Guidewire Software, Inc. (GWRE) Business

Item 1.Business

Overview and Purpose

Guidewire is the platform that property and casualty (“P&C”) insurers rely on to engage with customers, innovate, and operate more efficiently. Founded in 2001, we serve insurers of all sizes, ranging from global carriers to regional and local providers, helping them navigate a rapidly changing insurance market.

Our platform combines core systems of record with digital, analytics, and artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities. Our foundational core products, InsuranceSuite and InsuranceNow, are delivered primarily as a cloud-based subscription service leveraging our proprietary cloud platform which we refer to as Guidewire Cloud Platform (“GWCP”). Historically, InsuranceSuite has also been available for self-managed installations. These products serve as transactional systems of record, fully supporting insurance operations, including product definition, policy administration, claims management and billing.

To support our core products, we provide digital engagement offerings that enable seamless sales, omnichannel service, and enhanced claims experiences for policyholders, agents, vendors, and field personnel and analytics products that allow insurers to manage and use data more effectively, gain business insights, improve operational efficiency, and underwrite emerging risks. To support insurers worldwide, we localize our products to address diverse regulatory, language, and currency requirements. Additionally, we provide Guidewire Marketplace to empower customers pursuing innovation initiatives by offering a vetted collection of insurtech applications and to help them differentiate their businesses by allowing them to leverage capabilities from the Guidewire ecosystem.

We reach customers directly through our global sales team and in partnership with third-party global system integrators (“SIs”). Because our platform is central to insurers’ operations, customer evaluation cycles are often extensive, particularly when multiple products are involved or when insurers are moving to GWCP for the first time. Sales processes typically include detailed due diligence and customer reference checks.

In addition to migration and expansion activity on GWCP, our growth depends on continuously enhancing existing products, introducing new capabilities, ensuring efficient cloud operations, and expanding local content. We sell our products primarily through subscription services for our platform and cloud-delivered products. We generally price our subscription services for core products based on the amount of Direct Written Premium (“DWP”) managed on our platform, with certain cloud-delivered products priced based on usage or other metrics. Initial subscription agreements are generally five years in duration, with annual renewals thereafter. In some instances, we have customers that sign contracts with an initial term of seven years or longer. Subscription revenue is recognized ratably over the contract term. We also offer term licenses, primarily for existing on-premise customers, as well as support and professional services. Support is typically priced as a percentage of license fees and recognized ratably, while most professional services are billed monthly on a time-and-materials basis.

Industry Background

The P&C insurance industry is large, fragmented, highly regulated, and complex. It is also highly competitive, with insurers competing primarily on product differentiation, pricing options, customer service, marketing and advertising, affiliate programs, and channel strategies. In some instances, P&C insurers rely on legacy systems that may impact their ability to respond to business and market requirements.

To better respond to market demands, P&C insurers modernize their transactional core systems to manage key functional areas of P&C insurance, including product definition, underwriting and policy administration, claims management, and billing. Product definition specifies the insurance coverage, pricing, and financial and legal terms of insurance policies. Underwriting and policy administration includes collecting information from potential policyholders, determining appropriate coverages and terms, pricing policies, issuing policies, and updating and maintaining policies over their lifetimes. Claims management includes loss intake, investigation and evaluation of incidents, settlement negotiation, vendor management, litigation management, and payment processing. Billing includes policyholder invoicing, payment collection, and agent commission calculation. We believe insurers that adopt modern, cloud-based core systems can enhance customer experience, operate more efficiently, and introduce innovative products more rapidly.

We believe the P&C insurance industry is rapidly evolving in how insurers engage with, sell to, and manage relationships with, consumers and businesses. Today, P&C insurers are striving to respond to significant changes in their competitive marketplace and the characteristics of the risks they underwrite. The most significant changes include:

•an industry going through rapid change that requires agility and efficiency from its core systems;

3

Table of Contents

•an increase in catastrophes and natural disasters impacting the P&C insurance industry requiring agility and innovation from its core systems;

•a rise in customer expectations for digital, mobile, and omnichannel interaction to augment the traditional agent model;

•a growth in demand for personalized services and products;

•an increase in technology and market-driven changes in vehicular risk, including usage and driving behavior based insurance;

•an increase in consolidation of providers of insurance products and associated rationalization of markets served given recent claims ratio trends and developments;

•demand for coverage of emerging risks such as terrorism, cybersecurity, pandemic, and reputational risk;

•growing data volumes which require modern tools to build analytics and gain actionable insights;

•advances in the use of data and AI-based analytics to better market to and engage with customers, price policies, and manage claims;

•development of opportunities to compete or partner with non-traditional players that offer disruptive technology-based value propositions;

•established industry leaders are facing increased competition from new entrants in the market, including insurtech companies;

•generational turnover in the underwriting and claims workforce, as the baby boomer generation retires and insurers must hire, train, and retain talent at scale; and

•the introduction and leveraging of new technologies, such as generative AI, large language models, autonomous driving, and telematics.

In response to these trends, changes, challenges, and opportunities, we believe that P&C insurers need a modern core platform that can increase agility and enhance digital engagement and analytics offerings.

While each insurer may have different goals and priorities when pursuing new technology investments, there are several major themes that we believe guide these investments:

•Agility. Insurers face rising competitive and market pressures, including social inflation that is contributing to higher claims severity across lines of business, that demand faster product definition, risk selection and pricing, and market entry or exit. These pressures are heightened by climate-driven risk events such as wildfires and floods, growing competition from digital-first insurers, and broader macroeconomic challenges including inflation, supply chain volatility, and changes in trade policies.

•Digital Engagement Models. Policyholders and agents increasingly expect seamless, digital-first experiences. Insurers are investing in modern engagement tools to reduce customer dissatisfaction and improve retention while transitioning from transactional interactions to more advisory and personalized relationships. Examples include embedded insurance offerings, omnichannel claims service, and personalized product recommendations. These investments can drive higher lead conversion and lower churn.

•Cloud-Delivered Solutions. Adoption of cloud platforms is accelerating as insurers recognize the cost efficiencies, scalability, and security benefits of public cloud infrastructure. We believe cloud deployment also enables faster innovation cycles, improved resilience during catastrophe events, and easier compliance with evolving regulatory requirements. By shifting infrastructure management to third parties, insurers can focus more resources on differentiating products and services.

•Data Driven Decision-Making. Insurers are increasingly leveraging proprietary and third-party data sources, ranging from telematics and internet-connected devices to catastrophe and climate models, to inform decisions across underwriting, claims, and pricing. Predictive analytics and AI technologies can help underwriters and claims professionals improve accuracy and efficiency, while automation enables straight-through processing where possible. At the same time, insurers must balance these gains with transparency and compliance requirements around the use of analytics and AI technologies. Insurers also face costs from fraud in underwriting and claims and are using analytics and AI technologies to improve detection and reduce related expenses.

•Innovation. Insurers are under pressure to innovate across their product lifecycle in order to grow their business and improve service quality. Examples of focus areas include creating services and products to target under-insured risks such as cyber, supply chain disruption, and reputational risk and partnering with insurtech providers to streamline operations and improve service to policyholders and agents.

4

Table of Contents

•Legacy System Modernization. A significant portion of the market continues to rely on legacy systems. We believe modern policy administration, claims management, and billing systems will continue to be adopted as insurers that rely on legacy systems seek to gain operating efficiencies, expand into new markets and lines of business, and introduce new digital and data offerings.

Products

The Guidewire ecosystem is designed so that insurers can increase revenue, reduce operational costs and losses, improve pricing, and engage with a customer base that increasingly demands convenience and automated forms of self-service and communication. We are investing in research and development to accelerate improvements in our platform and suite of products to better serve our customers.

Core Operational Products

We offer the following suite of products: Guidewire InsuranceSuite and Guidewire InsuranceNow.

Guidewire InsuranceSuite

Guidewire InsuranceSuite is a highly configurable and scalable product, delivered as a service, and primarily comprised of three core applications (PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter, and BillingCenter) that can be subscribed to separately or together. These applications are built on and optimized for our GWCP architecture and leverage our in-house cloud operations team. GWCP is a Guidewire-developed infrastructure layer enabled by and hosted on Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). GWCP’s architecture consists of three primary layers. The specialized cloud infrastructure service and tool layer centered around optimizing service and resource availability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency, maintaining data security, privacy and regulatory compliance, and offering a high degree of service observability to provide customers with better insight and control consistent with their operational needs. The data platform layer providing access to core and predictive analytics data to allow creation of curated datasets that can be used to drive delivery of actionable insights across the insurance lifecycle. The app platform layer containing modular, cloud-native services decoupled from the InsuranceSuite core that can be used individually or interconnected to enhance existing applications and empower creation of new business applications. GWCP was developed to meet the specialized needs of the P&C insurance industry, providing a scalable cloud architecture that combines multi-tenant cloud services and tools with the ability to isolate each customer’s system of record and database instances. This approach provides our customers with the benefits of cloud-native infrastructure and services and the flexibility to provide differentiated services to their customers.

InsuranceSuite is designed to support multiple releases each year to accelerate delivery of new capabilities and ensure that cloud customers remain on the latest version and gain fast access to our innovation efforts. Additionally, InsuranceSuite embeds digital and analytics capabilities natively into our platform. Most new sales and implementations are for InsuranceSuite.

Guidewire PolicyCenter is our flexible underwriting and policy administration application that serves as a comprehensive system-of-record supporting the entire policy lifecycle, including product definition, underwriting, quoting, binding, issuance, endorsements, audits, cancellations, and renewals. Guidewire ClaimCenter is a complete end-to-end claims management solution that offers core claims functionality. Guidewire BillingCenter automates the billing lifecycle, enables the design of a wide variety of billing and payment plans, manages agent commissions, and integrates with external payment systems. These primary applications also include predictive analytics that drive smart decisions, digital engagement, and an ecosystem of partners and insurtechs.

Guidewire InsuranceNow

Guidewire InsuranceNow is a complete, cloud-based application that offers policy administration, claims management, and billing functionality, plus pre-integrated document production, analytics, and other capabilities, that increases agility without adding complexity. Like InsuranceSuite, InsuranceNow is hosted on GWCP and managed by our internal cloud operations team. InsuranceNow is currently only available in the United States, and is generally suited to mid-market carriers and managing general agents whose needs are often not as complex as a typical InsuranceSuite customer.

Guidewire InsuranceSuite: Complementary Capabilities and Applications

We offer several complementary capabilities and applications, some of which are included in the core operational services and products, and all of which are designed to work seamlessly with our core operational services and products, including:

Guidewire Rating Management

Guidewire Rating Management enables P&C insurers to manage the pricing of their insurance services and products.

5

Table of Contents

Guidewire Reinsurance Management

Guidewire Reinsurance Management enables P&C insurers to use rules-based logic to execute their reinsurance strategy through their underwriting and claims processes.

Guidewire Client Data Management

Guidewire Client Data Management helps P&C insurers capitalize on customer information more coherently, overcoming traditional siloed practices that impair efficiency and customer service.

Guidewire Advanced Product Designer

Guidewire Advanced Product Designer is a cloud-native application for insurance product design and management across the complete insurance lifecycle. It enables insurers to launch and update products quickly by providing visual product development tools, prebuilt product model templates, product management capability, and auto generated product code.

Guidewire Product Content Management

Guidewire Product Content Management provides software tools and standards-based, line-of-business templates to enable insurers to more rapidly introduce and modify services and products by reducing product configuration and maintenance efforts. Any such product introduction or modification must connect to and incorporate regulatory or industry-standard data and content, such as Insurance Services Office (“ISO”) or National Council on Compensation Insurance content.

Digital Engagement

Guidewire Digital Engagement Applications

Our Digital Engagement Applications enable insurers to provide digital experiences to customers, agents, vendors, and field personnel through their device of choice. As consumers increasingly use self-service functions on the internet and on mobile devices, we believe that many of them prefer to interact with their insurance providers digitally and that they expect to have a consistent and efficient transactional experience through multiple channels, whether online, in-person or by phone. Our Digital Engagement Applications also benefit agents and brokers who are seeking to automate business processes with insurers to improve customer service and productivity. Digital engagement applications are enabled by the Jutro Digital Platform (“Jutro”), allowing insurers to strengthen customer relationships and brand loyalty while reducing operational cost through easy-to-use, self-service interactions. The focus of Jutro is on empowering “digital native users,” or those who understand and expect to interact with their insurers through digital experiences that are seamless, intuitive, user-friendly, mobile-ready, and omnichannel. In order to provide a holistic experience, Digital Applications are unified with InsuranceSuite.

Data and Analytics

We offer a variety of applications that allow insurers to evaluate risks and write more profitable business by enabling a seamless path from data to value.

Guidewire Predict

Guidewire Predict is a P&C-specific machine-learning platform that empowers insurers to make intelligent data-driven decisions throughout the insurance lifecycle. By building (or importing) predictive models built from multiple data sets, designing comprehensive solutions, and operationalizing the predictive insights, Predict allows insurers to rapidly turn any model into business value by delivering guidance to frontline decision makers. Predict for Claims helps customers to better manage claim indemnity and loss-adjustment expenses. Predict for Profitability improves pricing accuracy and customer satisfaction.

Guidewire HazardHub

Guidewire HazardHub allows insurers to understand, assess, price, and manage property risk quickly and intelligently. HazardHub provides a single source of geospatial risk data, and provides access to more than 950 risk variables, including perils from air, water, earth, and fire. HazardHub is a cloud-native solution delivered through an Application Programming Interface that provides access to this information for any personal or commercial property located in 19 countries, including, among others, Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom (“U.K.”), and the United States, and has the ability to evaluate an entire portfolio for property risk.

Guidewire Canvas

6

Table of Contents

Guidewire Canvas is a cloud-native application included with ClaimCenter. It features an interactive map that enables claims management and catastrophe response teams to geo-visualize claims to help improve customer satisfaction and reduce indemnity by proactively responding to storm events.

Guidewire Compare

Guidewire Compare is a cloud-native application included with ClaimCenter that monitors key claims measures and gives feedback on how those compare against peer insurers in the Guidewire community, or within a single insurer across regions or over time. Compare allows claims organizations to increase their processing efficiency by monitoring key claims measures such as indemnity, expenses, cycle times, reserves, salvage, subrogation, percentage closed, catastrophe, and litigated.

Guidewire Industry Intel

Guidewire Industry Intel comprises a set of pre-built AI-based models leveraging our comprehensive datasets. Intel provides carriers with line-of-business-specific actionable predictions to enhance operational efficiency directly embedded into core workflows within PolicyCenter and ClaimsCenter.

Guidewire Data Studio and Explore

Guidewire Data Studio is a cloud-native application leveraging the Guidewire Data Platform. It is designed to provide streamlined access to the data from InsuranceSuite products. It provides a curated content data repository that enables insurers to build, organize, and publish InsuranceSuite datasets for downstream applications. The Guidewire Insurance Data Model contains sets of pre-curated P&C insurance-specific metrics and attributes; data dictionaries; and supporting user diagrams and documentation. It facilitates the generation of financial and business insights, ultimately improving policy and claims outcomes for insurers.

Guidewire Explore is a cloud-native business intelligence application with ready-to-use datasets, reports, and dashboards that provides insurers with financial and operational insights to better understand the health of their business, make informed decisions, identify areas of improvement, stay competitive, and support internal and external stakeholders.

Guidewire Cyence

Guidewire Cyence is a cyber-risk economic modeling product that helps P&C insurers accurately measure the financial impact of cyber risk on their customers. It does this by capturing data about cyber threats from more than 400 sources, including public, open-source, proprietary, and third-party data. Cyence then curates and analyzes the data through AI and machine-learning statistical models to extract meaningful signals. Based on these models, Cyence produces insights delivered through reports that will predict the likelihood and economic impact of cyber attacks on a target company or individual. This can be used for underwriting, pricing, and developing cyber insurance products.

Guidewire DataHub and InfoCenter

Guidewire DataHub is an operational data store that unifies, standardizes, and stores data from the patchwork of insurer’s systems as well as from external sources.

Guidewire InfoCenter is a business intelligence warehouse for P&C insurers that provides information in easy-to-use formats for business intelligence, analysis, and enhanced decision making. With Guidewire InfoCenter, insurers gain flexible operational insights as well as the ability to optimize their business.

Guidewire Marketplace

The Guidewire Marketplace is where insurers find vetted applications and content that complement the Guidewire platform from our PartnerConnect partners, as well as Guidewire product and services teams. These applications and content help insurers to rapidly innovate and differentiate their businesses by allowing them to leverage capabilities from the Guidewire ecosystem to meet their business goals. The Guidewire Marketplace also empowers customers pursuing innovation initiatives by offering a vetted collection of insurtech applications. Additionally, we promote innovation through our Insurtech Vanguards which is a community of select startups and technology providers, bringing transformative solutions to the P&C industry and making innovation more accessible. Sixteen Insurtech Vanguards have been promoted to our PartnerConnect program. As of July 31, 2025, the Guidewire Marketplace had over 315 partner-developed integrations that have been awarded Ready for Guidewire validation and hundreds of Guidewire-developed resources available for download. We are continually expanding the breadth of functionality and depth of partnerships in the Guidewire Marketplace.

Technology

7

Table of Contents

We have increased the scope of our platform, products, and business through internal development and acquisitions. This growing scope has required greater investment in the development of application interfaces and shared services necessary to unify the operations and user experience across our applications. The prioritization of cloud-delivered solutions has also required significant focus in improving our ability to manage, secure, and operate our applications since our cloud-based deployments, unlike our self-managed implementations, shift many operational responsibilities to us.

Our cloud infrastructure is designed to enhance the security, stability, scalability and efficiency of our applications. Our cloud infrastructure leverages AWS regions worldwide and is tailored to provide both the benefit of cloud subscription services delivered in a cloud-native multi-tenant model while still providing insurers with the ability to configure and extend their applications via single-tenant environments which are easily managed via Guidewire Cloud Console. All of our cloud services and products comply with relevant standards set by ISO, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.

Finally, we continue to improve the scalability of our service, which performs millions of complex, business-critical transactions daily. The accuracy and availability of our services must be maintained not only during normal business operations, but also during extraordinary events such as catastrophes, which may result in extremely high transaction volume in a short period of time.

Services

We provide implementation, cloud migration, and integration services to help our customers realize the benefits of our products. Our delivery services teams assist customers in building implementation or migration plans, integrating our software with their existing systems, and defining business rules and specific requirements unique to each customer. We also partner with leading SI consulting firms, certified on our software, to achieve scalable, cost-effective implementations for our customers.

Our investments in services and partners are designed to ensure customer success by committing appropriate resources to implementation projects.

Customer Support

We provide support for our subscription customers as part of our subscription services and to our license customers for an annual fee based on a percentage of the license fees. Subscription services also include regular updates to Guidewire software to ensure that Guidewire Cloud customers can easily access our latest innovations. New capabilities are often toggled-off so that customers can activate them at the right time for their businesses. This enables our customers to deliver improvements at a steady pace, optimized for their employees and customers.

Our subscriptions include Guidewire Cloud Assurance Services, which provides for review of all configurations and integrations to ensure they follow published standards, best practices and required security methodologies. Furthermore, our internal cloud operations team monitors application performance and our customer success team works directly with customers to optimize adoption, user experience, and business requirements.

Employees and Human Capital Resources

Our business requires attracting, developing, and retaining a motivated team of individuals who thrive in a culture based on integrity, rationality, and collegiality. Understanding and proactively anticipating the priorities and needs of our current and future employees is important to realizing our mission to be the platform P&C insurers rely on to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently.

As of July 31, 2025, we had 3,772 employees, including 1,879 in global product development and operations (comprised of research and development, cloud operations, and technical support), 873 in professional services, 533 in sales and marketing, and 487 in general and administrative roles. As of July 31, 2025, we had 1,714 employees in the United States and 2,058 employees internationally.

Attracting, Developing, and Retaining Employees

Our recruiting, development, and retention objectives focus on providing an optimal employee experience and culture across the employee life cycle from recruitment to retirement, and involve attracting skilled and engaged employees who contribute the talent and range of perspectives critical to our innovative, forward-looking, and inclusive workforce. Our recruiting process is designed to reduce bias and support our ability to hire candidates with professional qualifications, personal potential, and differing perspectives. For certain roles and when required to meet our business needs, flexible work policies expand our ability to hire for certain roles and retain talent in geographies where we do not have physical offices. Fostering career progression by encouraging regular professional education empowers our employees to pursue their professional goals, which is critical to developing and retaining our employees. We invest in broad-based development by providing diverse growth opportunities, including skills training, on-demand AI learning

8

Table of Contents

platforms, mentorship, and leadership programs. We gauge progress and efficacy, identify opportunities for change, and pursue solutions through tracking and analyzing data from various sources such as annual talent reviews, employee feedback, and our progress toward hiring and promotion goals.

People and Community Engagement

We believe that understanding and respecting another’s perspective, experience, background, and beliefs provides opportunities to expand horizons, increase innovation, challenge complacency, and foster empathy. A broad range of perspectives and experiences drives our innovative, collaborative, and engaged workplace. We aim for the highest standards of fairness and equal opportunity in recruitment, hiring, promotions, job assignments, and compensation. Initiatives to foster a collaborative and welcoming workplace include recruiting and outreach programs and various employee resource groups open to all employees.

Guidewire Gives Back (“GGB”) is our program focused on investing in local communities where we operate by encouraging employee volunteerism, philanthropy, and social impact investment. The GGB program is centered around employee engagement and community impact through volunteer hours from the Guidewire community and financial donations, both of which are geared toward making a measurable difference. The GGB strategy, programs, and collaborative partnerships reflect employees’ passions and embody Guidewire’s corporate mission, as well as our customers’ purpose.

Corporate Culture

Our employees are critical to our success, and our global strategy includes cultivating an inclusive and engaged workforce that fosters collaboration and supports our shared values. Our values of integrity, rationality, and collegiality are the foundation of how we work with one another. We incorporate a wide variety of communication and training activities to encourage collaboration across our global workforce. We measure the effectiveness of our employee programs through quarterly surveys and use the results to identify opportunities for improvement.

Health and Wellness

We believe a healthy, engaged, and high-performing workforce is part of our competitive advantage. We want all of our employees to thrive, and we regularly re-evaluate how to best support our employees’ wellness, health, and safety through management systems, policies, and programs that encompass our global operations. Our current benefit and wellness programs drive engagement that positively impacts our culture, job satisfaction, recruiting, and retention programs. We demonstrate our commitment to well-being through our physical, mental, and family health programs, and professional development opportunities. We also prioritize personal empowerment, wellness initiatives, safe and flexible workspaces, and comprehensive benefits — ensuring our team stays healthy, supported, and connected.

Employee Relations

Our employees in the United States are not represented by a labor union; however, in certain foreign locations, there are workers’ councils that represent our employees. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good. We recognize the critical role that our supervisors and managers play in fostering a productive, inclusive and respectful work environment, and we encourage employees to work directly with their supervisors, where possible, to efficiently and effectively resolve workplace concerns. We also respect our employees’ rights to voluntarily establish and join unions and similar associations without unlawful interference. We strive to work collaboratively with the councils and associations that represent our workers.

Customers

We market and sell our products to a wide variety of global P&C insurers ranging from some of the largest global insurers to national, regional, and state companies. We believe strong customer relationships are a key driver of our success given the long-term nature of our customer engagements and importance of customer references for new sales. We focus on developing and maintaining our customer relationships through customer service and account management. Customers are defined as entities that have placed orders for our services or products. In some instances, a parent corporation can have multiple entities, or insurance brands, that place orders for our services or products and, in other instances, customers are in industries adjacent to the insurance industry and do not have an insurance brand. As of July 31, 2025, we had approximately 500 customers representing approximately 570 insurance brands in 43 countries. Our customer definition excludes customers that pay us less than $10,000 per year, which primarily represents customers of our HazardHub product.

Strategic Relationships

9

Table of Contents

We have extensive relationships with SI, consulting, technology, and industry partners. Our network of partners has expanded as interest in and adoption of our platform has grown. We encourage our partners to co-market, pursue joint sales initiatives, obtain certifications related to our products, and drive broader adoption of our technology, helping us grow our business more efficiently and enabling us to focus our resources on continued innovation and further enhancement of our solutions.

We work closely with our network of SI partners to facilitate new sales and implementations of our products. Our partnerships with leading SI partners allow us to increase efficiency and scale while reducing customer implementation and migration costs. We continue to invest time and resources to increase the number of qualified consultants employed by our SI partners, develop relationships with new partners in existing and new markets, and ensure that all SI partners are qualified to implement our products. We believe this model will continue to serve us well, and we intend to continue to expand our network of partners and the number of certified consultants with whom we work so we can leverage our SI partners more effectively, especially for future subscription migrations and implementations.

As part of our PartnerConnect alliance program, we have a community of solution partners developing integrations that enable software and insurance business solutions to interoperate with our products, many of which are in the Guidewire Marketplace. These integrations help customers reduce implementation risk and effort, and lower the total cost of implementation and operation.

Sales and Marketing

Consistent with our industry focus and the mission-critical needs our products address, our sales and marketing efforts are tailored to communicate effectively to senior executives within the P&C insurance industry. Our sales, marketing, customer success, and executive teams work together to cultivate long-term relationships with current and prospective customers in each of the geographies in which we are active.

Our direct sales team serves as both our exclusive sales channel and our account management function and is organized by geographic region across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. We augment our sales professionals with a pre-sales team possessing insurance domain and technical expertise, who engage customers to understand their specific business needs and then represent our products through demonstrations tailored to address those needs.

Our marketing team supports sales with competitive analysis and sales tools, while investing to strengthen our brand name and reputation. We participate at industry conferences, are published frequently in the industry press, and have active relationships with all of the major industry analysts. We also host Connections, our annual customer conference, where customers both participate in and deliver presentations on a wide range of Guidewire and insurance technology topics. We invite potential customers and partners to our customer conference, as we believe customer references are a key component of driving new sales.

Our strong relationships with leading SI partners enhance our direct sales through co-marketing efforts and by providing additional market validation of the distinctiveness and quality of our offerings.

Research and Development

Our research and development efforts focus on enhancing our platform, services, and products to meet the complex requirements of P&C insurers with particular emphasis on capabilities, operational efficiency, data analytics, security, and privacy in the cloud. These efforts are intended to help our customers improve their operations; drive greater digital engagement with their customers, agents, and brokers; and gather, store and analyze data to improve business decisions. We also invest significantly in developing our products and necessary integrations to meet the market requirements, including regulations, language, currency, and local terminology, of each country or state in which our customers operate. This market-segment specific functionality must be updated regularly in order to stay current with regulatory changes in each market. We rely on a multi-national engineering team, which has grown organically and through acquisitions.

Our investments in cloud operations are focused on managing the infrastructure for our cloud-based customers in a secure, efficient, and cost-effective manner.

Competition

The software market that caters to the P&C insurance industry is highly competitive and fragmented. Increased spending by insurers on software solutions and the emergence of new platforms that have broadened from core system modernization to new digital engagement and data and analytics solutions have generated significant interest among investors and entrepreneurs. Increased capital allows market participants, or potential market participants such as insurtech companies, to adopt more aggressive go-to-market strategies, improve existing products, introduce new products, develop innovative solutions that disrupt the market, and consolidate with other vendors. This market is also subject to changing technology preferences, shifting customer needs, and the adoption of cloud deployed solutions. These factors create an environment of shifting and increasing competition. Our current and

10

Table of Contents

future competitors vary in size and in the breadth and scope of the products they offer. As we expand our product portfolio, we may begin to compete with software and service providers we have not traditionally competed against. Our current competitors include, but are not limited to, customers’ internally developed proprietary solutions; P&C insurance software vendors such as Duck Creek, EIS Group, Insurity, Majesco, Origami Risk, and Sapiens; and horizontal software vendors such as SAP SE, Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Competitive factors in our industry depend on the product being offered and the size, geographic market, and line of business of potential customers. The principal competitive factors include product functionality, performance, customer references, total cost of ownership, solution completeness, implementation track record, security and in-depth knowledge of the P&C insurance industry. We typically compete favorably on the basis of these factors in most geographies.

Intellectual Property

Our success and ability to compete depend in part upon our ability to protect our proprietary technology, to establish and adequately protect our intellectual property rights, and to protect against third-party claims and litigation related to intellectual property. To accomplish these objectives, we rely on a combination of patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements and other contractual protections. We own or have pending patents and patent applications, which generally apply to our software. Our owned patents have expiration dates starting in 2025. We also rely on several registered and unregistered trademarks, as well as pending applications for such registrations, in order to protect our brand both in the United States and internationally.

Information about Segment and Geographic Revenue

Information about geographic revenue is set forth in Note 2 “Revenue” and information about segment reporting is set forth in Note 13 “Segment Information” to our consolidated financial statements included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Seasonality

We have experienced seasonal variations in our license revenue and, to a lesser extent, in our subscription revenue as a result of increased customer orders in our fourth fiscal quarter due to efforts by our sales team to achieve annual incentives. Because we recognize revenue upfront for term licenses compared to over time for subscription services, changes in the mix between term license and subscription services may impact our quarterly results. Additionally, any significant multi-year term license renewal or non-renewal could impact quarterly results. Subscription sales now represent the significant majority of total sales and, as a result when compared to term license sales, the revenue we recognize in the initial fiscal year of an order is lower, deferred revenue is higher, and our total reported revenue growth may be adversely affected in the near term due to the ratable nature of these arrangements. Over time, this ratable revenue dynamic has and will dampen the impact of seasonality on our revenue.

Our services revenue is also subject to seasonal fluctuations, though to a lesser degree than our license revenue and subscription revenue. Our services revenue is impacted by the number of billable days in a given fiscal quarter. The fiscal quarter ending January 31 usually has fewer billable days due to the impact of calendar year end holidays in the United States. Our fourth fiscal quarter usually has fewer billable days due to the impact of vacations taken by our services professionals. Because we pay our services professionals the same amount throughout the year, our gross margins on our services revenue are usually lower in these quarters. This seasonal pattern, however, may be absent in any given year.

11

Table of Contents

WHERE YOU CAN FIND MORE INFORMATION

The following filings are available to view and download free of charge on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after we file them with the SEC: Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and our Proxy Statement for our annual meeting of stockholders. Our website is located at www.guidewire.com, and our investor relations website is located at ir.guidewire.com. We also provide a link to the section of the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov that has all of our public filings, including periodic reports, proxy statements, and other information.

We provide access to a recording of our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website. Additionally, we also provide notifications on our investor relations website of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press releases, and earnings releases. Investors and others can receive notifications of new information posted on our investor relations website in real time by signing up for email alerts and RSS feeds. Corporate governance information, including our governance guidelines and code of business conduct and ethics, is also available on our investor relations website under the heading “Corporate Governance.” Corporate sustainability information is available on our website and is located at www.guidewire.com/corporate-sustainability. The contents of our websites, including any information contained in reports or other resources found on such websites, are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC. Any references to our websites are intended to be inactive, textual references only.