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Greetings and welcome to the Guidewire fourth quarter fiscal 2026 financial results conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be posted on our investor relations page later today. I would now like to turn the call over to Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. Alex, you may begin.

Thank you, Grace. Hello, everyone. With me today is Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, John Mullen, President, Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer. Complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued today, as well as in our related Form 8-K furnished to the SEC, both of which are available on the investor relations section of our website. We have also posted our fourth quarter earnings deck on our IR section of the website. Today's call is being recorded. A replay will be available following its conclusion.

Statements today include forward-looking ones regarding our financial outlook, our cloud and AI product strategies, customer demand, business operations, the impact of macroeconomic factors, and other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions and are based on management's current expectations as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date.

Please refer to the press release and risk factors and documents we file with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our prior and forthcoming quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed and to be filed with the SEC for information on risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. We also will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide additional information to investors. All commentary on margins, profitability, and expenses are on a non-GAAP basis unless stated otherwise. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is provided in our press release. Reconciliations and additional data are also posted at the end of our quarterly earnings deck on our IR website. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mike.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We finished our fiscal year with an outstanding fourth quarter, capping off another exceptional year for Guidewire. ARR finished the year at $1.242 billion, up 19% year-over-year, and above the high end of our guidance range. Fully ramped ARR grew 22%, marking the fourth consecutive year that fully ramped growth outpaced ARR growth. Subscription and support revenue grew 33%, and we exceeded expectations across revenue, operating income, and cash flow. Our execution in Q4 underscores the durability and resilience of our business model, as well as the position and potential we have to lead the AI-driven transformation in the P&C insurance industry. Q4 included a number of achievements and milestones. My personal highlight was signing a long-term cloud migration agreement with Nationwide.

Guidewire has partnered with Nationwide for over a decade across our core application suite, and in many ways, they were the critical partner who validated the scalability of our platform to the tier one insurance segment. Earning their trust for their cloud transition and solidifying our position and supporting them for decades to come is a defining milestone in our company's cloud journey. Nationwide also selected PricingCenter for personal lines pricing and rating. This is obviously a great win for our PricingCenter team. As we work to deliver on the specific business and technical requirements, we will further validate that PricingCenter is ready to provide the capability and scale required for any tier one insurer globally. While the Nationwide win was monumental, our broader momentum with PricingCenter has been remarkable.

John will share more details shortly, but the integrated value proposition and the market demand for real-time price adjustment are resonating with customers. I couldn't be happier with the performance so far of this acquisition, and this deal serves as a fantastic capstone to an incredible year for Dawid, the founder of Quantee, and our PricingCenter team in Warsaw. Another standout in the quarter was ProNavigator. John will provide additional color, but sales velocity for this new product dramatically outperformed our plans. Embedding AI-driven assistance directly into the core workflows of ClaimCenter and PolicyCenter is precisely what our customer base needs right now. Rapidly integrating ProNavigator into the fabric of Guidewire and seeing immediate commercial traction was a major highlight of the quarter. ProNavigator serves as a straightforward AI and on-ramp for customers and now forms a core pillar of our broader strategy.

Given customer enthusiasm, it is entirely realistic to expect this capability to eventually be incorporated into every Guidewire implementation worldwide. The final element of our AI strategy tangibly taking shape relates to Guidewire Cloud Platform itself. Developer assistants are now available to all customers and partners, making agentic development on Guidewire exponentially faster. Things like writing integration code and building front-end applications for digital experiences are now dramatically faster. In our Quesar release, we delivered our agentic platform, enabling customers to build standalone AI agents tuned to their specific implementations and existing workflows.

These agents operate seamlessly within their core systems, maximizing their preexisting modernization investments and taking full advantage of the structured context that resides natively in Guidewire. Taken together, these platform and product milestones make the Guidewire strategic thesis clear. The path to intelligent, hyper-efficient, agent-driven P&C insurance operations begins with a modern, cloud-based, continuously upgraded core platform.

I think it's fair to say that only Guidewire has the ability to provide this to the market right now. With respect to the financial performance of the company Jeff will cover the numbers in detail later in the call, but I want to highlight two significant financial milestones. First, we nearly completed our share repurchase program, buying back over $600 million in shares. Our ability to do this is an outcome of our expanding profitability, cash generation, and confidence in the long-term durability of our business. Second, this year, we achieved an annual gross ARR attrition rate of less than 1.5% for all ARR and less than 1% for core systems customers who represent the vast majority of our ARR base. Attrition is a key metric we manage closely and acts as a primary indicator of our business durability and customer satisfaction.

These attrition rates at over $1 billion in ARR are world-class. Even more than the top-line metrics, this number signals that our product design, implementation, and ongoing support are driving exceptional long-term customer loyalty. I am immensely proud of our team for achieving this measure of performance and commend everybody at Guidewire, past and present, for helping to create this system and for operating it at this level of excellence. We play a critical role in our customers' business operations, and of course, that reality necessitates an approach that logically leads to a uniquely durable business. This year, and especially in Q4, we have begun to see clearly how our role as a core system of record can be expanded to support the application of advanced analytics to pricing agility and application of AI to core workflow efficiency.

How earning the trust of our customers allows us to establish a cloud platform that is delivering the AI-powered speed and agility the industry needs to not just continue their monetization agendas, but to propel them into a new, more intelligent and efficient insurance operating model. We are happy about the results in Q4 and our fiscal year, but we are more motivated about the impact we are helping to create in the insurance industry. Finally, before handing the call over to John and Jeff, I want to convey my excitement for our upcoming Connections conference this October in Las Vegas, where we will also host our Analyst Day on October 27th. You are all, of course, invited to join us. We look forward to showcasing our latest product innovations and the new agentic capabilities of our platform.

Our strategy is straightforward: deliver the world's most trusted core platform for P&C insurance, supercharge it with AI to accelerate every technology initiative within an insurance company, and embed agentic intelligence directly into claims and underwriting to drive an industry-wide and global transformation. There is no better place to understand the power of Guidewire in the insurance industry, and we hope to see you at Connections in October. With that, I will hand it over to John.

Thank you, Mike. This was a great year that underscores the increasing alignment between Guidewire's roadmap and our customers' strategic ambitions. We work to continually increase the value our customers experience from their partnership with Guidewire and improve speed to value. Our proximity to our customers is a tremendous asset. We are at a point where our growing portfolio of products and solutions affords us the opportunity to work closely with those customers addressing enterprise-grade operations and agile business capabilities, connecting their specific context to their agentic future. This alignment resulted in 26 core deals for the fourth quarter, bringing the total for the year to 62 core cloud deals covering PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter, BillingCenter, or InsuranceNow. A few of the core deals to highlight. As Mike mentioned, Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company, is the clearest example.

They signed a multi-year agreement to move their entire InsuranceSuite estate to Guidewire Cloud Platform, capping a long-standing partnership built on proving out the platform's maturity to support their growth ambitions. Another is AF Group, consolidating a number of core processing components onto Guidewire InsuranceSuite. MAPFRE US expanded with Guidewire InsuranceSuite and added ProNavigator to support their commercial lines growth strategy. Additionally, one of the largest insurers in Canada signed a meaningful migration deal. We are also seeing our customers choose to expand their AI footprint with Guidewire. Definity, a leading tier one Canadian P&C insurer, expanded their Guidewire Cloud commitment and adopted ProNavigator for embedded insurance domain-specific AI expertise. They are accelerating their innovation by leveraging our platform alongside their broader suite of enterprise cloud and AI tools. We are seeing that same choice play out elsewhere in the portfolio.

Alfa Insurance selected ProNavigator to accelerate previously considered internal build options. Hollard, a tremendous partner in Australia, selected ProNavigator to strengthen claimant and adjuster experience in support of a truly differentiated brand. Regulatory and compliance precision and increasing demands for efficiency contributed to this win. A long-standing customer in the U.S. Northeast selected ProNavigator as a critical element of their strategy, following on from work done together with one of our field engineering pods. Fundamental in our strategy is the ability for our platform and product portfolio to coexist with our customer's environment, maximizing impact, pace, and flexibility. The strength of ProNavigator is important to this thesis and translated into 14 wins in Q4 and 28 for the full year. A tremendous year for this team as they joined Guidewire. I could not be happier to see this team's impact and their passion for driving results for our customers.

PricingCenter also had a great quarter. We had eight PricingCenter deals close in Q4 and 12 for the year. A tremendous year for the team as they advance in addressing this critical strategic and fiercely competitive capability for insurers. Nationwide, in addition to the core migration, has become our first U.S. tier one customer for PricingCenter, choosing it for their home and auto lines. Integration to PolicyCenter will provide greater pricing sophistication and improve speed to market for Nationwide. We saw that resonate across the rest of the portfolio. A long-standing customer in Finland became our first existing InsuranceSuite customer in Europe to adopt PricingCenter. Capital Insurance Group selected PricingCenter in a highly competitive process. Shelter Insurance chose PricingCenter as part of its larger expansion with Guidewire.

Finally, Achmea Farm Insurance in Australia chose PricingCenter to drive greater pricing agility and precision throughout their operation. The last point to make on momentum for the quarter is how pleased I was to see the mix by carrier size. MGA and smaller carriers contributed meaningfully to the results of the year. In addition to carrier size, we continue to invest heavily in our line of business, notably workers' compensation and geographic-specific content and tools. Our platform maturity and AI have accelerated our ability to address the needs of these important markets. Regarding speed to value, our investments in implementation tools and AI-powered Project Harness for implementations is delivering on the promise of material reduction in project complexity and duration. We will be focusing the next six months on rolling out these capabilities to all of our projects and our SI partners.

We believe this powers a change in the way the market thinks about capacity and the budgetary hurdle to clear in making the decision to move to a modern core foundational platform that powers their agentic future. With that, I will turn it over to Jeff.

Thanks, John. I am excited to close the books on another tremendous year. The team continues to execute on the growth engine while also delivering on margins, profitability, and cash generation. ARR ended the year at $1.242 billion, up 19% year-over-year on a constant currency basis and ahead of our expectations. ARR benefited from strong new sales activity and the lowest gross ARR attrition rate since we started measuring ARR as a metric. As a reminder, we report ARR on a constant currency basis throughout the year and then update at year-end for FX rates. Making this update negatively impacts ARR by $5 million, resulting in ARR of $1.237 billion. Fully ramped ARR, which is defined as the fully ramped annual price outlined in customer contracts, grew 22% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.

This is the fourth year in a row that fully ramped ARR growth has outpaced ARR growth and the second year in a row where fully ramped ARR surpassed 20% constant currency growth. We ended the year with 105 customers with fully ramped ARR of over $5 million. This is up from 86 at the end of fiscal year 2025. Total cloud ARR, which includes ARR for all of our cloud products and customers that have contracted to move to the cloud, grew 35% year-over-year and comprised 84% of total ARR. Subscription revenue finished the year at $916 million, up 37% year-over-year. Subscription and support revenue was $971 million, up 33% year-over-year. License revenue for the year was $235 million, down 7% year-over-year as healthy migration activity continues.

The shift from license revenue to subscription continues to accelerate, but it is partially offset by DWP growth of on-prem customers. Services revenue finished at $270 million, up 23% year-over-year. We experienced strong services revenue growth as we worked to balance healthy utilization of Guidewire resources with continued strong partnership and alignment with the SI community on cloud programs. All this results in total revenue for the year of $1.475 billion, up 23% year-over-year and ahead of our expectations. Turning to profitability for the fiscal year, which we will discuss on a non-GAAP basis, gross profit was $990 million, up 25% year-over-year. Overall gross margin was 67%. Subscription and support gross margin was 74.5%, up four percentage points year-over-year and already close to the high end of our FY 2028 target. Services gross margin was 12.5%, compared with 12.9% a year ago.

Our services organization has been investing to deliver on the demand environment. We have also been investing in AI capabilities to support the future of program delivery. These investments are impacting near-term margins a bit, but we believe the future efficiency lift in our services motion will help future cloud sales as we work hard to bring down the cost of implementations. Operating income was $340 million, up 63% year-over-year and above the high end of our outlook. This was driven by strong subscription and support gross profit, higher than expected license revenue, and solid operating expense discipline. Our stock-based compensation expense was $182 million for the year, up 13% year-over-year, but down over 100 basis points as a percent of revenue. Operating cash flow ended the year at $390 million, up 30% year-over-year.

This strong cash flow generation is a result of excellent execution and the leverage established by our model. We ended the quarter with $1.2 billion in cash equivalents, and investments. With respect to our share repurchase program, we repurchased $606 million in fiscal year 2026. This equates to 4.1 million shares repurchased at an average price of $148.41 per share. Now let me turn to our outlook. For fiscal 2027, we expect ARR of between $1.45 billion and $1.46 billion, representing 18% constant currency growth at the midpoint. As a reminder, our ARR outlook assumes foreign exchange rates as of the end of fiscal 2026 and will be held constant throughout the year. Let me add a couple points of context. First, our outlook assumes ARR attrition normalizes relative to fiscal 2026. Our record low attrition rate contributed roughly one percentage point to ARR growth in FY 2026.

While it's possible we see similar rates again, we haven't built that into our base plan. Second, more than half of the net new ARR contemplated in this outlook is already under contract, with ramp dates defined and signed customer agreements. That contracted foundation is where two consecutive years of 22% fully ramped ARR growth shows up, and it's the basis of our confidence in durable high teens ARR growth. Total revenue for the year is expected to be between $1.707 billion and $1.727 billion. We expect that subscription revenue will grow approximately 31%. We expect subscription and support revenue to be between $1.240 billion and $1.246 billion in fiscal 2027, representing 28% growth at the midpoint. This assumed support revenue will decline about $8 million as a result of the continued migration of our install base to the cloud. As a reminder, support revenue attaches to term license customers.

For cloud customers, support activities are included in the subscription fee. We expect license revenue of approximately $189 million, a decline of $46 million year-over-year. This decline is a result of the cloud transition model playing out as we expected. In FY 2027, we expect to see term license revenue from recent cloud migration customers decline by almost $50 million. This is partially offset by true-ups and pricing adjustments at existing on-prem customers. Our outlook for services revenue is approximately $285 million, as we expect to experience more modest growth this year off of a healthy services revenue base experienced in fiscal 2026. Turning to gross margins, we expect subscription and support gross margins to be between 75% and 76%. This outlook is above our prior FY 2028 target and gives us confidence as we look ahead to our long-term target of 80% subscription and support gross margin.

We anticipate professional services gross margin to be approximately 12%. We expect total gross margins for the year to be between 67% and 68%. With respect to operating income, we expect non-GAAP operating income of between $403 million and $423 million for the fiscal year. We expect GAAP operating income of between $197 million and $217 million. Our stock-based compensation expense is expected to be approximately $202 million. Cash flow from operations in fiscal year 2027 is expected to be between $445 million and $465 million. Our CapEx expectations for the year are between $23 million and $28 million, including approximately $17 million in capitalized software development costs. Our Q1 outlook can be found in our earnings press release, but let me provide a bit more color. We are expecting ARR to be between $1.253 billion and $1.259 billion.

We expect subscription and support revenue to be between $279 million and $283 million, and subscription and support margin to be around 77%. In Q1, we expect to realize approximately $4 million in credits from our cloud infrastructure provider, which is meaningfully higher than we expect for the remainder of the year. We expect services revenue of approximately $65 million and services margin to be around break even. This is largely related to timing of revenue associated with some larger fixed fee services engagements. Overall, we expect total gross margins of approximately 65%. Also, annual employee bonuses and commission expenses related to Q4 sales are paid out in Q1, which impacts cash flow. As a result, we expect Q1 cash flow from operations to follow a similar pattern to what we experienced in fiscal year 2026.

In summary, it was once again a record Q4, and we look forward to a great fiscal 2027. Finally, before we turn to Q&A, I wanted to note that we filed an 8-K today announcing David Peterson, our Chief Accounting Officer, has let us know that he intends to retire in early November. The first good decision I made as CFO of Guidewire was to elevate David's role, and he has been an incredible partner to me. He has built a strong team of considerable depth, so we are well-positioned to carry on, but I just wanted to take a quick moment to thank David for his partnership and for his contributions to Guidewire. Okay. With that, let's open the call for questions.

Great. Our first question is going to come from Alexei Gogolev, JPMorgan. Go ahead, Alexei.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for letting me ask a question. First of all, I wanted to ask about the ARR dynamics. FX suggests that ARR came in at the top end of your guide. Can you break down the key drivers of Q4 and that new ARR performance and talk about what was the most different versus your internal expectations entering the quarter, things like new deals versus backlog conversions and true-ups? Then maybe if there are any sizable deals that closed in August that you were positively surprised with?

Yeah, sure.

You can go ahead.

Okay. Yeah, if you look at Q4, we ended at $1.242 billion, and we measure ourself on a constant currency basis throughout the year. This largely came in in line with our expectations as we moved through the year. We were very pleased with the bookings that we delivered in the year. The ramp outcomes of those bookings were also quite positive, and so kind of flowing through to 19% ARR growth, 22% fully ramped ARR growth. Again, the impact of churn, which we highlighted a couple of times on the call, was tremendous. That was a bit beneficial as well in the quarter. All of those dynamics were quite positive for us.

I would say, just Alexei, one thing to add. Relative to the plan, maybe not going into Q4 because we saw this momentum building, obviously, in the pipeline that we saw, but the performance of these two new products, ProNavigator and PricingCenter, was markedly better than what we anticipated at the beginning of the year. That's a great sign for us. One of the objectives we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year was to broaden the product portfolio. Obviously, that led to these two acquisitions. This is important for us as we grow, and obviously, it's also a way for us to monetize the cloud install base that we've worked so hard to establish over the past number of years.

It's just great to see these product lines performing the way that they did, both in terms of deal count as well as ARR, that obviously correlates to that. But especially want to point out the win and partnership that we have in Nationwide with PricingCenter. It's hard to earn the trust of a tier one insurance company, and it really does help us make sure that we're going to, let's say, stress test that product and make it valid for every other tier one in the world. That's really what I would call out in terms of it's a driver to the ARR, both strategically but also from a numbers perspective.

Thank you, Mike. You also pulled out a very impressive eight PricingCenter deals in 4Q, or maybe John was mentioning those. Who are you most often displacing? Is it homegrown versus point solutions, and what are you learning about sales cycle length and attach rates with PolicyCenter customers?

Yeah. Alexei, thanks for the question. What we're up against is really fragmented, but well-established install base. Rarely is it homegrown. There's always a number of tools, rating and pricing tools in place inside an enterprise. It's really early for us to say what we think the sales cycles are going to look like and what the attach rate's going to look like. But it is the attach rate and the ability to really, I think number one, serve very effectively a user base that potentially has been underserved in modern technology. So that's point one. Then point two is the native integration with PolicyCenter that allows for just really efficient throughput on pricing and rating changes, both from an accuracy standpoint and a speed standpoint.

It will be that integration that is the reason why we see win rates and attach rates that we are planning for in the long future, but it is too early to really measure up what those sales cycles are going to look like as time and pipe.

Thanks, Alexei. Our next question is going to go to Rishi Jaluria at RBC.

Oh, wonderful. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. Nice to see continued strength in the fully ramped ARR number. Maybe let us start with that, right? If I think about your fully ramping ARR number, and you are coming off another strong year prior was also some of the fully ramped growth. Can you help us understand mechanically how to think about the timelines of these ramps starting to kick in and stack on each other? Because I am just trying to do the math on kind of the ARR guide that you provided for FY 2027, and understand, because it feels like the setup is there to try to drive even further acceleration. Maybe help me understand that, and I have got a quick follow-up.

Yeah, Rishi, I think that there is a number of dynamics that we are looking at. And we obviously, as we negotiate these arrangements with the customers, try to optimize for the long term. And as you see, if you kind of look at the model, ARR the backlog ARR, as a percentage, you can look at it as a percentage of ARR or as a percentage of fully ramped ARR. That backlog as a percentage of that ARR is growing over time, which means on a percentage basis, we just have more future ARR that will fall off of the backlog, which sets a foundation for very durable growth. There is a couple of other metrics that we look at. How much ARR do we expect to come off of the backlog and flow into next year's ARR?

That ratio next year is a little bit lower than where it was last year. That is just a reflection as we look at the and inspect the totality of the backlog that we have. We are going to get more of that in years two through five, rather than year one of that kind of first year of a ramping event. That is just

Kind of continues to signal that we just have this healthy asset of backlog that we will execute over the next 5 years. So, our orientation is always to orient to the long term and to make sure that we are driving the right fully ramped outcomes. Two years in a row of 22% fully ramped ARR growth really validates that.

Got it. Okay. That is really helpful. Then, look, nice to see success with ProNavigator. Can you maybe walk us through how much of the early success you are having there is just cross-selling it into the install base? Maybe what I am trying to get at is there an opportunity for this to land net new customers for you, where they might be with a competitor, but you can land on ProNavigator or other new products, use that as kind of a beachhead, and over time, use that as a mechanism behind displacement? Thanks.

Yeah. Good question. I would say the momentum that we saw this fiscal year was primarily cross-sell. There is definitely an opportunity for us to sell ProNavigator independently. Obviously, they did that as a standalone company before joining Guidewire, and that path is not closed to us at all. But I think that the bigger way to think about this is that we are seeing these systems evolve from, call it a workflow system or a system of record to really the platform that you use to establish your agentic approach to claims and underwriting. These AI systems, powered by ProNavigator, facilitate that. That creates a differentiation for us in ClaimCenter that we just did not have before, that we are able to bring a broader and more, I do not know, automated value proposition to bear when we are differentiating that product.

That is the way that I think that you should think about it helping us to win new estate and win new implementations of our core systems. Like I said, in the prepared call, I think we will get to the point where it is unusual to see an implementation of Guidewire without it, just because it is resonating so much with our customer base. Over time, I think you will see it as a real differentiator, a real driver of net new wins, but it will not be standalone. It will be more new wins for core.

Right. Very helpful. Thank you.

Our next question is with Joe Vruwink at Baird.

Great. Thank you for taking my questions. The comments about ARR coming off backlog are interesting. I guess I will take the flip side. What does this say about your new deal pipeline? I think there is some scrutiny on just the one Q ARR guide coming in below consensus. Some of that is the FX reset that you highlighted, Jeff.

Yeah.

Is it also reflective of anticipated deal timing and there just being more opportunities later in the year?

Yeah, look, I think we feel very good about where we sit and how the market is evolving and the need for a modern core platform to support an insurer's initiatives just broadly and within AI. So from a pipeline perspective, we feel very positive. As we think about modeling the next year, there are a couple areas that we try to be cautious around. As I said earlier, we always optimize for the long term, and we don't optimize for year one ARR events associated with new deals. So we look at a metric internally called year one ARR versus the booking event and kind of what that ratio is, and that impacts how we think about modeling the business, and that impacts how we think about setting the guide.

We always want to orient our sales reps to focus on making sure they're driving the right long-term outcome. So as we look at kind of next year, compare that to recent history, and kind of what is the corpus of the types of deals. Now, the bigger the deal often yields a lower first-year ARR and a larger fully ramped event vis-à-vis the booking opportunity. So these are all things that we kind of weigh as we think about setting an appropriate guide for the year. We've been pretty consistent about our goals of driving durable growth. For many years it was mid-teens. More recently it is upper teens, and the model is certainly supporting that upper teens growth ambition.

Hey, I just want to add, Joe, look, I feel like we're going to have a great fiscal year. We feel set up to have a good, really strong fiscal year. And I think when you look at, we keep using this word durability, when you look at the business model and the characteristics of the fully ramp base and the attrition rates that we've established, it's like there's just more upside potential than there is downside anxiety. We have to be prudent in the way that we guide and the way that we project the company, just because our deals are very lumpy and things can happen and we can't perfectly predict the future. But the company is just getting stronger and stronger.

We look at the portfolio of products now kicking in, and we look at the alignment that we are able to achieve with artificial intelligence and ProNavigator and the way that we are bringing it to bear on the platform. We just feel great. I feel great about the company. Like I said, I just really think, if you look at the fiscal year, we feel like there is more upside potential than there is downside risk. We really just need to figure out how to quarterize that. We provide the guide for Q1, and we figure out how to provide that visibility, but when I zoom out, I see a lot of strength and a lot of confidence in the momentum that we have established.

That is great color, Mike. Just on the AI native products, it sounds like eventually it is not going to be possible to split them out in terms of a discrete ARR contribution because it will just be a part of the InsuranceSuite. For the time being, is it possible to maybe size those? I know you started the year sizing ProNavigator just because it was being acquired in, but could that exposure, I do not know, double in its ARR contribution next year?

I think we will look at how much visibility we will provide. We obviously shared some deal counts that we were excited to talk about on the call today. As we proceed and get a little bit more experience with the business quarter to quarter, we can assess whether or not we provide more visibility. At this moment, it is not appropriate and that is why we did not do it. To your point, we have to assess how we package these things and how they factor into the deals that we are doing each quarter.

I guess, yeah, I appreciate your question. We will take it under advisement and we will think about it, and we will offer you as much visibility as we think is strategically valuable. Or strategically possible, I suppose, is a better way to put it. Mostly we just wanted to signal how excited we are about this, and it is really driving meaningful appreciation in the business.

Thank you.

Thanks, Joe. Our next question is with Dylan Becker at William Blair.

Hey, gentlemen. Appreciate it. Mike, starting with you touched on the importance of Nationwide and PricingCenter. I wonder if we could go a little bit deeper. I think you called out homeowners and auto, maybe two segments that are seeing a little bit more pricing pressure themselves in the market. So I think the appetite for adopting something that is more real time, that is maybe disruptive or transformational, validating the importance, and maybe why a solution like that is resonating and can drive competitive differentiation. Is that a fair read on kind of some of the momentum in PricingCenter? I guess maybe just any other kind of color around the tethering of pricing, layering into policy, and the rest of the platform over time.

Yeah, it is a great question, and I think it is fair. I do not want to speak specifically for Nationwide, but I do want to say in general, the thesis behind us investing in ensuring that we had a pricing platform, rating platform, deeply integrated into PolicyCenter, our product modeling capability, which we call APD, and our data platform, and creating what we kind of refer to as a closed loop system for enabling actuaries and business leaders in the insurance industry to have the type of agility they need to be able to compete effectively. That is absolutely what people are buying when they buy PricingCenter and PolicyCenter. No question about it, full stop, 100% correct. This is super exciting, right?

Because to some degree, Guidewire traditionally has sold off of a variety of things, but let's say risk of a legacy system factors into this less so than maybe business competitiveness. It is very exciting for us. It's very exciting for our sales teams. I'm sure John's going to want to lean into this answer here in a second. I know he's excited about it. It's exciting to be connected to the business of insurance and how you're pricing and how you're adjusting to competitors and how you're adjusting to those new risks. At the same time, you're also seeing this real huge transformation in AI and realizing, hey, we need to figure out how do we get more operationally efficient so that we can create more leverage in our operation, and can we do that with Guidewire? This is very exciting for us.

It is absolutely true that the PricingCenter value proposition connects to that competitiveness, and it's an exciting component of the story now.

Perfect. Thank you, Mike. Maybe it's a good segue to John, too. I think you called out some of the efficiency you're seeing in delivery, in speed and cost reduction, lowering that hurdle, opening kind of the top of the funnel from a demand perspective. How should we think about the dynamics between those two segments? Because you could infer that there's a little bit of cannibalization on the services line. Is there a fixed fee orientation to kind of insulate some of that? But maybe on the inverse, it enables you to go much faster, and we're seeing that reflected in the subscription strength. I think that's abundantly clear with the 26 deals you guys signed in the quarter. Maybe just kind of how we think about the evolution of that subscription and services dynamic, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Good question. First thing, the ecosystem at large is navigating this. We're navigating this, and we're investing heavily to make sure that the decades of experience of doing this is put into a harness where we can really move things faster. We're seeing really good returns on particularly the spec-driven development aspects of, as Mike mentioned, things like product speed to market and product definition. That's the one that I think is the fastest from a business standpoint. We're also navigating that with the systems integrators. Our relationship with our system as integrators continues to strengthen through this, and that's a through line that we have to manage very specifically, not carefully, but specifically with them as they're moving more of their efforts towards the business transformation that sits on top of what should be a more efficient implementation.

Making sure that we're all tooled appropriately to make these programs go faster and more predictable. We're also working with them to make sure that we're getting closer to the business results and the things that matter to the C-suite, not only in making that first decision to modernize on the core platform, but to make sure that we're driving tangible, measurable, repeatable, scalable business results off the back of it. That's a bit of a pivot in the conversation with our SIs, in focusing more of our energy on that. Then certainly we want them to continue to build their tools. There's no world where we're going to insist that they use our tooling. We just want to make sure that they have it available to them in all their programs.

All right. We'll go to Ken Wong now from Oppenheimer.

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. Mike, John, wanted to dig into that Nationwide agreement a little more, specifically the PricingCenter commitment. Any color how additive that could potentially be to TCV, perhaps not near term, but as you think about this as it scales, and then how might this influence potential tier one that are looking at the platform going forward?

Well, the structure of the agreement is kind of per normal, right? There's no rollout impact related to scaling TCV. The TCV is the contract, right? Obviously, we're excited about the price point of that product. We're not going to describe the details here publicly. But for sure, the opportunity to work with Nationwide and roll this out with them helps us convince ourselves and convince others that this is a product that can meet the needs of any insurance company anywhere in the world, regardless of size. That was the objective when we began to build this. That was the objective when we tried to really convince every one of our customers, and we couldn't be more excited to be partnering with Nationwide on this journey to be able to go deliver this very quickly and prove that it works.

Yes, absolutely, that is part of the strategy here, and it is an incredibly important milestone for us. Like I said in the prepared remarks, it is very similar to the initial deal with Nationwide. None of us, I do not think, were here at Guidewire when we did that, but it has served as a real forcing function for every component of our product and services and company and ecosystem to make sure that the products work there. And I have every expectation that that is going to occur here with PricingCenter.

Yes, I will just add one quick comment, too. From here, where do we go? I will not comment on Nationwide's decision. As much as we appreciate that alignment, where this goes from a future standpoint is the product roadmap for PricingCenter has some tremendous capabilities in it, today and in the future. And as we enable that more with the analytic that actuaries need to do the job and allow them to bring their own tools and consume data, it does become, hearkening back to the earlier question on ProNavigator as potentially a wedge offer, PricingCenter in combination with Advanced Product Designer, is absolutely an opportunity to be a wedge offer for customers and be an opportunity to actually pull through PolicyCenter deals in the future because of that closed loop that Mike Rosenbaum was talking about earlier.

And that is one thing that I am excited about actioning in the market as we start to stack up these proof points, is PricingCenter being that wedge. And we will see how that plays out over the year, but I am excited about it.

Fantastic. Thanks for the color. Jeff, maybe just digging in on the ARR side. You mentioned next year, slightly more conservative retention assumptions, maybe a little less backlog coming in. I guess, would it be fair to assume maybe an elevated amount of prudence compared to how you were thinking about ARR guidance last year, since you might need a little more net new, to hit numbers this year?

Yeah, no, it is pretty consistent with our overall methodology. Just to be clear, we are going to see more coming off of the backlog next year. The ratio vis-à-vis what is in the totality of backlog is a little bit lower. So the absolute dollar number will be up this year. So it is pretty consistent with how we kind of established the guide beginning of last year. Obviously, we were lucky enough to raise guidance a couple of times throughout the year. But no change in guidance methodology.

Thanks, Ken. Our next question is with Parker Lane at Stifel.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Mike, when you look at some of the competitors out there is certainly AI natives that are coming to bear, a lot of folks bringing AI functionality. You have brought your own in the latest releases. Is that introducing any level of confusion or lengthening deal cycles in any way for Guidewire, or are you appropriately navigating that with your customers today?

I do not know if confusion is the word, but with respect to AI, it is a very interesting dynamic. Maybe unprecedented in the history of enterprise software. Is it lengthening deal cycles for core? No. I think what we are seeing very clearly is Guidewire is the right core to architect your AI strategy around. This is admittedly biased, I suppose, but I think we are going to see a differentiation in the companies that are running Guidewire, running Guidewire Cloud, taking the latest releases of Guidewire, aligns to the approach that we are taking, and the AI strategies there are going to accelerate. We hope, and it is our intention, to create differentiation for our customers, and they are going to be able to out-compete the ones that are not as agile and not as fast. That is the core side of this, right?

That's the system of record workflow to run your insurance company side of this. Then there's this question of what AI system are you going to put on top of that. We're going to play a role in this, and it's super exciting to see the momentum that we've achieved with ProNavigator, the interest I would say we've achieved with our agentic platform, and how we're able to help our customers build and manifest these AI-driven workflows in and around our platform. But certainly, there's a lot of other choice. We've actually purposely created a very open ecosystem through our APIs, our MCP servers, our ability to run Guidewire headless, our ability to connect Guidewire to these other systems. We are open to a variety of architectures when it comes to how to manifest that out in production with each one of our customers.

That side of it, I wouldn't call it confusion, but there's a lot of options and there's a lot of different companies placing bets with different providers. As I often say, I didn't say it in this kind of meeting so far, our objective is to win the core. We want to win the core worldwide. We want to be the core system of record for every P&C insurance company in the world. We think we can do that by running an open platform.

We think we can accelerate the transformation in AI by bringing first-party product to bear, but we fully expect and support customers looking at alternatives, and I would not say that any part of that is causing deal cycles to slow down. I think what is really happening is people are recognizing that the right way to be prepared for the future is to be on a Guidewire core.

Yeah. I'll add that the way it's manifesting is insurance executives are as busy as they've ever been navigating what Mike just talked about. And there's this critical moment in the conversations with carriers that say, "Look, this does not need to be a build versus buy conversation of the good old days or the bad old days," depending on how you think about it. This is a build with Guidewire and a practicality that's available to you simply because we run open, we run unthrottled, and we're not presenting you with any one-way doors.

When you get to that conversation with the executive teams that are navigating the space right now, there's almost a, I won't call it a sigh of relief, but there's a light of practicality and execution through-line there that really sings really well with, "Okay, now let's get about the business of going forward and solving this problem.

Appreciate the feedback. One quick one for you, Jeff. When we look at ProNavigator and PricingCenter, is the ARR ramping structure fairly similar to what you see across the core today? Is that a work in progress? Any color you can provide there would be great.

I expect these to have more modest ramps. The reality is they're also going to attach to core sales, so the dynamics may be carried by that core sale, depending on how we're going to market. If we're selling it standalone, the ramps will be much shallower than what we see in a core. So we'll see. That's my expectation right now.

Got it.

Great. We're now going to go to Allan Verkhovski at BTIG.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions here. Maybe just to follow up on the last question, can you talk about what advantages Guidewire has with the latest Quesar release that third-party AI platforms cannot replicate as well as you, along with how you plan to monetize those capabilities over time?

Well, I think fundamentally, our differentiation is always going to be an opinionated structure around property casualty insurance, and an opinionated structure that cleanly and seamlessly integrates into our core applications. [Qarma] a commitment to continue to evolve those products in unison so that one changes, the other one changes. It's our responsibility to keep that working. That value proposition is more and more valuable as you move down market, and the size of the organizations and the IT organizations that can be brought to bear in solving these problems get smaller and smaller. One of the things which was exciting we called out in the script is the momentum that we saw in smaller carriers, MGAs. These aren't companies with massive IT teams or huge budgets to configure horizontal solutions and sort of tweak them to fit an insurance use case.

That's what you're going to get with Guidewire. As we move up into the top tiers of the insurance industry, these companies have a different kind of take on how they want to work with Guidewire and might be looking to invest more to differentiate themselves with maybe one of the frontier model partners. We want to support that. We absolutely do support that. So, call it the out-of-the-box point of view that we're able to bring to bear there is less valuable to that tier one insurance company than it is to a smaller insurance company that doesn't want to invest.

That said, I think we're still in the early innings of how this plays out in reality and where we are right now and what you can do right now relative to what we imagine an insurance company is going to be able to do in terms of automating underwriting and automating claims workflows. I think a lot's going to evolve and a lot's going to change, and we're all going to learn a lot. That's my take of how things work right now, is just like that opinionated use case and the commitment to keep it integrated into the Guidewire core applications and workflows.

Yeah, I think as we work up the tier ones, to Mike's point, of course, they should be building agents, and they can build agents with our tooling, with theirs. But the thing that really I think we need to think about and they need to think about is those agents you build need to be able to contribute to and consume from your enterprise context. That enterprise context resides primarily in your core systems, in your core operating platform. Moving those things together in unison is going to give you your best chance for future flexibility and differentiation.

That's very helpful. I guess, Jeff, just a follow-up for you. Can you share what the puts and takes are for where we can expect fully ramped ARR growth to be in fiscal 2027, given it once again came in above ARR growth this year?

Yeah, I think we don't guide to fully ramped ARR growth. We will certainly report on that at year-end, but we don't guide to that. As we look at the pipeline, there are still a lot of healthy volume for cloud modernization, cloud migration deals that carry these dynamics with large ramping events. That leads us to be optimistic about our potential to continue to grow that line. But we're not going to provide any sort of color or guidance at this point.

Okay, great. Our next question comes from Tamjid at Guggenheim.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I guess the first one, it is encouraging to hear about the lower churn, but I wanted to focus on the new business side in the quarter. The first one is, did the deals that slipped out of the third quarter close in the fourth quarter? And the second side of it is, excluding those deals, how did gross new business track against your internal plan?

Simple answer is yes, things played out in Q4 as we expected them to and as we outlined on the Q3 call. Secondary answer is it is complicated. We go into a quarter with a portfolio of deals, and we try to close them all and we do our best and rarely get to 100%. But I would say generally, things ended up aligned with what we expected. And it ended up being a very good fiscal year, right? It is exciting for us to be able to beat the way we did and accelerate the way we did. And we are very, very happy with the outcome. I do not know if, John, you wanted to add anything relative to your expectations going into the quarter, but it was a great quarter, and the teams really executed very well.

Nothing to add.

Great.

Thank you. If I could ask another one. I think you mentioned Shane Cassidy, who is going to be formally assuming the role of our Chief Commercial Officer role starting this fiscal year. Are there any changes that we should be expecting in the sales organization? How much of that is embedded in your guidance?

Shane joins us. First, I guess I want to say that David did a phenomenal job in his tenure as Chief Commercial Officer. The things that he achieved as far as predictability and linearity within the fiscal year and within the quarter are things we want to double down on and making sure that we continue to carry the torch on that sales operations methodology and rigor. With Shane joining, no changes in structure. We certainly want to make sure that we continue the momentum that has been built, and the rest of the team is in place and playing the same roles they have before. I do not see a whole lot of change there.

I do think that as we go forward, just given the nature of our relationship with these large customers, is doubling down on the expansion within our existing customer base and solving these very specific business problems with the expansion of the solution portfolio is going to be a big, big focus for Shane as he moves into the role.

Great. Thanks. Our next question is going to go to Michael Turrin at Wells Fargo.

Hey, thanks very much. Appreciate the questions and all the time. I am getting a pretty consistent set of similar questions. Just wanted to go back to some of the dynamics we are looking at. On the Q4 ARR number, growth was strong, but it is a seasonally stronger period. The fully ramped ARR number stands out at 22%, but I think people are looking at that relative to the initial ARR guide for next year and trying to parse why that would not be more of a leading indicator for growth into next year.

Jeff, I know you have had some comments that are useful in attrition and there are some currency impacts we can weigh, but just maybe help level set fiscal Q4, Q1, full-year guide for ARR. How you would frame those out for investors as we are just kind of evaluating and trying to parse what the normalized growth trajectory will look like from here.

Yeah, look, I think multiple years of over 20% fully ramped ARR growth creates this incredible asset that we call backlog, our ARR backlog. We have visibility into how that backlog flows into the number. We try to share some of that visibility with you all at Analyst Day. As we look at how that number is flowing into next year, that is a key building block of how we think about setting the guide, and this is on an annual basis. Then we think about what the appropriate churn rate is to model based on recent patterns, but also historical averages.

Then we look at what we have to go out and sell in the year and have a perspective of the type of deal that it is and what are the kind of ramping dynamics associated with those deals and how they then yield year one ARR. Those are the foundational building blocks. Fully ramped ARR at a couple of years, north of 20% certainly gives us increased confidence into the durability of the upper teens. If you go back four or five years, it was much lower than that. So we are kind of building that flywheel of this incredible asset that is this backlog asset that will flow into the number.

The ratio of ARR that will flow into FY 2027 as a percentage of that total backlog number is down a little bit year-over-year, as I mentioned earlier on the call, and that's just a function of more ramping events to come in the future. But those are the foundational building blocks that we look at, and all of those are in a very healthy place and feel very aligned to how we've talked about the durable growth engine of Guidewire.

Thanks very much.

Yep.

Thanks, Michael. We'll go to Billy Fitzsimmons at Piper Sandler.

Hey, guys. Thanks for fitting me in here. Good to see the new product momentum. Appreciate the commentary on PricingCenter and ProNavigator. Imagine it's still early, but any initial thoughts you can share on UnderwritingCenter, specifically as it relates to customer conversations and pipeline relative to what you outlined 90 days ago?

Sure. We are very excited about the momentum of the product and working with a couple very early customers and getting the product into their hands and getting some hands-on feedback and traction from out in the real world. I think we are excited to share more details about that as we head into our Connections user conference. That is basically where we are. I would say relative to the underwriting category is more and more excited about it in general. Receptivity to the idea and the problem and the potential for artificial intelligence to play a really positive role here is just validated more and more every day. We really feel like we are onto something with respect to the demos and the workshops that we are able to do with the early customers. That is really positive.

The other side of it, John was talking about Shane's remit and the things we have learned this year is being able to build this motion where our sellers can really learn multiple products, and we can fit these new things into our pipe generation and demand generation and product marketing teams. It is like developing that at Guidewire as opposed to sort of being a one-core trick pony kind of company is pretty exciting. That is where we are with underwriting and more to talk about and share at Connections.

Great. Now we will go to Aaron Kimson at Citizens.

Thanks so much. I want to follow up on Dylan's question. John, you mentioned the role AI is having on accelerating time to value for implementations. Jeff spoke to the effect of some fixed bid contracts on F1Q service margins. As you get into some of the larger migrations, are you finding you are increasingly comfortable offering fixed bid implementations? Is there a scenario where fixed bids could drive a pool forward in migrations in FY 2027, or at some other point further along in the future?

Yeah, there's a geographical and a complexity of market component that goes along with the tooling. Large programs have their own complexity. Oftentimes they have a large systems integrator involved that we're partnered with side by side. What will we see from a fixed bid standpoint? I think what we'll see is very definitively acceleration. More of the fixed bid componentry will come from the SI world as they get more confident in their tooling and their ability to drive these programs. On a pull-forward basis, what I really see happening is just a greater degree of confidence in aligning business and IT executives towards this agenda item as the complexity hurdle rate, the budgetary hurdle rate, and most importantly, the time duration hurdle rate becomes easier to clear so they can get definitively into the competitive posture they want to be in.

I do foresee that there will be some new entrants and disruptors into the SI world who will be really aggressively applying AI tooling into these programs, and we want to make sure that the entire ecosystem is enabled with our tooling to push that envelope.

Super interesting. As a follow-up, it sounds like the deals that pushed into F4Q mostly closed. One question I got a few times throughout the quarter is whether you're seeing the broader P&C cycle having any effect on the timing of deals closing relative to prior years.

No, I think the pace on these big decisions is very similar to what it's been prior years. We're not modeling, nor am I measuring the team differently based on the time in pipeline for these large deals or for any of the deals for that matter.

Thanks, Aaron. I'll now turn it over to Mike.

Okay, everybody, just to close, I wanted to reiterate the key takeaways that we see from the quarter and from the year is, number one, we really are just seeing phenomenal deal momentum. The continually beating ARR growth with fully ramped ARR growth creates an incredibly durable business. We really are seeing AI starting to drive the business. It's starting to be infused into our products, into our platform. It's positively impacting the services organization and the momentum we're able to achieve with implementations. Very excited about the momentum of these new products, PricingCenter and ProNavigator. We obviously talked a lot about that on the call, but incredibly strategic for the company in the long run. Finally, the cloud model is just really playing out here exactly like we thought it would.

We're seeing expanding margins and cash flow enabled share repurchase that we talked about, and really remarkable attrition rate at the company, creating what we think is a very unique and durable business. I appreciate everybody joining us on the call and hope to see as many of you as we possibly can at our Analyst Day and Connections. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you later.

Thank you.