These Indian engineers help insurance companies move to the cloud

Diego Devalle spent 11 years in SAP, up to 2012. During that period, he spent 3 years in Bengaluru, helping establish SAP Labs in the city. He recollects they would hire from colleges, or from IT services companies, and put the hires through a training process. For the college hires, it would be a 6-month process.
Today, Diego is chief product development officer at US-headquartered insurance technology company Guidewire and he’s overseeing hiring for the company’s technology centre in Bengaluru that was established in 2020. Now, he says, you can hire talent that is ready to go. “15 years ago, you were hiring good college kids that you could mould into what you need. Now, you start by hiring people who are experts in different areas. And the beauty here also is, there is still a gigantic young crowd that is dynamic, eager to learn,” he tells us on a visit to India.
Guidewire is one of the world’s biggest insurtech companies focused on property & casualty insurance, and the company’s India facility has become core to helping the company’s insurance clients transform their legacy technologies, including mainframes, into a cloud architecture. Cloud enables disparate data to come together, so as to enable crucial analytics. That in turn also helps insurance companies to design and develop new products much faster.
Guidewire, founded in the early 2000s, has products focused on insurance policy issuance (determining who is eligible, premium rates, etc), and on insurance claims processing. Traditionally, these products were licensed out, and were self-managed by the customer (an on-premise system). The transition to cloudbased, software-as-a-service (SaaS) products started around the time Diego came to the company in 2018. Today, slight ly more than half of its customers use the cloud products.
“The two major pieces of work the India centre does is around our cloud infrastructure and cloud data platform. In both, about half of the work is done in India, and the other half in the US. But each site owns the projects it is involved in,” Diego says.
Cloud infrastructure work is around Kubernetes (system used to deploy, scale, and monitor applications), around managing authentication, and persistency (ensuring data can be retrieved any time). The cloud data platform involves building the ability to store the enormous amounts of transactions flowing through the system, processing all that, and generating live reports of everything that customers are doing. Diego says the platform also consolidates reports across all their customers.
Mohammed Anzy S, India MD at Guidewire Software, and who too spent almost 8 years in SAP prior to this, says the entire cloud data management is done by the Bengaluru team. “Customers have huge sets of data. We are bringing everything to a single data lake so that we can build analytics on top of it. The entire fabric or the infra for that is built out of Bengaluru,” he says.
This cloud transformation is becoming vital, with AI enabling a host of new capabilities. Customers on the cloud, Diego, says, can take advantage of the new capabilities way faster than customers that are on self-managed systems.
AI, he says, is also enabling integration of systems almost without any developers. “You can just say, I have this API endpoint here and I have this endpoint there, build me the scaffolding of the integration,” he says.
AI is even radically simplifying things like converting the legacy quoting algorithm (used for determining premium for a policy) into the cloudbased one. Diego says the cloud-based algorithm provides the flexibility to quickly make small changes to it to customise to a different requirement. “Changes in the legacy algorithm would require us to take the entire system down and refresh it, and that was a big project,” he says.