Guidewire accelerators: An origin story

“It’s a very, very cool story.”

Charlie Hanna, a senior alliance manager at Hyland, has been involved with Hyland’s Guidewire accelerators for years. In fact, he says the two software organizations started talking before the accelerators – which can reduce implementation times by more than 50 percent – were even in development, and that the partnership has only strengthened as they’ve worked together.

And the results of that partnership have been a boon for insurers.

For example, the Ready for Guidewire OnBase solution accelerators are a package of Guidewire-tested-and-approved software capabilities. The seamless integration between Guidewire and the accelerators creates a powerhouse for property and casualty insurance (P&C) providers so they can not only ingest all of their data, but also leverage it with intelligent processing.

“The brilliance of the accelerators is that we can pull present and very specific pieces of data directly through Guidewire at particular points in the underwriting process,” Hanna said. “That’s important in an increasingly complex insurance world, where, if you printed out a policy for a large entity such as Hyland and put it on a table, you’d be looking at piles of data-filled paper 20 feet high.”

So, how did Hyland identify the need for, build and implement Guidewire accelerators? Hanna takes us on a journey from their origin to today.

How accelerators came to be

Hanna says the insurance industry has long been enthusiastic about efficient technology.

“Insurers were always taking our core offering, OnBase, to the limits,” Hanna said.

Back in 2014 – 2015, this meant that as early adopters of document management, insurance customers were doing a lot of paper document scanning and ingesting. They were storing all that data, but in many cases, it sat, waiting, for a way to be put to work efficiently and contextually. Because the key to all that data is using it to make more-informed decisions.

“What was missing was the opportunity to have a repeatable solution that was deployable without having to reinvent the wheel every single time you did it – a way to create user stories around the services aspect and components,” Hanna said.

Hyland had identified a gap in technology. Now, it was time to bridge it.

Our vision was to deliver a turnkey, core-application integration solution to our insurance customers, so they could deploy intelligent automation to optimize how they use data.

To do that, we zeroed in on the recognized leader in the market, Guidewire, and ended up signing a partnership. Soon after, our development team went to work. Through testing and collaboration, Hyland got the OK to launch a product with the stamp of approval from Guidewire.

What guidewire accelerators do for customers

With the enthusiastic backing of Guidewire, the accelerator package was ready to take off.

Once we give the accelerators to Guidewire for testing against their products, they validate it,” Hanna said. “That tells their customers, ‘Hey, all of this code is going to work flawlessly based on your version of the software.’ It gives customers an affirmation that if they invest in this accelerator, they know it’s going to account for things that custom development won’t.”

But the benefits for Guidewire users don’t stop with affirmation. They also gain:

• Cost-effectiveness
  

  By eliminating the need for custom coding or evaluating multitudes of vendors, Guidewire users can be up and running sooner; internal IT teams can focus on longer-term projects, not building complicated integrations that already exist.

• Mutually assured success
  

  Confidence knowing that Guidewire has validated the integration and comfort knowing that Hyland will update future upgrades.

• Intelligent automation

  As data is ingested, OnBase determines what each piece of data is, then processes it according to your business rules, creates tasks and updates core systems based on the data.

• Reduced implementation time and costs

  Customers that have aligned their Guidewire strategies with Hyland’s content service platform have realized powerful ROI.

Where we are, and where we’re going

Hyland is running its fifth iteration of Ready for Guidewire accelerators and working with dozens of enterprises. The Hyland-Guidewire partnership remains strong, and in many ways is closer now than it was in the beginning.

“To this day, we are the core content services partner for Guidewire,” Hanna said. “We are the only software vendor of our type that has a certified integration with its core product offerings: PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter and BillingCenter. From a partnership perspective, there’s probably more collaboration today than we’ve ever had.”

Looking forward, the two software enterprises anticipate continued modernization efforts, both internally and in the insurance space. Hanna says the Hyland accelerator team is committed to ongoing enhancements, from additional functionality, responses to customer discussions or even removing pieces of functionality as business processes evolve beyond them.

And of course, the special relationship between Hyland and Guidewire will remain central to progress – for Hyland, Guidewire and especially our shared customers.