Datalogics Maximizes PDF Performance with PDF Optimizer: Solutions Gate Case Study

PDF Optimizer Beats Competition on Performance, Functionality, Support

The need to reduce large PDF files brought Solutions Gate to Datalogics initially, and the combination of product performance, customer service, and price made them a customer.

Headquartered in Amman, Jordan, Solutions Gate is an IT solutions and professional services company serving the telecom industry. They provide their global customers with general and integrated IT solutions and software development. While working on document management for their largest customer out of Kuwait, they contacted Datalogics for help optimizing PDFs to reduce file sizes.

“In December 2022, we partnered with a French document management and generation company to help us with our customer," said Solutions Gate General Manager Mohammad Al Naimat. “This company has a suite of products that generates numerous types of documents, including HTML, Postscript, and PDFs, which our customer was using.”

The Challenge

During their proof of concept for this project, they realized the original invoices they were generating during the process were too large and needed to be compressed in size without losing quality.

“The files being generated were very big due to embedding special forms into the documents – forms which are not standard,” Al Naimat said. “The forms included Arabic font, images, logos and so on.”

They began their search for the perfect software to help them optimize the documents. They started with an open source software – the price was right! - but which generated documents too slowly.

“We contacted a PDF software company and although the software worked, the price was too high for us,” Al Naimat said. Solutions Gate was looking to pay for the license to use themselves without passing the cost onto the customer.

“Another company’s online software evaluation didn’t work correctly, so we were never able to test the software. When they did respond to us, it turned out they too were too expensive as their pricing was based on the number of pages generated.” Some of the client’s documents were hundreds of thousands of pages long, so this software didn’t work for them either. Another software didn’t have the performance required, it was expensive, and there were additional security concerns – of utmost importance when dealing with a telecom company.

The Solution

“Then we tried Datalogics PDF Optimizer Linux 64-bit,” Al Naimat said. “Its performance, functionality and ability were exactly what we needed at a third of the price of the others we had considered. This is one of the main reasons we moved forward with Datalogics.”

The Solutions Gate team originally downloaded the evaluation and license key from the website, but Datalogics also supplied an offline version which did not require an internet connection, which increased the speed of the optimization and was great for testing the whole process.

Solutions Gate performed some benchmarking with Datalogics and other products using 2 files (6 pages original size 850KB, 2100-page original size 6.7MB) which provided the following results:

“In addition to the PDF Optimizer performing well, working with Michael Dudley (VP of Sales, Datalogics) was very good,” Al Naimat said. “Our discussions with him were always friendly, and we knew we were working with good people. He is very straightforward, which is important to me.”

Al Naimat said there was little to no interaction with people from other companies. “You could download the evaluations and try them, but that’s what made Datalogics stand out the personal touch.”

“As soon as I downloaded the evaluation, I received an email from Mike with more info about the offline capability during testing, which was very helpful. I appreciated that because our customer service team doesn’t have internet access (for security purposes), so it was important that we could work with the software tool offline.”

“PDF Optimizer did a very good job of reducing the file sizes. For example, a 102MB file was reduced to 70MB, a 30% decrease in size, which is fantastic,” said Al Naimat. “We had one file that was 60,000 pages - about 150 MB - that took 45 minutes to optimize. That is extremely fast considering the size of the original file.”

“The overall performance of PDF Optimizer, ease of use, support from the Datalogics team, and the price – Datalogics wins on all of these.”

Datalogics offers a free evaluation with PDF Optimizer command-line tool.

Need an SDK to handle your optimization needs? Download a free trial of Adobe PDF Library.

Contact Solutions Gate for more information on their IT and professional services.