Guidewire Software, Inc. (NYSE:GWRE) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Matt VanVliet: Okay. Very helpful. And then, Jeff, not to believe the point too much, but obviously, as you get more scale on GWCP, in particular, how much more of the long-term operating margin target and I guess within that, obviously, gross margin. But how much of those reliant on just getting more and more customers to migrate over versus some of the other things you outlined earlier on the call, like reducing headcount or I guess, restraining headcount growth and some of these others. So I guess the question is just how much — do we need to see more migrations occur to ultimately get to those long-term target gets?

Jeff Cooper: Yes. And we’ve talked about this in the past. I kind of think business, $4 billion of ARR and we need to scale into that $1 billion of ARR. So that does mean that in order to get to our midterm targets, which have us at $1 billion of ARR, we need to add new customers and continued steady progression of migrating our installed base and winning new business. I think what we saw — what we’re seeing this year is we’re starting to see some of these larger new modernizations come back into the market with — and a lot of these have been sitting on the sidelines for a period of time. So that’s an exciting back pattern for us. But absolutely, we need to execute on our plan and continue to sell. And our model assumes that we can do that in a very scalable manner by not adding headcount and continuing to leverage the investments in the platform that we’ve made.

Mike Rosenbaum: So let me just jump on what Jeff said, Matt. I want you to understand this. The positive improvement in the margin I am super, super pleased with because it indicates that the strategy is working, right? And in the case that — you could call it the pivot we made, the decisions we made around prioritizing, constraining headcount growth in these areas and the focus that we made on optimizing our infrastructure spend are starting to work. And it doesn’t mean that if you hold revenue flat that you’re going to get more and more efficient. And it’s sort of like, hey, we said, “Hey, if we take X number of people and they build a capability into our platform that will work for one through 100 customers, we still need those people because we got 31, right?” But as we go from 31 to 100, we don’t need to add more people.

We — the platform marginally will scale much, much more efficiently now — and so that’s why we’re so pleased with the results on the margin side this quarter is that, that strategy is now working. And I think you can start to see it in the financials. So great question, but I really want you to understand that the philosophy here is, like Jeff said, we’ve built the platform to convert this customer base and win the majority of Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 insurance companies in the world, and I think we’re on a path to doing that.

Operator: The next question is from the line of Parker Lane with Stifel.

Unidentified Analyst: This is Matthew Kicker on for Parker. To start, what are your thoughts on the use case for generative AI within the adware where would be the potential for incremental use on future platform updates? Could you see it helping at all with migrations?

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