Meeting at Formation ’19 customer conference, Duck Creek’s CEO talks with IIR about what the vendor has accomplished, how its vision has evolved for the Saas/platform era, and how the current vision represents continuity with Duck Creek’s original ideals.
It’s been a little over two years since core systems vendor Duck Creek Technologies, acquired by Accenture in 2011, became a privately-held company through a joint venture with Apax Partners that finalized in August of 2016. Since the finalization of the Apax/Accenture spinoff, Duck Creek has rapidly evolved in the direction of becoming a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform company with a full range of core and ancillary capabilities and a large ecosystem of partners. In June of 2016, fresh on the heels of the initial announcement of its impending ownership status shift, Duck Creek announced that it had agreed to acquire Agencyport Software, a specialist in front-end digital engagement, a move followed in January of 2017 by the acquisition of Yodil, an insurance data management company. The vendor continued this trend in October of 2018 with its acquisition of Outline Systems, whose ProducerOne product became today’s Duck Creek Distribution Management. Today, Duck Creek has over 230 property/casualty clients globally, and in the first two quarters of its fiscal year 2019, it reported nine customers taking delivery of their Duck Creek applications via the vendor’s Duck Creek OnDemand SaaS solution (six of the nine for core systems). Insurance Innovation Reporter had the opportunity to meet with Duck Creek CEO Michael Jackowski on April 1, 2019, at the vendor’s Formation ’19 customer conference in Miami.
Insurance Innovation Reporter: About two years ago, the announcement of Apax’s investment indicated that the move was designed to accelerate the innovation of claims, billing, and policy administration software. How would you say that has played out ?
Michael Jackowski, CEO, Duck Creek: Overall, it’s allowed us to execute with greater agility and speed at lower cost. I think Duck Creek has always been about bringing the best of our industry acumen together with the available technology and enhancing our applications to be the most configurable. You can always get into the details of features and functionality, but the most notable thing is that it has unleashed us to be a SaaS-based company.
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