NetOxygen Frequently Asked Questions
Are all the vendors of rich-client Loan Origination Systems (LOS) beginning to put Internet capability at the center of their development efforts?
No. However, Gallagher put Internet origination capability at the core of its systems development efforts beginning in 1998.
Some mortgage technology vendors are making good strides towards a Web-based LOS. When will a viable solution be available?
Three years ago. The Gallagher NetOxygen system was developed from the ground up as a 100% native Internet platform using Web services with backward compatibility to its previous generation rich-client LOS. NetOxygen has been in live production since the first quarter of 2001.
Many vendors seem to be working on a browser-based system that delivers the experience and functionality of thick- or rich-client systems. How far off is that?
Gallagher has had a browser-based system that delivers the experience of a rich client in production use for over three years. NetOxygen delivers a rich-client experience to the desktop using native Internet protocols, without reliance on additional server equipment. It is available today, and Gallagher has been in production with their NetOxygen solution since early 2001.
An Internet LOS will require a programmer to configure or customize, right?
Wrong. NetOxygen was designed so that lenders can configure, maintain, and take ownership of their own system. Customization and configuration are the domain of a System Administrator or business analyst. Gallagher’s tools are designed to put the configuration of the system in the hands of your business analysts, which frees up your IT staff to focus on the vision and strategy of technology initiatives. As a primary example, Gallagher’s NetOxygen Studio lets business analysts quickly create HTML Web pages for Web deployment using a drag-and-drop interface that requires no programming whatsoever.
When an Internet LOS solution is available, what kind of performance can users realistically expect?
While it’s true that a rich-client LOS system can be "ported" to an Internet system, it won’t be scalable, and users can expect diminished performance. That’s why Gallagher designed and created NetOxygen as a native Internet platform using Web services. NetOxygen was developed from the ground up to support a multi-company, branch-based environment—it is not a port of a legacy system—and it scales both horizontally and vertically. NetOxygen was architected to work in a server-farm deployment in a load-balanced environment; therefore, more users and branches can be supported by adding more servers, if necessary—NetOxygen supports thousands of concurrent users. To ease concerns about scalability and performance, Gallagher continually tests NetOxygen in the Gallagher Labs environment.
How many users can an Internet solution support?
NetOxygen supports thousands of concurrent users, with the largest production client currently having 3,500 users, and it has been independently tested with 10,000 concurrent users. Gallagher has a wide range of users installed at each customer site—with the average number being 850 users. Inherently, the NetOxygen architecture was developed as a multi-threaded application that can make use of multiple CPUs and increased memory. Therefore, if the memory capacity is increased or the CPU’s are upgraded, more concurrent users can be supported per physical box. As a matter of fact, NetOxygen supports the use of multiple surrogates on the server to optimize memory usage.
If an Internet LOS allows access to a wider customer base, won’t database scalability be an issue?
No. Unlike a traditional client/server technology deployment, where the database is used to perform much of the processing, all of NetOxygen’s processing power is needed on the application servers. For example, in almost all of our in-house load tests using the Mercury Interactive Suite, even to levels of 2,500 concurrent users, the database resources are typically used between a maximum of 10% - 15%.
Will deploying a new LOS require a company to purchase new hardware for all its users?
No. Since NetOxygen is a true n-tier, thin-client, Web services-based application architecture, there is no client component that needs to be distributed or updated. The client application can be any software that can make an XML request via SOAP or a COM call. Typically, this is a browser, such as Netscape Navigator (6.10/6.2) or Internet Explorer (5.5/6.0), and the client hardware can be any machine capable of running one of these browsers. NetOxygen leverages off of standard browsers running on existing hardware.
