Two Decades, One Partnership: How OSG and Solimar Systems Built a Leading eDelivery and Archive Solution

Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)

OSG needed documents to automatically move to less expensive storage as they aged, without changing how users find them. “We built Hierarchical Storage Management into SSE per OSG’s recommendation,” Mary Ann Rowan, Chief Experience Officer at Solimar Systems. Newest work lands on the fastest storage; older work dynamically migrates through progressively slower and less expensive tiers; documents are automatically deleted when the agreed-upon retention date arrives. “It’s totally blind to the user,” Rowan notes. “They have no idea what storage system they’re going to get it from. It might take half a second longer; it may not.” HSM is core to SSE, and all customers can benefit from this functionality.

File compression

Print wants CMYK and high resolution. Archive does not. OSG and Solimar Systems worked through color space and resolution together, then kept going. “We were sweating every kilobyte in the PDF,” Cooper recalls. “That’s when Solimar Systems implemented flate compression for us.” At 80 million images a day, where images rather than documents consume capacity, those kilobytes compound.

Archive structure tuned for query performance

“On the database side, that’s something we’ve spent a lot of time with Solimar Systems on as well,” says Durie, “making sure we have archives structured so that when a client logs in, they’re not searching a greater amount of data than needs to be searched.”

Configurable modules on output servers

This is the capability Daniel Durie singles out when asked how OSG keeps retrieval fast as volume grows. “One of the great features of SSE is that we can configure modules on output servers. That’s one of the ways we’ve been able to scale — to add servers over time and control how those are managed.”

The most useful thing OSG has learned about archives is that documents are not equally interesting over time.

Across nearly every vertical, access concentrates in the first 30 to 90 days — a consumer questions a charge, a service representative pulls a statement, a client requests a reprint. After that, activity falls away sharply, even though the retention obligation may run for years. In mortgage servicing, it can run for the life of a loan: up to 30 years.

”Even on the mortgage side, tiered storage is critical,” says Cooper, “because in reality most of the access across all of the markets is going to occur in the first 60 to 90 days. And then you can move that to lower-cost, slower-performing storage.”

Durie frames the economics directly. “The easiest thing would be to put everything on the fastest storage, everything on a tiny database table. But we have customers who want to keep things for the life of a loan, and it’s much less common that someone’s going to look at something from 12 years ago.”

Retention periods themselves are configuration, not code. SSEs are deleted automatically when the agreed timeframe is reached, and adjusting them — for a project, an audit, a business event — is a routine client conversation rather than a development request.

Direct Access is OSG’s branded retrieval service, embedded in client websites so that end consumers can access the Atlantis SSE-based archive without ever leaving the brand they are dealing with.

“That’s just phenomenal, and I would argue it’s still industry-leading today,” says Cooper. The longer tail belongs to multi-page documents — some 40 or 50 pages, occasionally more than a thousand images.

Scale sits behind the speed. The Atlantis dashboard reports 34.9 million documents and 80.4 million images per day, at roughly 3.35 million images per hour. One of OSG’s tightest SLAs requires that 550,000 documents be received, processed, loaded, and made available online within six hours.

The change OSG’s own team notices most is what no longer happens.

Under the legacy system, almost every client arrived with specific requirements — index method, PDF naming convention, multi-document versus single-document PDFs, delivery bundling — and each one meant a developer. Today, all of it is configuration inside the Atlantis output and FTP engines, built on SSE’s archive structure. Flex fields handle delivery bundling, where a job that runs as a single job in production needs to reach the client as several jobs. Archive segregation keeps client data separate and, increasingly, keeps departments within a single client separate to prevent fraud.

“I don’t think we’ve had to make a code change to support a client-specific request in many years,” says Durie. “I say that as someone whose background way back in the day was a developer — but it’s great when you don’t have to write code to meet a customer request.”

Onboarding tells the same story. Asked how long it now takes to bring a new client into Atlantis, Durie’s answer surprised the room: “The actual configuration of it, I’d imagine that’s a couple of days, tops. The actual hands-on keyboard, it’s very, very fast.”

Thirteen years after Atlantis went live, the requirements have changed considerably, and OSG has met them from the same foundation, extending rather than replacing.

Digital delivery is now table stakes

“Digital delivery is required. On every RFP that we’re doing, it’s required,” says Durie. “The expectation on how long it takes something to process has come down across the board, but where you see that most is digital delivery. They’d like to send a file overnight, and the digital images are ready in the morning — which is vastly different from when we were implementing Atlantis originally.”

Onboarding speed has become a sales argument

“We’re always pushed on how we can onboard faster. It’s been great from the perspective of Atlantis to say, well, we know this piece isn’t going to take a long time. That’s a huge advantage of this platform.”

Review and release has evolved

OSG’s proofs-and-approvals workflow lets clients inspect a job in the archive before it prints. It used to require the client to nominate specific documents in advance. “More clients don’t want to be tied down to doing that,” says Durie. “They’d rather look at the whole file and choose whatever accounts they want. We’ve accomplished that by indexing it so you can search anything on the document in advance of the approval for printing.” That change is recent, and it was possible because the indexing capability was already there.

Mixed input formats keep arriving

OSG’s coupon system still produces Metacode, and clients still send AFP. Solimar Print Director Enterprise and Rubika transform them into indexed PDFs for SSE — and clients increasingly ask for the digital image to be improved or enhanced after the fact, which post-composition is built to do.

Segregation requirements keep tightening

Multiple archives for a single client, departmental access restrictions, and fraud-prevention boundaries within one organization. “That’s a more and more common ask,” says Durie.

The same architecture now underpins newer Solimar Systems capabilities. SSE is the back end for piece-level tracking, and SOLsearcher™ Cloud extends the same model as a cloud-native service on Azure — evidence that the platform OSG helped shape in 2011 is still where new development happens.