Guidewire Software Inc., commonly just Guidewire, is based in Foster City, California. It offers core back-end software for property and casualty (P&C) insurance carriers in the U.S. and worldwide. 
 

In September 2011, Guidewire filed with the SEC to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering and first publicly traded on the NYSE in January 2012. Guidewire was later cited as being one of the top IPOs of 2012, even #1. 
 

The company has been cited as being among the 50 most desirable mid-size Bay Area companies (101 to 500 employees) to work for 2010-2012. 
 

Guidewire develops the Gosu programming language, which it released as open source in 2010.
 

 

Business model

The company was established in 2001. Guidewire was founded by six people: Ken Branson, James Kwak, John Raguin, and Marcus Ryu, from Ariba (and McKinsey, where James and Marcus had met), plus John Seybold and Mark Shaw from Kana Software. They are a recurring revenue software company as they sell term licenses. Its three main software products are ClaimCenter, PolicyCenter, and BillingCenter, each servicing a major component of a P&C insurance carrier. There are also four add-on modules, which are Rating Management, Reinsurance Management, Client Data Management, and Standards-based Templates.
 

Software

Guidewire InsuranceSuite™ provides an end-to-end set of applications that support insurance operations: underwriting, policy administration, billing, and claims management. The company's InsuranceSuite applications are a set of common platform modules that cover the property and casualty insurance lifecycle and typically replace legacy systems developed internally by insurance carriers.
 

Competitors

Competition for Guidewire comes mostly from the insurance carriers themselves, who have historically built their own systems internally, or with the help of large consulting companies. Competitors include Accenture (Duck Creek), CSC, eBaoTech Corporation, Insurity, MajescoMastek, OneShield, and StoneRiver.