Guidewire Software, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the Guidewire First Quarter Fiscal 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A 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. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investment Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator. I'm Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, and with me today is Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff Cooper, 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 8K 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 the conclusion of the call. Statements made on this call include forward-looking ones regarding our financial results, products, 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 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 and documents we file with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, 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 that 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 web zone. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mike.

Thank you, Alex. Good afternoon, and thanks, everyone, for joining today. We're off to a strong start to the year, and it's great to see this momentum continue following a record Q4 where we had especially high close rates. I characterize this quarter as one of continued solid execution. We are seeing good progress on the deal front as well as in operations and also had a tremendous customer conference at Connections last month. We had record attendance with about 3,000 in-person attendees. The enthusiasm and support for our strategic direction and cloud platform was noticeable, and the event provided great validation of our progress and the tangible business impacts we are providing to our customers. We are steadily building a franchise that will have a lasting and positive impact on the PNC insurance industry, and that will produce the durable, profitable, long-term growth that is commensurate with a vertical market leader. Since we had a chance to speak at Analyst Day last month, I'll keep today's remarks fairly brief and share my key takeaways on the business. First, Guidewire Cloud Platform continues to advance steadily and consistently with each new release. The ninth release of Guidebar Cloud Platform Innsbruck was made available December 1st and builds on the automation, orchestration, integration, and monitoring capabilities in Hakuba and will deliver greater functionality in digital analytics, data, straight-through processing, and pricing. Each release brings greater and greater benefits to customers, which helps to grow interest in our platform. Second, we continue to see this interest manifest in sustained sales momentum. We closed another seven cloud deals in the first quarter, including six for InsuranceSuite Cloud. This despite Q1 typically being a seasonally light quarter for us. We closed four InsuranceSuite migrations in the quarter, including the first Japan-based insurer to commit to the full suite in the cloud. And also closed three net new deals, including another competitive takeaway. Insurers are responding to the greater agility, efficiency, and innovation that Guidewire Cloud Platform offers and increasingly view it as aligned with their technology and strategic roadmaps. Third is data and analytics, which is something I'm excited about as a longer-term opportunity and as something our cloud success positions us well for. As a core systems provider, we have a unique opportunity to layer on data and analytics offerings to core workflows and to drive greater real-time analysis and decision-making around policy underwriting and claims. I was pleased to see HazardHub adopted by a Florida-based property insurer just a few months after it adopted our InsuranceNow core solution. HazardHub was chosen for its proprietary hazard risk scoring and its seamless integration with InsuranceNow. Fourth, we continue to nurture and grow an ecosystem of partners, including SIs and solution providers, which helps to drive sustained go-live activity and greater value from the platform. In the quarter, we had nine more go-lives, and leading SIs, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, EY, and PWC all now have achieved cloud migration certifications. As I mentioned previously, Connections was a tremendous success and highlighted for me the advantages Guidewire and our ecosystem deliver for our customers. The stories that were shared drove home the impact of the improved agility, speed, and innovation our platform delivers. DFINITY Insurance, a leading Canadian insurer with 150-year history, adopted Guidewire Cloud Platform in 2021 to achieve greater scale, resilience, agility, and innovation. They have now already seen deployment times improve 63%, quote response times improve 30%, downtime reduced by 75%, and platform setup times improve 10x. The speed Guidewire Cloud Platform delivers was best illustrated by Gia Monstar, who spoke about successfully creating and launching an embedded insurance product from start to go live in only nine months. And I thought CNA Insurance, one of the largest commercial and specialty insurers in the United States, really illustrated the complexity that large insurers have to manage through when moving to the cloud and how Guidewire Cloud Platform's continuous release cycle supports much greater agility for these insurers while also providing the strategic optionality they need to stay current with the market. As we continue to sell, innovate, and expand the community around our platform, An additional key objective has been to drive greater and greater platform and company efficiency. Jeff will talk more about this, but we were all pleased to see continuing margin expansion in the quarter, even above our objectives and forecast. The work we are doing to manage all of this while also improving efficiency through our organization is critical and not always the most glamorous part of the job. It has been exciting to see the results of these efforts continue to flow through to our financial outcomes these past few quarters. And finally, we also announced in today's release that Priscilla Hung's sabbatical is ending soon, and we are all very excited to have her back. While we do not plan for her to return to the same operating role, we are very pleased that she'll continue to be an employee and an invaluable senior advisor at the company. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeff to discuss the financials.