Like Diego Devalle, my family is filled with avid skiers. One of the great things about ski resorts is that every season, they always get a little bit better: new lifts, new terrain, new restaurants… When Guidewire launched Aspen just six months ago, we introduced a platform that we could improve upon every six months. With the Aspen release, we introduced our cloud-native rules and rating engines for InsuranceSuite. These are “always-on” services that business and IT users can update whenever they like, without having to wait for a maintenance window or system restart. With the Banff release, we’re adding three more cloud-native services below, the InsuranceSuite Cloud API to simplify integrations, and a number of improvements to the Guidewire Cloud Platform.
New Cloud-Native Services
Banff improves upon Aspen with these three new Cloud-Native services:
String Manager
Guidewire Payment API
Rules Validation
String Manager is a tool for business users that makes it easy to change any string of text in the user interface (UX) in real-time. These could be small, single-word changes or large translations of the UX. Without String Manager, making these changes is typically far more time consuming and often requires precious IT resources. With Banff, we’re introducing String Manager for PolicyCenter and BillingCenter to address that need.
The Guidewire Payments API is a RESTful API for integrating with common payment services and will ensure you can still meet your PCI compliance requirements. It makes it easier and faster for insurers using Guidewire Cloud to simplify how their customers pay their premiums. At launch, we are starting with two vendors: Authorize.net and One Inc. Over time, we plan to add more based on customer demand. With Banff, we are also launching SurePath Content that accelerates integrating with the Guidewire Payments API for PolicyCenter and BillingCenter, and native integration with InsuranceNow.
Cloud Rules for Validation is being offered to make it much easier to resolve issues when a validation rule is triggered by highlighting the field in question. This makes it much easier to navigate the PolicyCenter user interface, fix the problem quickly, and provide a better customer experience.
InsuranceSuite Cloud API
The InsuranceSuite Cloud API is a collection of RESTful system-level APIs that make it much easier to connect to apps and services. This API will significantly reduce the cost to build and maintain integrations so that each customer can create their own differentiated ecosystem. It also keeps your integration code separate from core code making upgrades easier and faster. Developed on common open specifications, this API enables developers to write integration code in the language of their choice, using the tools they prefer. With Banff, the InsuranceSuite Cloud API is available for PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter and Contact Manager.
Guidewire Cloud Platform
Going back to the ski resort concept for a minute, the foundation of every great season is the snowpack. Now is the time of year when we skiers start checking our apps and watch as each snowfall builds on the previous one, making for a better ski season.
Like the snowpack in an endless winter, Guidewire Cloud Platform is the foundation of our cloud service – and it keeps get better. It leverages common cloud services, provisioning, and observability, built to deliver the full power of Guidewire. And, because it is independent of core system business functionality, we’re able to update it at a minimum, every two weeks. While many of these updates are transparent to our customers, such updates allow us to continually improve the performance of the system.
Guidewire Cloud Platform is built upon highly scalable and flexible cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Guidewire also provides proprietary tools to automate routine tasks and make them self-service. We’ve reduced the time to provision new environments from weeks to minutes. We’ve also improved observability by centralizing logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerts. At the time of this writing, Guidewire Cloud Platform is active in eight AWS Availability Zones, and 19 of our more than 25 InsuranceSuite customers are either in production or implementation on Guidewire Cloud Platform.
I can’t wait to see the progress we’ll have made by Cortina (and to report back on the upcoming ski season!).
In the meantime, for details about all of this new Banff functionality and more, visit the Guidewire and Banff websites, read the blog post and press release, and check out the sessions in the Cloud track from our recent virtual user conference, Connections Reimagined: