Insurance companies are modernizing systems and adopting advanced technologies to overcome the limitations of decades-old IT platforms at a rapid rate. Fueling this transformation are evolving policyholder demands, changing methodologies, an ever-evolving technology landscape, and an increasing need to make informed, real-time decisions.
In that modernization journey, however, there are a myriad of different paths to choose from—and it can make navigating a sea of SaaS platform solutions feel like a daunting task.
That’s why we feel, every year, Gartner puts together its Magic Quadrant for SaaS P&C Platforms, North America. Through detailed research, Gartner provides in-depth insights into the SaaS management market, trends driving SaaS adoption, and key leaders in this space.
This year, Duck Creek Technologies is proud to be named a Leader in the “Gartner 2024 Magic Quadrant for SaaS P&C Platforms” report based on our “overall Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.” We believe this is an important designation for the entire Duck Creek ecosystem—and it further solidifies our commitment to helping insurers modernize and innovate faster with a full suite of modern insurance technologies.
To better understand why Duck Creek was named a Leader—and what it means for today’s P&C companies—we break down some of the core strengths.
Focusing on the Future of Insurtech to Help Customers Grow
At Duck Creek, we’re helping our customers evolve by putting the advanced technology and capabilities they need right at their fingertips. Here’s a breakdown of each reason why we feel we were named a Leader.
Ensuring the most up-to-date solutions with continuous deployment
The strength of our continuous deployment capabilities with Active Delivery lies in our architecture’s separation of configurability from the base platform. Unlike other P&C solutions, we never had to re-platform to achieve Active Delivery—only refactor certain components to become independently deployable and scalable. This improves the modularity and automation of our platform, enabling continuous delivery of changes without impacting our customers’ configurations and LOB operations. This also enables us to continue our architectural evolution to cloud-native multi-tenancy.
So, what does this mean for our customers? We deliver updates at regular intervals automatically, and customers have a grace period to test it in their system, make sure it works, then move it to production on their own time. This lets them take advantage of continuous updates and the newest features automatically—without the cost, time commitment, and downtime often associated with a traditional upgrade cycle. It also means customers will always have the most up-to-date security measures implemented, ensuring the safety of their data.
Building a more intelligent business with AI and machine learning
Our ability to enable insurers to use data with Machine Learning (ML) is another strength. With Duck Creek’s solutions, insurers can use data from the core system or their own third-party models to support faster product prototyping and process automation.
The true strength is in our layered approach to ML and AI, which ensures insights are delivered when and where customers need them:
- First, we’ve mastered the insurance insights curated data set, as we’re able to aggregate data to provide an ability for third-party solution partners to plug into our Clarity product.
- Second, we provide low-code tools for customers to start creating ML algorithms without the need for extremely sophisticated, knowledgeable (and expensive) ML operations personnel.
- Third, our low-code ML product allows users to easily inject insights pulled from data within the Duck Creek environment and outside of it from Clarity, ML models, and predictive AI models into our customers’ experience in a way that is meaningful to the persona – such as nudges, embedded intelligence, and copilot assistance.
- Finally, we’re enabling business transformation across the entire insurance lifecycle experience to create a new layer of configuration on top of the entire product suite. We do this instead of configuring one product at a time, which results in easier end-to-end lifecycle workflows across the entire portfolio. This allows products to communicate faster to draw insights that are delivered to the user at the user in real-time.
It’s important to note that data and AI governance is of utmost importance to us, and we are delivering those capabilities via our layered approach. It’s also important to note that with these solutions, we’re starting from a place of strength with Ratings and Claims, learning, measuring value, and then growing to achieve suite-wide capabilities.
How We’re Helping Our Customers Evolve Alongside an Ever-Changing Landscape
We understand the insurtech landscape is rapidly evolving, and we’re constantly exploring ways to enhance our platforms to meet the needs of the P&C industry and better serve our customers.
Today, our goal is to guide our current and future customers on their journey to continuous deployment, near real-time data, advanced analytics, and more. But we recognize that every company is at a different point in that journey—and no path to transformation is the same.
That’s why we’re committed to empowering our customers to evolve on their own terms—ensuring they’re adopting new technology at the right time and in the right environment, helping them minimize disruptions and ensure the best possible outcomes.
Here are a few areas we’re currently working in lockstep with our customers on—ensuring they have the right capabilities and tools available at their fingertips as soon as they’re ready.
Moving to near-real-time reporting
Our cloud-native SaaS data management platform, Clarity, does not meet the qualifications of near-real-time reporting because we still take advantage of batch updates. Duck Creek utilizes a mix of near-real-time and micro batch for one key reason: Some of our customers still need them—and we’re committed to supporting these use cases.
However, we are continuing to evolve to fulfill near-real-time reporting requirements. For example, we have an Event-Streaming API that allows information to come into Clarity in near real-time, enabling low data latencies. This gives us the ability to refresh that reporting data rapidly, and it gives customers the power to configure how fast they need this data updated.
Through our regular updates, we can incrementally evolve these reporting capabilities so that customers can adopt new solutions on their own schedule—ultimately in a direction where micro batch ingestion is no longer needed, and we can evaluate removing batch as an option.
Building the right upgrade environment
While our latest version with Active Delivery has been available for over a year, just under half of our customers have upgraded to the latest version of Claims.
Heres’ why: It’s not only about the product—it’s about the transformation of an insurer’s processes, delivery, and IT practices. While a number of our customers are already on their migration journey, others aren’t quite ready. We understand that to take part in a final upgrade and move to Active Delivery with Duck Creek, there are certain requirements—like adopting a DevSecOps practice, moving into a fully automated CI/CD pipeline, and adopting updates every two weeks (to name a few).
That’s why our team has made it a priority to work with our customers to support any changes needed—then we can fully focus on ensuring a successful evolution to Active Delivery, in a timeframe and budget that works for them.
Take the Next Step in Your Modernization Journey
At Duck Creek, we see ourselves as the leader in advancing the insurance industry to the forefront of technology. We are committed to helping every one of our customers evolve, take advantage of the latest and greatest technology, and improve their businesses significantly through insurtech.If you’d like to learn more about how Duck Creek’s modern suite of insurance technology can empower today’s insurance companies, you can download the full Gartner report, “Gartner 2024 Magic Quadrant for SaaS P&C Platforms.”
