Guidewire Software, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Guidewire First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you, Alex. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to Guidewire Earnings Conference Call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2022, which ended on October 31st. My name is Alex Hughes. I am Vice President of Investor Relations, and with me on the call is Mike Rosenbaum, Guidewire's Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff Cooper, Guidewire's Chief Financial Officer. A complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued today, as well as in our related form AK, furnished to the SEC, both of which are available in the Investor Relations section of our website. Today's call is being recorded. and a replay will be available following the conclusion of the call. Statements made on this call include forward-looking ones regarding our financial results, products, customer demand, operations, and the impact of COVID-19 on our business and other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions and are based on management's current expectations as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. Please refer to the press release and the risk factors included within the documents we file with the SEC. including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, as 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. 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. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Mike.

Thank you, Alex. Good afternoon, everyone. And thanks very much for joining us today. On the heels of a strong finish to last fiscal year, we had a record Q1 sales activity and continued to build momentum for Guidewire Cloud. Cloud bookings were over 90% of deal activity for the first time ever and helped drive Q1 ARR above the high end of our guidance range. It was a great start to our fiscal year and points to continued strength in our cloud business and strategy. In the quarter, We signed five more insurance suite cloud deals on top of 17 last quarter and saw another six successful cloud customer deployments. This is a great illustration of success leading to success. As we close more deals and demonstrate more go lives, we will see increasing confidence and demand from our customer base. With a growing number of commitments and successful deployments, more insurers will decide that the time to move to the cloud is now. Interest in Guidewire and the overall insurtech market was on full display at our recent Connections customer conference, which was held as a hybrid event in Las Vegas last month. We had over 1,300 people in physical attendance, which I think is phenomenal considering the current environment and international travel restrictions. We saw a broad participation from across our customer base and partner community, and it was great to see a heightened focus on cloud, and insurance innovation from everyone in our ecosystem. Connections was a great platform to show the Guidewire community the exciting new developments and innovations in Dobson, our fourth release of the Guidewire Cloud Platform. I'll talk more about Dobson in a minute, but I think it is getting clearer and clearer to our customers that the six-month release cycle of Guidewire Cloud Platform offers a superior track to the faster and continuous innovation needed to advance their objectives. As I mentioned, cloud deal activity in the quarter was phenomenal, with five new insurance suite cloud upgrades in the first quarter, spanning both Americas and EMEA. In the Americas, I was pleased to see a deal with a Tier 1 insurer and activity across both commercial and personal lines. A Tier 1 insurer elected to upgrade Claims Center to the cloud as part of its strategic vision to provide industry-leading claims services while balancing superior satisfaction, indemnity accuracy, and cost of service management. Franklin Mutual, based in New Jersey and dating back to 1879, elected to migrate to the Guidewire cloud platform to take advantage of our autopilot roadmap, data strategy, and the combination of our deep R&D and innovation cadence delivered to the cloud through our fast six-month release cycle. Franklin Mutual came to Guidewire through our acquisition of ISCS, decided to migrate to Insurance Suite B10 from InsuranceNow in 2018, and we are now excited to take them to our cloud as they look to further expand. A Tier 2 insurer based in Canada chose to migrate ClaimsCenter in order to simplify its technical ecosystem and to accelerate speed to market. This builds on their adoption earlier in the year of Policy Center and Billing Center for the Guidewire Cloud. In EMEA, it was great to see two exciting cloud deals. Trig, the largest non-life insurance company in Scandinavia with significant market share across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, adopted Claims Center on Guidewire Cloud for its platform sophistication, autopilot, and analytics technologies. P&V Assurances, founded in 1907 and now one of Belgium's largest insurers, elected to migrate InsuranceSuite to the cloud because of our platform's strong fit with its strategic imperatives. We also saw continued success in analytics in the first quarter. S&P, as I briefly mentioned last earnings call, expanded their relationship with us in a very significant and strategic way. We will work with S&P to use science to develop the first cyber risk impact quantification of credit and financial health. This is an outstanding validation of what we already know, that cyber risk is an important consideration when evaluating credit risk, and it's exciting to partner with S&P on this initiative. Additionally, Markel Corporation, a global insurance and reinsurance carrier based in Virginia, selected science. In addition to deal activity, we continue to drive strong cloud deployments with six more cloud go-lives in the quarter. These deployments are a critical element of our cloud strategy because they enable us to show the industry that customers just like them are successfully executing cloud strategies on the Guidewire Cloud platform. A large tier one insurer went live with Claim Center on Guidewire Cloud and began its business rollout. This speaks to our ability to support an important tier one customer in the cloud, and we look forward to continuing our work together. Amica, the oldest mutual insurer of automobiles in the United States, achieved the second of its three major cloud milestones with the launch of Policy Center on Guidewire Cloud. This joins Billing Center and will next be joined by Claim Center and speaks to our ability to successfully transition a large, longstanding, and highly configured customer to Guidewire Cloud. We also saw a private mutual insurer with over 120 years of experience serving individuals, families, and businesses in multiple states throughout the United States deploy policy center, billing center, producer engage, and cloud data access in Guidewire Cloud. This sets the foundation for multi-state expansion and additional lines of business on Guidewire Cloud. In addition, A fast-moving commercial insurer targeting the evolving mobility market successfully launched Claims Center on Guidewire Cloud in less than 10 weeks, which speaks to the fast time-to-market advantage that Guidewire Cloud brings to Greenfield initiatives. This follows the Policy Center and Billing Center go-lives a year ago, meaning they're now in production with all three core InsuranceSuite Cloud products. At the same time, we also deployed insurance now at two more insurers, Bowhead Specialty and Innovated Holdings. Customers adopting and deploying Guidewire Cloud are doing so in large part to take advantage of the superior speed and innovation it delivers every release. The release adoption last month demonstrates these advantages and delivers exciting new enhancements that accelerate innovation, integration, design, and insights. Innovations made faster by enabling customers to launch and deliver products more quickly with Guidewire Go. Innovation is also amplified and accelerated by making it easier for developers to integrate external applications with their core systems through our cloud integration framework. It's also now much faster and easier to design front-end digital experiences with Jutro, which delivers an expanding library of preconfigured building blocks, reusable components, and metadata-driven UI configurations for our customers' digital experiences. At Connections, we also launched Guidewire Live, a suite of analytics applications designed to allow insurers to be brilliant in every stage of the insurance lifecycle. This all makes me very proud of our team and excited for our future. I'm equally excited about the excellent progress we continue to make with our expanding partner community, which is a critical component to our strategy and an important element of our success. Our SI partners remain a force multiplier for us, Since they play a critical role in helping customers plan and execute their deployment on Guidewire Cloud, we continue to see strong growth in this area. We now have 15,800 Guidewire consultants from 32 SI partners, up 38% year over year. And we now have 14 SI partners involved across 35 cloud projects. With Guidewire Cloud momentum increasing, we are seeing this community move quickly to become Guidewire Cloud certified. Guidewire cloud certified consultants grew 287% year over year to over 2,800. At the same time, our solution partners and the Guidewire marketplace continue to be important drivers powering PNC insurance innovation for our customers. We continue to see strong growth in our marketplace, and I'm even more excited about the long-term potential here as cloud deployments make it easier and easier to integrate and deploy on Guidewire. This ecosystem will unlock tremendous value on top of and alongside Guidewire, and developments such as our new cloud integration framework and Jutro are important components facilitating this. We finished the first quarter with over 140 solution partners, up 50% year over year. We understand the strategic importance of the InsurTech ecosystem to our customers looking to build competitive advantage. So we're investing in this area further to identify and incubate the next generation InsurTechs as potential solution partners through our new InsurTech Vanguard program. We're also investing directly in leading InsurTech solutions. And last month, we invested in two exciting innovators, Pris, an AI-powered end-to-end fraud prevention and detection solution for global PNC insurers, and Shift, a provider of AI-driven automation and optimization solutions for the global insurance industry. In summary, we had a fantastic first quarter on the heels of a strong finish to last year. I feel good about how the fiscal year is shaping up with our strategy and execution coming along nicely. We are optimizing and investing for product velocity and, more importantly, customer success in the cloud. These projects are very challenging and complicated, and we'll continue to invest to help ensure successful outcomes. It's hard but rewarding work that we're proud to tackle as we work arm in arm with our customers and partners to transform. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeff to talk about our financial results and our full year outlook.