35 Years Strong: How Solimar Systems Built Something That Lasts
Founded in San Diego in 1991, Solimar Systems has grown from a startup helping organizations print from mainframes and early PCs into a global provider of production workflow software serving thousands of customers — including many Fortune 100 companies. Thirty-five years later, the company is still independent, still growing, and still trusted by many of the same customers it served decades ago.
That kind of longevity doesn’t happen by accident in an industry defined by consolidation, acquisition, and relentless technology disruption. It reflects a clear and consistent philosophy about what customers actually need — and the discipline to deliver it. Solimar’s Chemistry™ Platform touches virtually every stage of the document production lifecycle: PDF optimization, workflow automation, job tracking and visibility, document transformation, accessibility, secure digital delivery, and more.
The Chemistry That Makes the Difference
Every great outcome in chemistry depends on having the right elements working together — precisely, reliably, and in exactly the right sequence. That’s the thinking behind Solimar’s Chemistry™ Platform, and it’s more than a name. It reflects a fundamental truth about production print and digital communications: the work only happens when content and output meet perfectly, every time.
Solimar’s Platform provides the connective intelligence that makes that possible — sitting at the center of an organization’s document workflows, managing the conversation between what needs to be produced and the systems that produce it. That connective role creates something enormously valuable: visibility. Real-time, actionable insight into what’s moving through a production environment, where it is, whether it’s performing as expected, and what needs attention. For organizations whose operations depend on getting documents out accurately, on time, and to the right people, that visibility isn’t just useful. It’s the foundation on which everything else is built.
Solimar has been building that foundation since 1997, when the company made an early and decisive commitment to PDF — long before the transactional print industry recognized its potential. What the Solimar team saw was a format designed for exactly this kind of work: random-access, extensible, and capable of carrying both the visual intent of a document and the production intelligence needed to deliver it. That early insight shaped everything that followed, and it’s why the Chemistry Platform today touches virtually every stage of the document production lifecycle: PDF optimization, workflow automation, job tracking and visibility, document transformation, accessibility, secure digital delivery, and more.
At the Core of Chemistry: Solutions Built for What’s at Stake
The Chemistry Platform is a modular system, designed so that organizations can deploy what they need today and build on it as their needs evolve. At its core are capabilities that address some of the most business-critical challenges in production print and digital communications.
Piece level tracking gives organizations the certainty that document delivery demands — confirmation that each individual piece reached its destination, when, and through which channel. For regulated industries like insurance and financial services, that certainty is non-negotiable: an auditable delivery record can be the difference between demonstrating compliance and facing serious legal exposure. But the business case extends well beyond regulated environments. Piece-level data helps predict cash flow, reduces inbound service volume by giving support teams real-time answers about what was sent and when, and supports the channel-aware delivery strategies modern customers expect — automatically triggering a physical mail follow-up if an electronic delivery fails, or vice versa. Solimar’s SOLitrack delivers all of this, with piece-level visibility that extends from the job level down to the individual document, across both print and eDelivery.
PDF Optimization sits at the foundation of quality and consistency in every production workflow. Incoming files need to be validated before they reach a device, font environments need to be tightly controlled so that what gets produced matches what was designed, and file sizes need to be managed so that archives don’t bloat and processing doesn’t slow. At production scale — with some organizations processing tens of thousands of PDFs in a single day — none of this can be done manually. ReadyPDF wraps full workflow automation around the entire process: validating, optimizing, and routing PDFs automatically, flagging problems for triage before they become failures, and ensuring that every file that enters the workflow is the file it was meant to be.
Document Re-engineering is the capability that allows organizations to adapt and enrich documents after composition, without ever touching the source application. That’s a powerful distinction: rather than recoding upstream systems every time a business rule changes, a regulatory requirement shifts, or a new output channel needs to be supported, documents can be intelligently modified at the point of production. Rubika makes this possible across a wide range of formats — AFP, Metacode, PCL, PDF, PostScript, VIPP, and more — bringing them into consolidated workflows regardless of origin. Rubika can add conditional marketing messages and TransPromotional content, manage postal optimization, including pre-sorting, householding, and address cleansing, control finishing and insertion with full ADF workflow support, and handle the simplex-to-duplex and multiple-up transformations that improve both efficiency and cost. Customers have reported 15% increases in overall output production and turnaround time reductions of 75% or more — not by replacing what they have, but by letting Rubika maximize what it can do.
AI and the Chemistry Platform: A Natural Partnership
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organizations think about communication, operations, and data — and Solimar sees that as a significant opportunity. The Chemistry Platform and AI aren’t competing approaches. They’re built to work together.
AI systems are powerful analysis engines, but they depend entirely on having good data to work with — clean, structured, operationally grounded data that reflects what’s actually happening in a production environment. That’s precisely what the Chemistry Platform provides. The visibility SOLitrack creates, the workflow data captured across the Platform, the document intelligence built into every process — all of it becomes the foundation on which AI tools can do their most valuable work. Solimar handles the precision-engineered, deterministic workflows that production environments demand. AI adds the analytical layer: helping organizations interpret what the data means, predict what comes next, and continuously improve how their operations run.
Solimar has already put this into practice with Diego, the company’s AI-powered chatbot, which gives customers fast, self-service access to product knowledge and production guidance — and gets smarter over time as it learns what customers are asking.
As AI becomes more embedded in production operations, the organizations with the clearest visibility into their workflows will have the richest data to feed them. The Chemistry Platform is how you build that foundation. That’s not a happy coincidence. It’s the plan.
Learning on Your Terms
One of the most meaningful investments Solimar has made in recent years is Solimar University Online (SUO) — a growing library of training content that enables customers and their teams to learn at their own pace, on their own schedule.
The philosophy behind SUO reflects something Solimar has understood for a long time: organizations experience constant staff transitions, and every time someone new takes on responsibility for a production workflow, they need a way to get up to speed quickly and confidently. SUO provides that. Custom training sessions are archived for the specific customer who commissioned them, so the investment in learning doesn’t disappear when someone changes roles. Generic product content is available to all active license holders, giving every team member a baseline of knowledge they can build on.
Together, Diego and SUO represent a coherent strategy for customer empowerment — one that reduces dependence on expensive service engagements while making customers more capable and more confident in their use of the platform.
The Real Secret Sauce
Ask what has kept Solimar going for 35 years, and the answer isn’t any single product or technical decision. It’s people — and the relationships built with them.
More than half of Solimar’s employees have been with the company for over 15 years. Several have been there for more than 30. That kind of longevity creates an institutional depth that’s genuinely rare in the software industry — a shared understanding of how the platform works, why it was designed the way it was, and what customers need from it that no amount of documentation can fully replace.
The same spirit of long-term relationship defines how Solimar engages its customers. The Customer Advisory Council (CAC) has been one of the most distinctive elements of the Solimar model — a structured forum where customers share what’s working, what isn’t, and where they need to go next. The CAC doesn’t just inform product development. It signals to customers that their experience and their challenges are genuinely valued, and that Solimar is a partner committed to solving problems over the long term, not just closing transactions.
Solimar’s approach has always been evolutionary rather than revolutionary — building incrementally, integrating carefully, and staying close to what customers actually need rather than chasing the latest thing. It’s a philosophy that requires patience and discipline, but it’s also the reason so many Solimar customers have been with the company for multiple decades.
Here for the Long Haul
Thirty-five years in, Solimar Systems is continuing to invest in intelligent automation, PDF optimization, document security and accessibility, cloud-ready solutions like SOLsearcher Cloud, and the training and support infrastructure that help customers succeed long after the initial deployment.
The industry around them will keep changing — AI will reshape communication workflows, print volumes will continue to shift, and new technologies will demand new adaptations. Solimar has navigated all of that before, and the foundation they’ve built — technically, culturally, and relationally — is exactly what makes the next 35 years look promising.
I’m Pat McGrew, McGrewGroup, and with me is sort of one of my favorite people in the Solimar universe, it’s Drew Sprague, President of Solimar Systems, architect of Chemistry, the platform, and we’re going to walk through five thought leadership questions. And I’m going to pose them as thought leadership questions. Drew, because you’ve seen a lot in 35 years. And, you know, we remember before there were PCs and we were working on mainframes and life was quite a bit different than it is now. So, we’re going to start by talking through some of the highlights. And then what we want to do is jump into a little bit more about what the 35 years of life with Solimar has meant. Let me start with the basics. How does it feel to have 35 years of Solimar under your belt?
Well, Pat, it feels a lot better having you on the other side of this conversation. So, thank you so much for joining along. You know, 35 years, it really is a lot to celebrate for sure. And to me, it reflects the number one priority for Solimar, which has been stability. You know, we try to make our customers feel secure because we know that our business comes from their willingness to refer us to other people. And so, we work very hard to make sure we have the best support that we can provide. And, just so grateful that it’s manifested in all these years and people sticking with us. I mean, we still have people who know us just for AS/400s. That’s how we got started working with AS/400s. Isn’t that crazy?
And we still talk about AS/400s. So, one of the fundamental things that Solimar brings to the table for all of its customers, regardless of which platform you’re supporting them on, is visibility. And we know when we’re out talking with printers in all the different segments you serve, they say, well, you know, how do I get more visibility and more certainty about what’s happening in my print operations? That’s really part and parcel of what Solimar brings to the table.
Well, Pat, you know, we are fundamentally middleware and we live in that space where documents and devices meet to have a conversation. And that’s a perfect place to create visibility because you’ve got the content and you’ve got the communication going on, and then you can help navigate the dialog and the exchange of the information. And that’s basically what we’ve built our business around, is helping people get stuff where it needs to go and keeping track of it.
Do you think your customers know that you can help them break that 50% of capacity, 60% of capacity, barrier with tools they already have installed.
Well, the business has been built around helping organizations leverage their legacy equipment. That was the foundation of the business. And then over time, we adapted it to okay, well, let’s be a little bit more forward looking and give people options for as they change their technologies, they can maintain the stuff they need to maintain, and yet they can adapt to the new things they need to onboard. And I think we’ve been pretty successful at that. In fact, I was just thinking about it. We’ve been working with PDF since 1997, which might surprise a lot of people. That PDF even goes back that far, and it goes back just a little bit farther than that. But yeah, that’s been a really big part of our business, is helping people engage the past and the future at the same time.
I know a lot of people when PDF first came to the market, it was, oh, well, that’s for the creatives and it’s for the advertising people. It’s not really for production. One of the things Solimar did was not only bring it to the production table and help the transactional and direct mail spaces and book spaces standardize on PDF, but you also provided that visibility to help an organization understand how much use they were really getting out of their very expensive hardware. Do you think that the market has really, in the industry, has learned that bottlenecks cost them money?
Well, I think they feel it. And they don’t have to think about it. They feel it. And I think they will also maintain a lot of equipment that they can’t more utilize simply because they’ve got a lot of legacy stuff that they hold on to. And so, as you know, some organizations probably should let go of some of the work they do and outsource it. But in other cases, if they had a few more tools, they could probably better leverage what they have. In fact, in our history, what we helped organizations do was adapt their legacy Xerox devices to be able to print PostScript and PDF. You might remember that long ago, Xerox had invented an interface, a SCSI interface that allowed it to basically, take raster data in and print it at rated speed. And so that helped a number of organizations to leverage big investments they had already made in Xerox devices. And similarly, organizations that find themselves with equipment they’re not fully utilizing, perhaps with some data transforms, could get better usage out of that equipment.
There’s a lot of reasons people don’t get full access to their capacity. And, one of the things that we notice when we walk around a Solimar customer environment, is that those that are actually using SOLitrack actually can narrow that gap between machine capability and what they’re actually getting out of it. When you were first working on SOLitrack, did you see that as a game changer or as a utility?
Well, we wanted to be able to give people access through a database to the reporting that’s essential to have that visibility. Our flagship product, the Solimar Print Director, is not backed by a database. And that works well for a lot of people who really don’t want a database. But some organizations in particular, those that want to be able to move to piece level tracking, accept that, yeah, we need that database and we saw that, yeah, SOLitrack can offer some really interesting capabilities, not just for being able to provide visibility at the job level, but down to the piece level. And then with a lot of, you know, reporting that goes along with what happened to this, that and the other thing.
I want to jump on to another question, if we can, because the idea of piece level tracking, what you just brought up is so essential in any kind of shop. And yet we walk into a lot of places where they know the words, but they don’t know what they mean. What happens when I’m tracking at the piece level that’s different than just throwing blobs of print files at a print device?
Well, what we’ve found is where, organizations are most willing to walk the walk and implement the piece level tracking is in the insurance space because the documents and the receipt of the documents and the exchange of documents is fundamental to their business. In other places where, maybe they’re not so closely tied to those document workflows, maybe it’s just a simple matter of getting it posted and letting it go, they’re not quite as committed to piece level tracking. So, but those places where the document workflows are critical, then the piece level tracking not only helps them manage the legal responsibilities around those documents, but also improves their customer service because the piece level tracking ties right into the ability to have, effectively a real time dialog with your users, with what have I sent you and what did you get? What are your questions?
I used to think that piece level tracking was only for regulated industries. I think I had this real narrow view of it. I understood the technical responsibilities and the real value to a regulated mailer organization. But when you look at the market that we’re in today, even direct mailers can benefit from things like from the capabilities that you get with piece level tracking.
Well, absolutely, because everybody wants to know when the money’s going to come in. And so oftentimes, piece level tracking tells you if the document got there and you can actually predict your float somewhat from, when documents get delivered. Also, you can kind of predict, when you’re going to get more activity, from customers following up, asking questions, phone calls, that kind of thing. So having piece level tracking can provide a lot more visibility into the organization than just did the piece get delivered.
And so from an auditing standpoint, it also gives you that audit trail that you can prove you delivered what you said you were going to deliver., when you said you were going to deliver it.
Of course. Yeah. And that is an important part, especially for the insurance industry. As I pointed out.
And piece level tracking though, it’s not just for print and mail, right. It’s also for eDelivery.
Of course. Yeah, it’s the very same platform because you can track whether or not, a piece was delivered physically or electronically, and you can even tie them together so that if somebody, you know, didn’t get their piece of their correspondence electronically, well, okay, send them a piece of mail or vice versa.
So, we know that the USPS is changing their promise to us both as mailers and as receivers of mail. I would imagine that having the ability to do this piece level tracking ought to be something that everybody who does any kind of print and mail would want to take advantage of if somebody is not using it today. How hard is it to set it up?
Well, providing eDelivery is relatively straightforward if you have the right tools to do it. It’s obviously something that is becoming increasingly widespread. The volume of print is declining. At least first-class mail has been declining for a couple of decades. And so, largely that’s happening because content that was previously printed is no longer printed. It’s delivered electronically. It may just be, online through a browser. You go look at your frequent flier account. Or it may be that your bank statements, you get them electronically. And in fact, for a lot of new accounts, my children have, you know, they really don’t think about getting something in the mail at all. They expect, well, it’ll just be on my phone, and they really don’t think of a need to go actually look at a statement and figure out what was on it. So, things are changing for sure in that regard. And eDelivery is a critical component for anybody that’s doing transactional now.
So, if I’m a sort of average print mailer, and I know that delivery into the mailbox of printed mail is a little bit more disrupted than it has been in the past and I really want to know, I need to come talk to Solimar about being able to do piece level tracking, to be able to guarantee my customers what that they’re going to be able to communicate with their customers when they want to.
Well, sure. And in fact, you know, a lot of people that get physical mail, actually want to have an electronic copy available to them when it comes to tax time because they want to give, electronic copies to their, CPA, for example. So, yeah, I don’t think one could reasonably expect now that I can just do physical mail and not have an electronic component to support it. It would be a reasonable expectation that people are going to want to have some level of electronic content to access.
I am absolutely a double dipper. I want everything to come both ways all the time. It just makes me feel more secure.
Yeah, and a lot of passwords to track.
Well, yes, that’s also true. So, one of the challenges in production mail and you live in this production communication world, right? Not just physical mail, but you delivered communication. There are a lot of ways that the print production train can get disrupted. I mean, it can be bad files coming in. It can be poorly preflighted files. It can be bloated PDFs. There’s just so many things that can happen. What are the things that a printer ought to have on their short list of things to look at when they know their production isn’t working the way it should be?
Yeah. Well, you know, our focus is predominantly transactional, and there are really two important parts to that. One is, of course, validating your data. And when there are transforms involved, hopefully the transform does a good job of validating your data upfront. Now people receiving precomposed content. PDF is the most common now. You need to validate that because, it’s not uncommon that someone will have a device that has a report from several years back and simply may not adapt well to some of the content that somebody is providing them today. And so, for example, our ReadyPDF tool allows people to validate PDF coming in. Without optimizing it, you can just validate it, make sure that it’s not going to blow something up. And then you can, segment, filter out those jobs that look problematic and triage them to figure out what you need to do with them next. But there’s a kind of another level of this which is making sure that, the content is what you intend. Sometimes, companies that have outsourced will unintentionally serve up to somebody something that’s not quite formatted correctly for the workflows that they’ve got set up. And so, validation can happen on another level, which is the context of the data itself. And so for that, we in this same way that we support, for example, the eDelivery, we can index content and then you can compare those indices and counts of mail pieces for example, to the expected values. And if they mismatch then you can flag it and say whoa, there’s a problem here. We need to again triage this document. So, there’s a couple different levels at which that works. And our software has been designed so that you can you can solve those problems with the software.
00:15:59:01 – 00:16:03:19
Speaker 1
Can we come back to my favorite four letter word for a moment. Font. It’s my favorite four letter word because it is with four little letters, it is so complex and it is such it’s really such a big concept that I think it’s not as well understood as it should be. I think people understand what graphics are and they understand what photographic images are, and they kind of understand what formatting is. But when we start talking about fonts as legally licensable entities, I think we confuse people. One of the things I love about ReadyPDF is that it understands fonts. It understands that they are licensed and it can help you optimize your use of fonts and solve problems when print files move from environment to environment where the fonts might not exist. Can you talk to me a little bit about the philosophy behind font library changes, and how you set up your systems to be able to help a customer get their font world in order?
Yeah. Well, Pat, as you know, PDF is an acronym for a Portable Document Format, right? And so the intent was to have a document that no matter where you presented it, it would look the same. And that works well if you embed the resources that you need in the document. But if you don’t embed them in, for example, that is a, not uncommon issue with fonts people don’t embed. A font is certainly allowed within PDF to not embed a font and reference it, and just expect that the device has the font. And if the device doesn’t have the font that you had expected it to have, it might have one with the same name, but actually is different in substance, because a font is actually literally a program that the device executes. Then you can get content that at the back end doesn’t look the way that you intended. And so what we do to help people with that is we allow them to provide a controlled environment for the fonts that actually go into a file. And so we allow them to substitute fonts. We allow them to force the embedding of certain fonts, removing certain fonts, that kind of thing, in order that they make sure that the content they’re producing is actually the content that they intend to produce. So, yeah, that’s a very important feature of our ReadyPDF product. And it’s a common challenge for organizations to make sure that the fonts they’re using are the fonts they intend to use.
And ReadyPDF kind of works in that same ecosystem a SPDE and Rubika, to make sure that the documents you think you’re producing are actually the ones you’re producing. And they look the way that the designers intended as well as the regulators required, right?
Well, it does, and it also helps to optimize the content so that you’re not throwing out there a lot of content wastefully because, you know, for example, with an archive of electronic data, many of them split the mail pieces up into individual mail pieces. And of course, to maintain the fidelity, you need to embed the resources. So, all of a sudden, if you’ve got 10,000 mail pieces, you bloated the content in the repository by 10,000 times. So, you want to do that as efficiently and effectively as you as you can to minimize the amount of bloat. Yeah. Now what ReadyPDF does that’s kind of special in the marketplace is it wraps workflow around the whole process because you want to be able to automate the whole process of managing. And some of our customers have many tens of thousands of PDFs or processing in a single day. And so you don’t want to feed those one by one into an engine to try to, optimize or validate them. And so, yeah, ReadyPDF is special in that it’s designed to really scale to provide the optimization and validation over large numbers of PDFs.
One of the places hiccups get introduced into production workflow is when new equipment is introduced into the universe, or older equipment is moved out, and all of a sudden it might be from a different vendor who might have a different approach to how they do their workflows. Is ReadyPDF and the rest of the Solimar Chemistry platform, designed to help somebody when they’re moving from vendor platform to vendor platform, or even technology to technology?
Well, as you can imagine, we’re not generally the place people come to when they ask about replacing the equipment they’ve got. We usually learn about it on the back end afterwards. Yeah. so we’ve put a lot of features into our software to help people adapt their content, front end and back end to deal with changes on either end because they do happen. We have, especially in this era of the vanishing mainframe organizations. are replacing workflows with new front ends that they’re on, which they’re trying to replicate existing content. And so we have a number of tools that help them do that. And, you know, on the back end, they’re trying to maintain the same production as well, and we help them there. Sometimes those are finishing features, you know, making sure that the content is duplex, printed on, you know, different colors of paper pulled from different trays and things like that. Yeah. so it’s an important part of our business being this middleware that navigates those discussions between the front end and back end.
One of the biggest pieces of middleware in any print environment is actually the staff in a lot of ways, they they’re the people who are pushing buttons, kicking off processes. But we hear from a lot of printers. I expect you do as well that the people that they’re hiring in the new hires don’t seem to be as well trained or skilled as people they hired maybe five years ago or ten years ago. So how does a company survive it? And I guess some of that wraps around this idea that if you have a smart software platform that is sort of watching out for all these processes, maybe you don’t need a PhD in computer science to be the one pushing the buttons, but you still need to get people in who can live within that platform.
Well, right. You know, our focus has always been to offer only off the shelf software. We really don’t think that customization, in the long run, serves everybody’s interest because, very quickly you discover that, you have competing bodies of software that you’re trying to maintain for different people. Our goal is to make software that’s easy to deploy, easy to configure and easy to maintain. And of course, those are relative contexts you have to understand somewhat of what you’re trying to achieve. You don’t just press a button away you go. But what we’re happy to note is that a lot of users seem to have adapted well to the changes they’re experiencing simply by leveraging more and more not our personal training, but our libraries of videos and stuff. And so, they basically just walk people through how to use the products. And the goal behind that is both to make it sustainable for the organization to have our software, but also help them to deal with the very frequent transitions they have in their own business. You know, they reassign people all the time to new projects, for whatever reasons that they have. And it gives them confidence when they have that library of videos, they’re that, okay, this is a product that’s going to be stable for us, and we don’t have to be panicked about our future with this product.
I think because Solimar is so often brought into a company by a hardware vendor who knows that you can build that front end workflow to feed their device, that you must have a really great relationship with them, but they’re also going through workforce reductions, and they’re fighting some of the same battles you think about that as you you’re building your next set of features and your next set of solutions about how easy you can make it to deploy, whether it’s a vendor trying to help you do it, or whether it’s a professional services partner or whether the customer wants to do it themselves.
Well, absolutely. In fact, some of our products, we’ve redesigned the user interface over the last 2 or 3 years to do exactly that, expose the more common features and hide the less commonly used features just to make it a little more obvious to people how to get started even because, you know, often the hardest part of getting anything done is just getting started. Once you get started, it’s very little to finish. But, and so, we’re very happy about that result because we’ve found that, yes, even though there’s been a lot of turnover in the various printer vendors, and that’s been going on for a long, long time, because we’ve been around a long time, that the ability for individuals to take on what we offer and put it to work very quickly has not subsided, you know. Yeah. We’re very happy with those results.
So, the elephant in the room in our industry right now is that two letter fun thing AI. And it is something that every conference I go to, somehow it winds up as a main tent, mainstage conversation. And very often the people who are standing on the stage don’t actually understand print and mail, transaction print, security print, and the things that we have to really keep our arms wrapped around. How do you think AI will actually impact personalized communications and the things that are really the place where you are the subject matter expert?
Well, you know, Pat, I’m going to be an optimist here that AI, despite its proclivity to be extremely disruptive to a lot of industries, that it’s going to help conversations between corporations and consumers. I think, one of the things it will do is help to focus those conversations. So, there’s not just a deluge of stuff that consumers just want to shut off, that the messages are targeted and appropriate and relevant. And I think AI will do that. I think the inevitable is that, yes, it will continue to exacerbate the decline in first class mail, but I think it will not be a cliff. I think it will just be gradual, because, organizations will slowly onboard new ways of leveraging AI and electronic communication broadly to do so. But the cornerstone of what we do is, is making sure that an organization’s workflows are reliable and dependable, and they get their fundamental work done. And that’s not what AI is about at this point in time. And we do see a lot of opportunity for AI, you know, and helping organizations, with the visibility problem, collecting information and making sense of it more quickly and more widely. And I think that’s a great application for it. But, AI doesn’t fundamentally address the challenge that we do as middleware, which is that dialog between device and document. That’s a fundamentally different space than what AI is trying to do. It doesn’t really deal with the device part of that. And so, that’s what Solimar middleware does, is it helps to, connect those dots so that, you know how the device is responding. And you can see in real time kind of what your operations are about, and then you leverage the AI to go, okay, well, what might we do about this situation?
In some of our previous talks, we’ve sort of sliced the AI/IA thing so that we try to lay the groundwork for people to understand that if you don’t actually understand your environment, AI is not going to help you. And that the Chemistry platform is a way towards intelligent automation that could then make it possible for you to leverage some of the other AI tools. And it comes down to putting AI in its place. What is that place? Where do you think AI brings benefit to the production floor?
Well, as I pointed out, it’s really going to be around the collection of, that with the analysis of the data that you collect through the middleware. So, the middleware platform is a touch point so that the devices and the content generators have a way to share information about what’s going on, because you need that data collector. AI systems rely on other components to gather data for them so that they can analyze it. They’re really analysis tools. And so we provide that critical part to provide the platform that you can deploy a workflow that you can then measure information on, and then provide that to the AI systems that can then consume it.
So, you’re not anti-AI. I know you just want to put it in the right place in the organization to generate that level of trust that your solutions are built on.
Well, and in fact, that’s what our customers are telling us they want. I have seen, just this week, a couple of documents where organizations are very adamant about not getting AI introduced into their environments by a vendor like ourselves. You know, they need to deploy AI on their terms, not on a vendor’s terms. And then that makes complete sense.
It really does. And how much do you take advantage of AI tools yourself when you’re trying to decide the different new features that you’re going to put in for your customers?
Well, you know, we use it tactically, but we like to reason through what we’re doing and feel it out. We’re very collaborative within our organization. You know, we ask each other, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? Because we come at it from different experiences within the organization. I can appreciate, you know, AI, since there are so many different AI vendors now, you can ask the different engines. Hey, what do you think about this? And you’ll get different opinions. So, they’re almost like people in that regard. And I do love how they can consolidate, you know, large collections of information for you so they can distill down questions that are ambiguous in your own thought. But from a user experience, I think it’s oftentimes best to talk to people, you know, what’s your experience with this? What do you like? What do you not like? What do you think we can do better?
So yeah, because it’s based on their actual experience. And so I think it’s deeper insight.
Yeah. And in particular, you know, people in operations, they give you some really keen insight into what they’re struggling with because, those are some of the people under the most intense pressure out there just to get stuff done because they’re always on the clock. And yeah, and, when AI systems are on a clock, then things are probably change for them too. Yeah.
Do you think you’re going to have more questions from current and future customers about how you use AI in your solutions, and how they should be using AI in their production facilities?
Oh, absolutely. I think it’s going to be a hot topic for conversation for a long time. Because I think organizations are going to be experimenting with it, for a lot of different reasons within their organization. I mean, we see applications for AI within our organization that aren’t directly tied to the products that we deliver, but the internal workflows that we need to execute to run the business. So, I’m sure that everybody is going to have a chance to touch the AI and see a way that it might benefit. And so we’ll hear a lot of feedback from organizations about things they think we could be doing better. It’s great.
So Drew, we’ve talked about AI in a lot of different frameworks, but Solimar actually has AI front and center with Diego the bot. And from the moment he was introduced, there was a lot of chatter among the customers about the ability to have a conversation with Diego the bot, about things that are in the manuals, ways to do things, questions that they might think are silly and don’t want to ask your support people. So, this idea of self-service support via Diego seems to be a pretty cool one.
I love the idea. The whole concept of self-service support is not so much about, not having to do work. It’s about helping the customers get answers as quickly as we can get them. Pat it won’t surprise you that a lot of the questions we get aren’t directly related to our software. They’re issues that people are having and they just don’t know where to go to get the answers that they need. And so, we have a pretty big collection of information about those kinds of cases. It’s not specifically in our user manuals, but it’s stuff that we’re working to pull together so that, our little Diego chat bot, which is really a fun thing to have to help people who are learning about Solimar or trying to dig deeper into what our products do to get that information right from our website. What we’re pulling together that other information to help them get answers when they don’t know what to do. And so it’s really a fun, exploration for us that well.
Over time, Diego will not only learn more and more about the nuances of the entire Solimar platform, but probably the kinds of questions people are asking to help you figure out where the gaps are in their knowledge.
Yeah, exactly. It’s a really a wonderful tool for us to explore AI ourselves. You know, it’s a bit of a walled garden so that the information is constrained to just information about Solimar. So, you won’t learn anything about Andromeda from it. But, yeah. So, it’s wonderful. And it’s part of our strategy to help, our users be successful in as many ways as we can.
So, in addition to Diego as a source of knowledge, there is the Solimar University Online. And I’m not aware of any other vendor that has put the amount of effort into providing that level of education to its customers in an online format. Is the idea that Solimar University will also continue to grow, just as Diego will continue to learn more?
It keeps growing week by week. Yes, we actively are developing new content for SUO all the time. It is really foundational because it’s really solves the show me problem. And, you know, organizations, while we do offer services, we know that organizations don’t want to spend a lot on services. And so this is a great way to help them economize when it comes to the services question. And we help them be more targeted in the services that they need by being able to point them, okay, well go learn about this. And then the answer will make a lot more sense to you when we give it to you.
If I remember correctly, if I’m a Solimar user and I do any kind of online training with you, all of that material winds up in a version on Solimar University Online that I can get access to, and my team can get access to.
Well, that’s right. Customized training, we put into a little private bucket for the specific user that ordered that. And then they can go back to it time and time again to, to rehash as they need. But there’s other content that we publish that’s just generic about the products and that’s available to all the users on active licenses.
And then there’s also case studies that are being done and updated. So, the nice thing about a Solimar case study is it’s not one and done. You go back and revisit people years later and say, you know what? What have you done that’s new? How are we helping you now? That can be so valuable to especially to a new customer who’s not really sure what to expect with the journey?
Well, and I’m also grateful because a lot of our users volunteer to do these case studies for us. That’s not very common, as I understand. And that’s because they’ve got a lot of good news to share within their organizations. And, so the case studies do often get revised because our customers do often live with us for a long time, and their needs change because their platforms change. And fortunately, we’ve built our system in a very modular way, so that what you might need today and what you might need tomorrow are just different components that you change out.
That’s great. Drew, thank you so much for walking us through that. Something about the tangibility of Diego, even though he’s kind of a voice relationship, I think for most people. And then the tangibility of this, you go on it. I think that these are really great features of the Solimar ecosystem.
Well its just one big part of the strategy of just making sure the customers are getting what they what they should get when they license a product like ours.
So, we’ve covered a lot. We covered some really key areas, but it’s time to take a step back from all that great visibility and tracking and quality stuff we’ve been talking about, and talk a little bit about 35 years of Solimar Systems. Because you are, you’re one of the few companies that is still here under your name, under your ownership, 35 years into the game in an industry that’s known for mergers, acquisitions, consolidation, disappearing, and not keeping up with technology, you’re right here. So, what’s it been like to lead it? Because it’s changed a lot.
Well, Pat, you know, we’re evolutionary and not revolutionary. So, you know, we try to be forward thinking without shooting ourselves in the foot, and we try to measure what do people actually want versus what they say they want. There’s often a difference there. And so we try to deliver incremental enhancements to what we do. We like to offer tangentially relevant new capabilities for people when we think that they’re ready for it. But we stay very close to our user base, and we want to first make sure that they are getting the work done that they need to get done. And that’s, I think, if there’s any secret sauce in surviving 35 years, it’s making sure that your products work and they work for the people that are licensing them.
So, you were a risk taker in the early days, because in a world where, AFP and Metacode, and to some extent, PostScript and InnerPress were on everybody’s lips and PDF with the was this sort of unknown, you jumped on it and embraced it. And as a developer, what made you see that PDF was going to be able to handle the security requirements and the processing speed requirements of the industry you serve?
Well, that’s a great question, Pat. One of the things that I love about PDF is that unlike the other content streams you were referring to, it’s really designed to be a random access document, and it’s really an extendable document in many ways. You know, it was basically built with the, for the ability the users to extend upon it and add their own functionality to a PDF. You could effectively embed your own proprietary information into it. And so we saw it as a great platform to leverage, what people wanted visually from a document, you know, they wanted to play in an electronic space, but also to play in the actual print space. And we were very, I guess, in some ways, fortunate and that we saw that we could hide information in the PDF that would allow us to set up finishing, for example, and then through our other modules, relay that finishing information so that the device actually finished the way that you wanted it to. You know, select trays, duplex, all that kind of stuff. And I think that was a really important part of our making PDF for success in the print space was being able to do those things.
When you look across your staff over the years and the conversations that you have, how do you transfer as the guy sitting on top as the philosophy owner for the Solimar platform, how do you imbue that into the developers who have to actually write the code?
Well, that’s a great question. I think what we do is we try to take apart the elephant one bite at a time and so, you know, again, we’re evolutionary and not revolutionary. We build little components and we bolt them together over time. We don’t necessarily create everything that we do. When there’s something that we’re not expert at, we go and we license it from somebody else and add it to our technology. You know, for example, there are a lot of barcodes out there and some engines that do a great job at writing barcodes. So, we just license them and have them create the barcodes for us so we don’t have to decipher all those specifications. So, I think our success lies in being able to break things down into little bits and then bolting them all together in a way that creates a holistic platform, which is our Chemistry platform.
Does your team get that the architecture is, to some extent, the secret sauce of your success?
I’m not sure if they do, but I think we all are happy that the pieces play together as nicely as they do. You know, sometimes, there’s a little bit of luck involved, and you pick the right pieces, and they fit together perfectly, and you’re like, wow, I didn’t expect that when I had all the puzzles pieces, you know, turned upside down on the floor. But, yeah. And, you know, it helps that our staff, we have amazing longevity in our staff. We have several employees now, that have been with us over 30 years. And so we’re so grateful for that. There aren’t that many organizations that have the technical staff that have stayed with them for that period of time. Well, more than half of our employees have been with us over 15 years, which is wonderful. You know, we don’t have turnover in our organization. Occasionally we have people retire. We’re grateful that they stay with us as long as they can. Because we love to make it a nice home for people. We enjoy the camaraderie and, you know, people love to grow. And so when you recognize that everybody has an opportunity to contribute, they do, and they make magic. I think, what’s the secret sauce in doing all this? It’s relying on good people. You know, it’s a team of people that makes this work. You know, I’m just one cog in the wheel. And, you know, many other people have had the visions that bring this stuff together. It’s very collaborative. I would not claim to be the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to putting this stuff together, but we all have kind of, you know, some good seat of the pants kind of sense for, you know, what’s going to work, what’s not going to work, and what the market is willing to accept and what it actually wants. And so, collaboration is the key.
Because Solimar customers almost become like family, one of the things I wanted to explore with you was your approach to handling your customers and sort of crafting that relationship. The Customer Advisory Council concept that Solimar follows, I think is one of the best I’ve ever seen. There are very few software companies that have the kinds of relationships that Solimar has with their customers. And it’s the same with your partners. You have some great long term relationships now that because it does set you apart, I’m curious about how you made the decision to make that an integral part of Solimar.
Well, you know, Mary Ann does a wonderful job of building relationships with our partners and users and, for the most part, I lie in the background and just try to do the best I can at making sure that we are building great products and supporting them the best that we can. And so what I think the CAC does for us is it gives us a platform to reassure people that we’re really interested in solving their problems. And, we want to hear what they’re not happy about. And we want to hear what they like to learn about and where they think they’re struggling, you know, as organizationally outside of the scope of Solimar just what do they need to be successful looking forward. And so, we want to be a listening ear. And I think that we’ve been successful in doing that, in making companies feel secure and that they’ve got a good partner who listens to them, does their best to make sure that what they’ve got works for them and, and delivers them, an outstanding return on investment.
One of the things we hear at all the CAC meetings is that they feel very a collaborative relationship. They feel that they can make a phone call into the support hotline and just throw an idea at the at the team, and they’ll always get a response and they’ll always feel valued that their opinions are valued. As you’re looking towards 26 and 27 and 28 and 29 into the future, are there things that you want to, just kind of specific topics you want to hear about from your current customer set?
Oh, fantastic question. You know, one of the things, that has always been a bit of a puzzle to us is, why organizations are not as forceful. I’ll use that word, in with their printer vendors in making sure that the devices themselves are delivering the interfaces that will make the visibility problem easier. There are a lot of partial implementations of interfaces, the devices and, you know, I think it would be helpful for many of those organizations in solving, for example, their capacity problems to have the printer vendor step up and deliver more fully those interfaces that they’re offering, you know, make JDF work the way is supposed to work or move to XJDF for example. That would be half way, because half way is really no way in many cases.
And we always hear from the hardware vendors that they haven’t implemented something because no one was asking for it. And that always baffles me because I hear printers asking for capabilities they might not be calling it the right thing, but they know what they want.
Well, yeah. And I think what happens is a when stuff hasn’t been built for them and they say, well why isn’t it working. The pushback that they get, just delays in getting those problems resolved makes them just throw up their hands. Sometimes and go, yeah, it’s just not going to get done. We don’t know what to do. We got to go find some other way or just forget about it. And we can’t do that kind of thing. I think there’s a lot of we just forget about it, you know? Among those people, it’s just not technically feasible. They think, just because other people, provide too much pushback.
We know that print is not dead. We know it’s not dying. We know it’s changing. There’s some segments are seeing great growth, some are in decline, some are flat. And that’s probably going to be the story of printing forever in a million years. But as you sit here, having come through a lot of the changes in print, what is your vision of the future of print and the role that PDF and JDF and the other technologies we live with are going to play?
Yeah. Well, again, that connectivity piece is really critical to the success of print because, organizations are going to need to be able to run their equipment more efficiently. Just sticking with the status quo is just not going to cut it, in an era when AI start to dominate how communication is handled. So, we’re going to need to get more work done and going to need to be able to know exactly when it’s going to get done and how it’s going to get done. So, I think the printer vendors can be their own best friend by doing a better job of providing that connectivity. There’s still a ways to go for a lot of them. And there are gaps, you know, the PDF specification now includes that document part metadata support, and yet very few printer vendors have implemented that. And I have to ask one of those, why haven’t we done that.
There’s a basis that for doing something that no one has refused to buy a printer because it wasn’t there.
Yeah. There you go.
Right. They’re very clean operated in a lot of ways.
Just working around it.
Yeah, it’s very true. So, I mean, the vision for Solimar has always been to be that trusted partner and making sure that they that you can help your customers get the things that they need communicated through the communication channels and out. You’ve got stable customers, you’ve got stable partners. You’re a reliable provider. Is there one thing you would say to someone who is not currently a customer to convince them to come have the conversation with you?
Well, I’d say, look at the breadth of users that we have that are there because they’re getting significant benefit from what we do. We never forced anybody to have anything. And so they do it out of their own free will because they see the benefits for themselves. And I think many of them have been surprised by how short the return is on the investment and how long the investment lasts. And our customers are often with us for multiple decades. And when you think about other software that you have, you know, it’ll be out the window in a couple of years.
Drew, thanks so much for taking time to do this. I know you were busy, but when we can hear how you’re thinking about things, I think just changes the way the Solimar solution set gets perceived. I think people understand that there’s a lot of thought behind it, there’s a lot of effort behind it, and there’s a lot of history behind it. And that cultural history, I think, plays a big role in people understanding that they can trust you.
Well, yeah, we want to perpetuate stability. That’s the thing. We’re here for the long haul for our customers.
That’s great. So everybody who’s been watching this, what I hope you’re taking away from this is that there are a lot of things within the Solimar Systems’ ecosystem that can help you be more productive and help your operation be more efficient and effective, while still being trusted by the clients you serve and the team members on your own floor who are helping get things out the door. 35 years is a long time, drives a lot of cultural history behind it, and sometimes that’s the exact same thing you need in order to ensure that you’re building for the future. Understanding your past is a good gateway to do. So Drew, thanks so much for your thoughts.
Thanks, Pat. Thank you everyone for listening.
