“Solimar Systems is a great partner and helped us work through many details"
Ask most software companies for a customer reference, and you get a project. Ask Solimar Systems about OSG, and you get a working relationship measured in decades. OSG — previously NCP Solutions — has worked with Solimar Systems for over 20 years, through acquisitions, platform migrations, and a complete rebuild of the company’s electronic document archiving and delivery. At the centre of that work sits Atlantis, OSG’s imaging network system, with SOLsearcher™ Enterprise (SSE) as its electronic document repository and retrieval engine.
OSG has sat on the Solimar Systems Customer Advisory Council since its inception, and the company continues to use that seat. The Council comprises over companies and nearly 100 individual members, and it is where customer requirements become roadmap items. Both Tim Cooper, OSG’s Chief Architect, and Daniel Durie, its Chief Technology Officer, are active contributors.
Several SSE capabilities exist today because OSG requested them. Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) was added to the product on OSG’s recommendation. Flate compression was added to bring down delivery times when serving extremely large files. Configurable modules on output servers — the mechanism OSG now uses to scale retrieval — emerged from the same conversations.
“Solimar Systems is a great partner and helped us work through many details,” says Tim Cooper. Daniel Durie puts it in the present tense: “There have been different bottlenecks at different times, and we’ve worked with the Solimar Systems technical team to address and overcome all of them.”
Why OSG Went Looking
The short version of the backstory: by 2009, the legacy imaging platform inherited from NCP’s Jacksonville operation could no longer keep up. Retrieval had stretched to between four and ten seconds. Every new client meant 24 to 60 hours of custom programming. Billing was manual, and there was no path to scale a business growing both organically and by acquisition. “Four to ten seconds to open a PDF file can feel like an eternity when you’re on a website,” says Cooper.
Research in 2010 confirmed no off-the-shelf system would do the job, so OSG built one. During a design session in Jacksonville, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off, the project acquired a code name, and — as often happens — the code name stuck. SSE was written into the core design as the image repository. The build began in autumn 2011; Atlantis went into production in April of 2013.
Every goal OSG set for the project — accuracy, delivery, audit, automated billing, performance and scalability, configurable setup without programming, and real-time monitoring — was met. “We were able to solve all of these issues with our Atlantis system using Solimar Systems as the back-end technology solution,” says Cooper. That is where most case studies stop. It is where this one starts.
Benefits
- Massive processing scale: 34.9 million documents and 80.4 million images archived daily
- Rapid availability: 550,000 documents processed, loaded, and online within six hours
- Fast document retrieval: 48% served in under 0.5 seconds, 71% in under 1 second, and 96% within 3.5 seconds
- Cost-efficient storage: Automated migration from solid-state storage to virtual tape as documents age
- Flexible, long-term retention: Configurable retention from short reprint windows to 30-year archives, with tier thresholds and deletion dates
- Simplified growth and onboarding: Configuration replaces custom programming, with scale-out achieved by adding server modules
Read the full Case Study – https://www.solimarsystems.com/case-studies/two-decades-one-partnership-how-osg-and-solimar-systems-built-a-leading-edelivery-and-archive-solution/
