Duck Creek Technologies, a tech outfit that provides cloud services and software for the property/casualty industry, has made an acquisition in a bid to broaden its product offerings.

The Boston, Mass.-based firm said it acquired North Carolina’s Yodil LLC, a firm focused on insurance data management products. Neither side disclosed financial terms.

What the agreement gives Duck Creek is more product options.

Yodil, known for insurance analytics and business intelligence expertise, has its Yodil Platform, which is geared toward data management for property/casualty carriers that operates in a more transparent and traceable way than current standards. Duck Creek said that Yodil’s “innovative” software and its own data and analytics platform will help carriers harness all of their data, analyze their operations and optimize their market opportunities.

As well, the combined operation gives Duck Creek Customers a wide range of structured insurance data stores, including core system, warehouse and data mart.

Jeff Goldberg, a Novarica vice president, said in a recent blog posting that Duck Creek’s move shows in part its willingness to broaden its product offerings and also a “growing focus on data and business intelligence across the industry as a whole.”

Goldberg added that the move also appears to be in response to M&A activity elsewhere in the data warehouse and business intelligence spaces.

“This move by Duck Creek is likely at least partially in response to Guidewire’s multiple acquisitions of data warehouse and business intelligence solutions, with EagleEye (now Guidewire Predictive Analytics) the most recent example,” he said. “It’s safe to say that BI and data warehousing can now be considered a core part of the insurance suite just like any other business process focused system.”

In April 2016, Duck Creek Technologies was part of a joint venture involving Accenture and Apax Partners that enables it to grow more. Funds advised by Apax acquired a 60 percent stake in Duck Creek (previously all owned by Accenture), Accenture kept a 40 percent stake, and Duck Creek’s senior management joined the new joint venture. Duck Creek CEO Michael Jackowski is CEO of the joint venture, which is slated to operate as a new and independent company.

The deal allowed Duck Creek to gain access to capital and management expertise through Apax, enabling more investment to fuel rapid growth for Duck Creek products and capabilities.

Source: Duck Creek Technologies