As any professional tradesperson, hobbyist, or home improvement DIYer will tell you, it’s essential to use the right tool for the job every time. Whether tackling a new project or making a minor repair, you can’t beat the satisfaction of completing a job with the proper tool — fast, easy, safely, and done right the first time.
Empowering developers is a key focus of Guidewire Cloud Platform. The Cloud Integration Framework, with expanded availability in Dobson, gives developers the right tools to connect Guidewire within your enterprise and across your ecosystem. Developers will feel right at home with our open, API-first, event-driven approach to integration. We estimate that the Cloud Integration Framework will reduce development effort for custom integrations by 50%, with even greater benefits for validated integrations available in the Guidewire Marketplace.
Integration Gateway* is an open framework for developing integration apps that bridge Guidewire APIs with external apps and services. It is based on Apache Camel, considered the “Swiss army knife” of enterprise integration for the hundreds of components available to connect any modern API or legacy protocol and orchestrate any interaction pattern. It’s mature and proven in enterprise environments and cloud deployments, it has an extensive user community of practitioners, and it’s among the most active Apache projects. Integration apps are each deployed alongside Guidewire Cloud apps, separating integrations from business logic. This offers more flexibility to enhance or change your solution, and it also enables easier cloud updates. Learn more about Integration Gateway by watching this Connections session:
InsuranceSuite Cloud API provides standard access to core system transactions and data for a broad range of claims and policy business functions. Developers can use these either directly from app clients or from within Integration Gateway apps. This RESTful system API is versioned and extensible for flexibility, and it supports the OpenAPI specification — the most popular API description format supported by many developer tools (see OAI). Watch this Connections session to learn how USAA uses the API on Guidewire Cloud, or explore the InsuranceSuite Cloud API page here on this site.
Application Events* delivers messages in response to business events that occur throughout the claims and policy lifecycle, enabling event-driven apps and cross-application workflows triggered by InsuranceSuite. Each message includes metadata details about the business event according to the CloudEvents specification, together with a JSON data graph with the related claim, policy, or account information. App Events can be delivered to external systems in two different ways: via Webhooks or Integration Gateway. With App Events Webhooks, an administrator can configure event subscriptions without coding, enabling events to be delivered to a web endpoint. Alternatively, Integration Gateway provides a Camel component for App Events, so an integration app can subscribe to specific events and transform the message to call a specific API for an external service. Check out our Connections session about App Events to learn more:
For common integrations, however, you should conserve your integration development resources and instead look to Guidewire’s experience and expertise to deliver. With Dobson, we’ve introduced Guidewire Connect, a new subscription service to implement, support, and maintain select integrations. More than two dozen are already available, with additional integrations coming in every release. Watch this Connections session to learn more about Guidewire Connect:
Early customers and partners are already using the Cloud Integration Framework, and now it’s your turn. So strap on that tool belt and get to work on that next project.
Dobson arrived November 12, 2021. You can read the Dobson innovation blog and replay our “Ask Me Anything” cloud integration Connections session.
* Integration Gateway and App Events product features are available for Early Access Program (EA) customers. Guidewire’s Early Access Program enables customers to contribute to the development of new InsuranceSuite features and capabilities by evaluating them prior to the General Availability release to the broader Guidewire community. Click here to learn more about the Early Access Program.
If you are an existing Guidewire Cloud Platform customer and would like to participate in our Early Access program, please contact your Guidewire representative.
About the Author
Chris Vavra
Senior Director, Product Management
As part of the Cloud Platform team, Chris leads the product strategy for the Guidewire integration capabilities.