ourselves exposed to some sort of smaller smaller insurance focused start up product that that’s ultimately could could be a threat to Guidewire. I feel great about all that. Like, we’ve executed really well.
The product works. The customers are happy. That referenceability also matters a lot in this segment. Is is like ultimately, just want I my perspective of of a buyer of Guidewire is somebody they just want confidence that this is gonna work. That’s why I talk so much about referenceability and customer success.
They’re taking such a risk with these decisions and these programs that like you can’t it’s not easily reversed. And so our ability to say, hey, we’ve got these customers. They’re successfully running insurance now. This product works. That’s really helping us win.
And then so anyway, just great execution generally, and we’ll we feel great about that.
John Mullen, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Guidewire: I’ll just add that that end of the market is is super dynamic. And it’s not just in The U. S. Where the smaller carriers are both dynamic and also becoming much more technology native. But also in Australia, the distribution space and the MGA space and the small end of the market in Australia is super dynamic.
That I really love the pressure that that part of the market puts on Guidewire to think about not just core processing, but where the world of distribution is going and where the world of dynamic product manufacturing is going. And it’s just a really good exchange of information and thought patterns with that end of the market.
David Hungar, Analyst, Wells Fargo: All right. Really helpful. Thank you so much, guys.
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Thanks, Rishi. Thanks, Rishi.
Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, Guidewire: Well, with that, that actually is our last question, Do you have any closing remarks?
Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, Guidewire: Okay. Great. No. It it was an incredible quarter, and, we’re looking forward to having a great quarter in q four wrapping up the year. We see a tremendous amount of momentum and potential.
Obviously, we need to execute, but we’re incredibly excited about strategic position of the company. So thanks everybody for joining us, and, we’ll see you on the q four call.
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