Guidewire Software announces its new data management andbusiness intelligence solutions, Guidewire DataHub and GuidewireInfoCenter, based on technology recently acquired fromMillbrook.

Together, these products position Guidewire to help p & cinsurers accelerate legacy system replacement, maximize the valueand insight of core system transformation, and supportenterprise-wide data management and business intelligencestrategies. 

"As insurers continue to modernize their core operating systems,Celent sees an increasing emphasis on combining the replacement oflegacy systems with data and analytics initiatives. To gain acompetitive advantage, insurers need an agile modern system thatintegrates analytics-driven best practices," says Donald Light,director, Property/Casualty Practice Americas at Celent. "Insurersneed a consistent source of truth across their enterprise andGuidewire's solutions will help them address that need in a wellarchitected way."    

Guidewire DataHub is an operational data storethat unifies, standardizes, and stores data from the typicalpatchwork of an insurer's systems as well as from external sources.This provides the single source of truth to feed core systems,business intelligence solutions, and downstream systems such asgeneral ledger, regulatory, and tax reporting.

DataHub decouples data consumption from data production, thusinsulating downstream data consumers from changes in the behaviorand configuration of upstream data producers. With DataHub,insurers can retire legacy systems, ensure business continuityduring core system transformation, and add new applications in thefuture.

"Today's proliferation of data and intensified industrycompetition has increased the importance of business insight as acompetitive differentiator for insurers. Yet our research indicatesthat P/C insurers see data accessibility and legacy systems as twoof the top inhibitors to fully capitalizing on the power ofbusiness intelligence and analytics," says Mark Breading, partner,Strategy Meets Action. "Guidewire is meeting this need at a reducedrisk by providing insurers a BI foundation based on a proven datamodel aligned with their core systems."

Guidewire InfoCenter is a business intelligencewarehouse optimized for the p&c industry to provide informationin easy to use formats for business intelligence, analysis, andenhanced decision-making. Pre-integration with Guidewire productssignificantly reduces implementation time, risk and maintenanceoverhead, allowing customers to focus on configuration for theirunique needs. It is compatible with a variety of industry-standardbusiness intelligence tools.

"Our collaboration with insurers over the past 10 years led to aclear vision for how we can unite core system replacement withenterprise data management and business intelligence. Guidewirecore systems are increasingly surrounded by pre-integrated smartsolutions that help insurers even more deeply understand andfine-tune their operations," says Ken Branson, director, productstrategy and Guidewire Software co-founder. 

"We are offering a path for insurers to create a central dataintegration hub that unlocks data from individual system siloes andreduces the maintenance burden from complex point-to-pointintegrations and data links," says Jack Plunkett, senior fieldconsulting director, Guidewire Software and co-founder ofMillbrook. "Our approach creates a BI foundation for embeddingadvanced business intelligence into the day-to-day workflows ofinsurance professionals."