{"url_path":"/sec/gwre/10-k/2026/item-1","section_key":"item-1","section_title":"Item 1 Business","topic":"sec","document":{"doc_type":"10-K","doc_date":"2026-09-11","source_url":"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1528396/0001528396-26-000046-index.html","accession_number":"0001528396-26-000046","cik":"0001528396","ticker":"GWRE","issuer_name":"Guidewire Software, Inc.","edgar_url":"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1528396/0001528396-26-000046-index.html","primary_entity_key":"0001528396","primary_entity_name":"Guidewire Software, Inc."},"word_count":6760,"has_tables":true,"body_markdown":"Item 1.Business\n\nOverview and Purpose\n\nGuidewire 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.\n\nOur foundational core products, InsuranceSuite and InsuranceNow, are delivered as a cloud-based subscription service leveraging our proprietary cloud platform which we refer to as Guidewire Cloud Platform (“GWCP”). These products serve as transactional systems of record, fully supporting insurance operations, including product definition, pricing and rating, underwriting, policy administration, billing, and claims management.\n\nOur platform combines core systems of record with digital, analytics, and predictive and generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities. To support our core systems, we provide digital engagement offerings that enable seamless sales and pricing and rating solutions that enable sophisticated pricing models and streamlined rate logic deployment. Our platform provides 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 that allow them to differentiate their businesses by leveraging capabilities from the Guidewire ecosystem.\n\nWe 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.\n\nIn 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 or market-specific content. We sell our products 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 and associated resource consumption. 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. Professional services are generally billed monthly on a time-and-materials basis; however, certain services engagements are based on a fixed fee, and revenue is recognized on a percentage of completion basis.\n\nIndustry Background\n\nThe P&C insurance industry is large, fragmented, highly regulated, and complex. It is also highly competitive, with insurers competing primarily on product differentiation, coverage and pricing options, customer and claims service, and channel strategies. Often, P&C insurers rely on legacy or immature systems that may impact their ability to respond to business and market requirements.\n\nTo 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, pricing and rating, underwriting, policy administration, billing, and claims management. Product definition specifies the insurance coverage, pricing, and financial and legal terms of insurance policies. Pricing and rating consist of developing, testing, and deploying pricing models, rating rules, and rate tables that incorporate internal and external data to estimate risk, set premiums that reflect underwriting strategy and regulatory and market requirements, and apply those premiums consistently for new business and renewals. 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.\n\nWe 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:\n\n3\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\n•increased need for agility and efficiency from core systems to address rapid changes in the industry;\n\n•an increase in the number of events and insured losses resulting from catastrophes and natural disasters impacting the P&C insurance industry requiring agility and innovation from its core systems;\n\n•a rise in customer expectations for digital, mobile, and omnichannel interaction to augment the traditional agent model;\n\n•a growth in demand for personalized services and products;\n\n•an increase in technology and market-driven changes in vehicular risk, including usage and driving behavior based insurance;\n\n•an increase in consolidation among insurance providers and associated rationalization of product lines and geographic footprints to eliminate overlap and improve combined ratios;\n\n•an increasingly complex distribution ecosystem composed of managing agents, wholesalers, and program administrators who pose both threats and opportunities to insurer growth and profitability;\n\n•demand for coverage of emerging risks such as terrorism, cybersecurity, AI, pandemic, and reputational risk, and the impact of social inflation on increasing liability claims;\n\n•growing data volumes which require modern tools to build analytics and gain actionable insights;\n\n•advances in the use of data and AI-based analytics to better market to and engage with customers, price policies, and manage claims;\n\n•development of opportunities to compete or partner with new or non-traditional players, such as insurtech businesses, that offer disruptive underwriting and distribution models;\n\n•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\n\n•the introduction and leveraging of new technologies, such as generative AI, large language models, autonomous driving, and the internet-of-things.\n\nWhile each insurer may have different goals and priorities when pursuing new technology investments, in response to these trends, changes, challenges, and opportunities, there are several major themes that we believe guide these investments:\n\n•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.\n\n•Agility. Insurers face rising competitive and market pressures that demand faster product definition, risk selection and pricing, and market adjustments. These pressures are rapidly changing and heightened by climate-driven risk events such as wildfires and floods, growing competition from digital-first insurers, social inflation that is contributing to higher claims severity across lines of business, and broader macroeconomic challenges including inflation, supply chain volatility, and changes in trade policies.\n\n•Data Driven Decision-Making. Insurers are increasingly leveraging proprietary and third-party data sources, ranging from the internet-of-things to catastrophe and climate models, in order to inform decisions across underwriting, claims, and pricing. Predictive analytics and AI technologies can help underwriters and claims professionals improve risk selection and loss outcomes, 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.\n\n•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, personalized product recommendations, and omnichannel claims service. These investments can drive higher lead conversion and lower churn.\n\n•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.\n\n4\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\n•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.\n\nProducts\n\nThe Guidewire product portfolio 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.\n\nCore Operational Products\n\nWe offer the following suite of products: Guidewire InsuranceSuite and Guidewire InsuranceNow.\n\nGuidewire InsuranceSuite\n\nGuidewire InsuranceSuite is a highly configurable and scalable product, delivered as a service, and primarily comprised of five core applications (PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter, BillingCenter, PricingCenter and UnderwritingCenter) 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 architectural approach provides our customers with the benefits of cloud-native infrastructure and services and the flexibility to provide differentiated services to their customers.\n\nInsuranceSuite 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, analytics, and generative AI capabilities natively into our platform. Most new sales and implementations are for InsuranceSuite.\n\nGuidewire 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 PricingCenter is our integrated pricing and rating engine that centralizes pricing strategy, operationalizes advanced analytics, and enables rapid test-and-learn rate changes across products, channels, and regions. Guidewire UnderwritingCenter is an agentic, AI-powered underwriting application that turns submissions into better, faster decisions from intake through risk selection and bind, unifying data, workflows, and insights so underwriters can focus on high-value, preferred opportunities. Guidewire ClaimCenter is a complete end-to-end claims management solution that offers core claims management and servicing 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.\n\nGuidewire InsuranceNow\n\nGuidewire InsuranceNow is a 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 in a single bundled software service. Like InsuranceSuite, InsuranceNow is hosted on GWCP and managed by our internal cloud operations team. InsuranceNow is currently only available in the United States (“U.S.”) and Canada, and is generally suited to mid-market carriers and managing general agents, who are highly cost sensitive and whose needs are often not as complex as a typical InsuranceSuite customer.\n\nGuidewire InsuranceSuite: Complementary Capabilities and Applications\n\n5\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\nWe 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:\n\nGuidewire Rating Management\n\nGuidewire Rating Management enables P&C insurers to manage the pricing of their insurance services and products.\n\nGuidewire Reinsurance Management\n\nGuidewire Reinsurance Management enables P&C insurers to use rules-based logic to execute their reinsurance strategy through their underwriting and claims processes.\n\nGuidewire Client Data Management\n\nGuidewire Client Data Management helps P&C insurers capitalize on customer information more coherently, overcoming traditional siloed practices that impair efficiency and customer service.\n\nGuidewire Advanced Product Designer\n\nGuidewire Advanced Product Designer is a cloud-native application for insurance product design and visual product modeling tools 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.\n\nGuidewire Product Content Management\n\nGuidewire 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.\n\nGuidewire ProNavigator\n\nGuidewire ProNavigator is an AI-powered intelligent assistant embedded in select InsuranceSuite applications and InsuranceNow. It uses insurer-approved documentation and core system context to deliver context-specific answers, suggestions, and actions directly within underwriting, claims, billing, and customer service workflows. These capabilities help insurers reduce time spent searching for information and support more consistent, auditable decisions across the insurance lifecycle.\n\nDigital Engagement\n\nGuidewire Digital Engagement Applications\n\nOur 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 fully integrated with InsuranceSuite.\n\nData and Analytics\n\nWe 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.\n\nGuidewire HazardHub\n\nGuidewire 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 flood, earthquake, and fire. HazardHub is a cloud-native solution delivered through an Application Programming Interface (“API”)\n\n6\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\nthat 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 U.S., and has the ability to evaluate an entire portfolio for property risk.\n\nGuidewire Predict\n\nGuidewire 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 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.\n\nGuidewire Data Studio\n\nGuidewire Data Studio is a cloud-native application leveraging the Guidewire Data Platform. It is designed to provide streamlined access to the core data from InsuranceSuite products. It provides a curated content data repository that enables insurers to build, organize, and publish InsuranceSuite datasets for downstream applications. This is enabled through an analytics-ready semantic model layer (Guidewire Insurance Data Model) that provides pre-curated P&C insurance-specific metrics and attributes; data dictionaries; and supporting user diagrams and documentation. This facilitates the generation of financial and business insights, ultimately improving policy and claims outcomes for insurers.\n\nGuidewire Canvas\n\nGuidewire 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, wildfire, earthquake, and other catastrophic events.\n\nGuidewire Compare\n\nGuidewire 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.\n\nGuidewire Industry Intel\n\nGuidewire Industry Intel comprises a set of pre-built AI-based models powered by one of the largest pooled, anonymized datasets in the industry. Intel provides carriers with line-of-business-specific actionable predictions to enhance operational efficiency directly embedded into core workflows within PolicyCenter and ClaimCenter.\n\nGuidewire Cyence\n\nGuidewire 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.\n\nGuidewire Explore\n\nGuidewire 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 provide information access and visibility to support internal and external stakeholders.\n\nGuidewire DataHub and InfoCenter\n\nGuidewire DataHub is an operational data store that unifies, standardizes, and stores data from InsuranceSuite, other internal insurer systems, as well as external data sources.\n\n7\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\nGuidewire InfoCenter is a business intelligence warehouse and reporting tool for P&C insurers that provides data visualization, reporting, and dashboards 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.\n\nGuidewire Marketplace\n\nThe Guidewire Marketplace is where insurers find vetted applications, market-specific content, and other extensions that complement the Guidewire platform from our PartnerConnect partners, as well as Guidewire product and services teams. These extensions 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. Twenty-seven Insurtech Vanguards have been promoted to our PartnerConnect program. As of July 31, 2026, the Guidewire Marketplace had over 415 partner-developed integrations that have been certified Ready for Guidewire under our validation program 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.\n\nTechnology\n\nWe 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 APIs, integrations, and other shared services necessary to unify the operations and user experiences across our application portfolio. The prioritization of cloud-delivered solutions has also required significant focus in improving our ability to manage, secure, and operate our applications on behalf of our customers, consistent with a cloud-based service.\n\nOur 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 the DevOps tools available through the Guidewire Cloud Home interface. Our cloud services and products are designed to comply with relevant standards set by the International Organization for Standardization, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.\n\nFinally, we continue to improve the scalability and high availability of our cloud infrastructure, which performs millions of complex, business-critical transactions daily. Our architecture is designed to maintain accuracy and availability not only during normal business operations, but also during extraordinary events, including catastrophic disruptions that may drive extremely high transaction volumes in a short period of time. To this end, we invest in disaster recovery and failover capabilities, redundant systems, and elastic scaling, designed to support continuity of service and recovery even under severe or unpredictable conditions.\n\nServices\n\nWe 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 engagements for our customers.\n\nWe are expanding our portfolio of services to include AI-enabled advisory, migration, and implementation offerings that are designed to accelerate customer adoption of our software while reducing the cost and complexity of implementation, including requirements, development, testing, and ongoing operations. These AI driven services help customers more rapidly configure, deploy, and optimize our products, reduce the need for extensive custom development and streamline maintenance over the life of the deployment. We are also expanding specialized field engineering capabilities that provide deep, hands-on technical expertise to deliver durable, production ready customer solutions quickly, address complex requirements early in the lifecycle, and help ensure that deployments are scalable, resilient, and easier to support over time.\n\nOur investments in services, AI-enabled offerings, field engineering, and partners are designed to help ensure customer success by committing appropriate resources and expertise to implementation and transformation projects.\n\n8\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\nCustomer Support\n\nWe 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 our customers can easily access our latest innovations. Many new capabilities are made available as configurable options so customers can choose when to adopt them, allowing them to roll out improvements at a pace that fits their business.\n\nOur Cloud platform includes automated tooling to evaluate customer implementations against our published Cloud Standards, including related security and operational requirements.\n\nOur Guidewire Global Support team provides 24x7 platform and application support to all customers, working together with our Operations and Customer Success teams to optimize adoption, user experience, and alignment with business requirements.\n\nEmployees and Human Capital Resources\n\nOur business requires attracting, developing, and retaining a motivated team of individuals. 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.\n\nAs of July 31, 2026, we had 4,174 employees, including 2,082 in global product development and operations (comprised of research and development, cloud operations, and technical support), 1,015 in professional services, 553 in sales and marketing, and 524 in general and administrative roles. As of July 31, 2026, we had 1,762 employees in the U.S. and 2,412 employees internationally. Our employees in the U.S. 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.\n\nAttracting, Developing, and Retaining Employees\n\nOur recruiting, development, and retention objectives focus on providing an optimal employee experience and culture across the employee life cycle, 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 foster a workplace where individuals are treated equitably, evaluated on professional qualifications and personal potential, and given equal opportunity to succeed. For certain roles and when required to meet our business needs, flexible work policies expand our ability to hire and retain talent in geographies where we do not have physical offices. Fostering career progression through continuous learning 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, technology-enabled learning resources, 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.\n\nTotal Rewards and Well-Being\n\nWe offer a competitive total rewards program designed to attract, motivate, and retain top talent while aligning employee interests with long-term stockholder value. Our compensation structure utilizes a combination of market-competitive base pay, performance-based cash bonuses, and, where appropriate, long-term incentive awards. Eligible employees may also participate in our employee stock purchase plan to purchase our common stock at a discount. To support our employees’ physical, emotional, and financial well-being, we provide comprehensive, country-specific benefits that generally include health insurance and retirement plans. Additionally, we provide global lifestyle spending accounts that allow employees to personalize their well-being support, alongside global recognition and referral programs that celebrate peer contributions, service milestones, and alignment with our core values.\n\nCorporate Culture and Employee Engagement\n\nOur values of integrity, rationality, and collegiality are the foundation of how we work with one another. We believe that understanding and respecting broad perspectives and experiences drives an innovative, collaborative, and engaged workplace. We actively gauge workforce sentiment and measure the health of our culture through regular, confidential employee engagement surveys, annual talent reviews, and ongoing communication channels. Insights from employee feedback help guide company initiatives, refine talent strategies, and foster an inclusive, respectful work environment.\n\nGuidewire Gives Back\n\nGuidewire 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\n\n9\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\ncommunity 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.\n\nCustomers\n\nWe 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, 2026, we had approximately 550 customers in 44 countries. In some cases, our customers may represent more than one insurance brand. Our customer definition excludes customers that pay us less than $10,000 per year, which primarily represents customers of our HazardHub product.\n\nStrategic Relationships\n\nWe 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. 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. We encourage our partners to 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.\n\nWe 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 assist with implementing 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.\n\nAs 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.\n\nSales and Marketing\n\nConsistent 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.\n\nOur 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.\n\nOur 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. We optimize website content for both traditional search engines and large language models to extend our brand reach.\n\nOur customer success team supports our customers from the outset of their transformation programs through ongoing production operations by coordinating specialized resources focused on adoption and value realization. We partner with customers at onboarding to understand their strategic objectives, monitor the use of existing and new product capabilities, and advocate for customer needs across our product, services, and support teams, in order to help customers realize the value of their investments in our platform.\n\n10\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\nCustomer success provides ongoing technical alignment, including cloud onboarding, enablement, and update planning, and helps ensure that customer implementations operate in accordance with our cloud standards and practices.\n\nResearch and Development\n\nOur research and development efforts focus on new enhanced products, embedding AI services across our platform, delivering AI assistants to guide users, automating tasks across the P&C insurance lifecycle, and improving our platform services with 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.\n\nOur investments in cloud operations are focused on managing the infrastructure for our cloud-based customers in a secure, efficient, and cost-effective manner.\n\nCompetition\n\nThe software market that caters to the P&C insurance industry is highly competitive, rapidly evolving, 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 and specialized AI 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 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. Further, as artificial intelligence technologies, including machine learning, generative and agentic AI, and automated decision-making technologies (collectively, “AI technologies”) continue to evolve, our existing and potential customers may leverage these capabilities to develop or enhance their own solutions that could reduce or eliminate the need for our solutions. Our current competitors include, but are not limited to, customers’ internally developed proprietary solutions, which may be accelerated by evolving AI technologies; P&C insurance software vendors such as Duck Creek, Majesco, Origami Risk, Sapiens, and DXC Technology; horizontal software vendors such as SAP SE, Salesforce, and ServiceNow; and enterprise AI platform providers and new market entrants utilizing AI technologies.\n\nCompetitive 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.\n\nIntellectual Property\n\nOur 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 U.S. 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 ranging from 2026 to 2039. 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 U.S. and internationally.\n\nInformation about Segment and Geographic Revenue\n\nInformation 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.\n\nSeasonality\n\nWe 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. As a result, a significantly higher percentage of our annual license revenue and cash receipts have historically been recognized in our fourth fiscal\n\n11\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)\n\nquarter. Because we recognize revenue upfront for term licenses compared to over time for subscription services, an increase in term licenses due to renewals or expansion orders, or a decrease from migrations or non-renewals may impact our quarterly results. Additionally, any significant multi-year term license renewal or non-renewal could impact quarterly results and cash flows. 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. However, our cash flows remain subject to seasonal variations and will most likely remain concentrated in the fourth fiscal quarter due to the annual billing arrangements of our customer contracts.\n\nOur 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. Our second fiscal quarter usually has fewer billable days due to the impact of calendar year end holidays. 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.\n\nWHERE YOU CAN FIND MORE INFORMATION\n\nThe 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.\n\nWe 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 our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), 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.\n\n12\n\n[Table of Content](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)[s](#i8d8975fd09cd414dbd82a30a6a6530aa_7)"}