Frequently Asked Questions

We have over 1,100 Solartians.

These employees support both our Solartis Insure Technology Platform as well as our Solartis Administer (BPO) Services.

Our Corporate Mailing Address
Solartis, LLC
1601 North-Sepulveda Blvd. #606
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266

We have four Delivery Locations
Solartis Technology Services Pvt. Ltd.
DLF IT Park, Block 3, First Floor
No. 1/124, Shivaji Garden, Nandambakkam Post
Mount Poonamallee Road, Manapakkam
Chennai — 600 089. Tamil Nadu, INDIA.

Solartis Technology Services Pvt. Ldt.
Hanudev Infotech Park
Block C, 5th Floor
Udayampalayam Main Road
Nava India, Coimbatore — 641 028. Tamil Nadu, INDIA.

Solartis Technology Services Pvt. Ltd.
Sorna Thiru Towers
Plot Number 288, Anna Nagar
Madurai — 625 020. Tamil Nadu, INDIA.

Solartis Technology Services Pvt. Ltd.
Number 3, 120 Feet Road,
Swami Vivekananda Nagar,
K Pudur Post,
Madurai — 625 007. Tamil Nadu, INDIA

1: Solartis Insure

Solartis Insure is an API-centric policy administration platform built totally on microservice architecture. The platform is deployed in cloud infrastructure and supports the full policy life cycle process (e.g., submission, rate, quote, refer, bind, ePay, issue, renew, endorse, cancel, reinstate, audit, etc.) for all P&C personal and commercial lines of business.

Here are some examples of Solartis Insure microservices:

1a: Transaction Microservices
We have 100+ transaction microservices that support the full policy life cycle process. They are available out of the box and ready for your immediate use.

Use our Solartis Builder (the toolkit used to initially configure and maintain your insurance products) to select and orchestrate the services that you need.

Here are a few examples of our Transaction Microservices:

1b: Solartis Workflow microservices

Access our workflow microservices via an API call which subsequently calls the individual microservices which perform the needed policy life cycle transactions. The individual microservice can be a Solartis service,  a service provided by you, or one provided by a third party.

Here are a few examples of our workflow microservices:

1c: Rating Microservice
Our rating microservice automates coverage and premium calculations. Use the Solartis Builder to quickly configure and maintain all your rating components (i.e., the states you write in, your coverages, rate tables, valid values, as well as your coverage and premium calculations).

1d: Document Generation Microservice
Our Document Generation Microservice produces all necessary policy documents (i.e., proposals, rating worksheets, policy packets, endorsements, renewal policies etc.). Business Analysts use our Solartis Builder to easily configure and maintain all policy documents (and their associated forms).

Form Authoring allows you to create all your proprietary static and dynamic forms in Microsoft Word (DocX). Simply use the Solartis Form Editor Plug-In to incorporate all dynamic product attributes.

1e: Metadata Microservice (for UI/UX page and page attribute rendering)
Use Solartis Metadata Microservices to render your UI/UX pages and their page attributes. Business Analysts initially configure and maintain all your insurance product’s UI/UX pages and attributes in our Solartis Builder.

Yes, Customers choose from the following delivery models to meet the needs of their tech initiatives, lines of business, programs, distribution channels and user types.  

2a: Solartis Insure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This is our “total solution” option.  Solartis provides all the needed sales quote and policy life cycle microservices. This includes the user interface, business flow, integrations, and reporting database. This option is currently used by customers in consumer portals, broker/agent systems quoting systems, and full-blown carrier underwriter systems. This is a good option if the customer does not have IT capacity and needs the vendor to take on the full project.  

2b: Solartis Insure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): This “Solartis Inside” option provides all the Solartis stateful sales and policy life cycle microservices without the UI/UX. This model allows Solartis to work collaboratively with your IT team, which develops and designs the user interface and business flow. Access the Solartis underlying sales and policy life cycle microservices (to support your quoting system or full policy life cycle platform) through API calls. A JSON request is sent to Solartis with the information needed to perform the transaction. Solartis then returns the requested information back in a JSON response. This option allows your IT team to control the project, reduces the development time and cost, and minimizes project risks as all rate, quote, and policy admin functionality comes pre-tested and ready to go.  

2c: Solartis Insure Rating as a Service (RaaS): Use of just the Solartis Rating and Metadata Microservices accessed via stateless APIs calls from your technology platform or your channel partner tech platforms. (No UI/UX)

1: The Solartis Builder

All Solartis Insurance products are developed and maintained in the Solartis Builder. The Solartis Builder is built specifically for insurance, and just like Solartis Insure, the Solartis Builder is built entirely on the cloud, with no legacy applications. Here is a high-level overview of the Solartis Builder's components and capabilities:  

1a: Create Insurance Products: A new insurance product can be either configured from scratch or can be created from a base insurance product; or from a bureau-based product like ISO ERC. Solartis contains the complete library of ISO ERC content, digitally consuming all ISO ERC countrywide and state-specific files into the Solartis platform. Via Solartis Builder, all ISO ERC content (states, coverages, rate tables, algorithms, forms selection rules, and stat codes) is accessible for customers to manage and use. An insurer can view, analyze, and manipulate all ISO data across all states via a graphical representation of the data or through downloadable spreadsheets. An insurer adds its carrier rate and rule exceptions and its carrier-specific forms, then tests and deploys the ISO-based product(s) into production. 

1b: Maintain Insurance Product(s): An insurer uses the Solartis Builder to manage all aspects of their insurance products; they can create and manage products and product versions, states and state deviations, coverages, rate tables, lookup tables, UI/UX pages and attributes, all documents, associated forms, processing rules, and algorithms.

1c: Configure, orchestrate, maintain, and test your microservices:  The Solartis Builder is used to configure, orchestrate and maintain all needed microservices. The Solartis Builder also provides the ability to test on the individual microservice level.

1d: Promote: Solartis has one environment for development, testing, and production.  Changes can be created, tested, and deployed into production using the Solartis Builder by business users without any need for additional DevOps resources.

1e: Activity Log: Solartis Solartis Builder provides a full audit trail of all changes made to insurance products, as well as an activity log of who performed the changes and when. 

2: Solartis Application Monitoring Tool

The Solartis Application Monitoring Tool (AMT) allows Solartis to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to potential system issues and/or problems.  The AMT is a tool used to monitor all Solartis customers’ production environments, ensuring services are always up and running efficiently.  Solartis monitors on a 24/7 basis for potential failures or performance issues including failures related to third-party system integrations. The system is used by the Solartis Application Monitoring Team and is also extended to Solartis customers so they can monitor their activities themselves.

3: Solartis Explorer 

Solartis also provides The Solartis Explorer Platform which allows Solartis or the customer to run various “what-if” scenarios on a book of business level versus the individual policy level from either the Solartis Insure Platform or from other third-party systems.

The Solartis Insure Platform is a comprehensive suite of components that support all the activities associated with insurance policy administration.

#1: Is our Solartis Builder. This is the toolkit Solartis, and our customers use to initially configure and maintain insurance products.

#2: The Solartis platform is our collection of microservices to perform full policy administration

• Our microservices are separate from your UI/UX and are accessible via API calls.   
• You can have multiple systems or UI/UX calling the same set of microservices for your insurance products.  
• You can have a consumer portal for your insureds, an Agency or Broker Facing System, or a UI/UX designed for your internal users.   You can also extend access to any other distribution channels/partners.

#3 is our Policy Life cycle transaction database which houses all policy transactions and user activity.

#4 is our Solartis Reporter Platform. It allows you to report on all information and user activity stored in the transaction database. In our reporter platform, you can create dashboards, canned reports, and ad-hoc reports using OLAP cubes.

#5 is our Solartis Explore Platform. Solartis Explore allows you to work with your policies on the book of business level versus on the individual policy level. In other words, you can make bulk changes on the entire book versus one policy at a time.

#6 is our Application Monitoring Tool

• It’s the tool we use to monitor all Solartis customers’ production environments.  
• It ensures that all application services are always up and running efficiently.  
• We monitor all customer systems 24 hours a day / 7 days a week for potential failures, performance issues, and failures related to third-party system integrations. 
• The system is primarily used by our Application Monitoring Team, but we also extend it to our customers so they can monitor their activities themselves.

Solartis Insure supports all Property & Casualty non-admitted and admitted insurance products.
We configure the product content directly in our Solartis Builder. Below are some examples of proprietary product lines we have in production today.

Commercial Lines P&C:

• Property (Fire, Wind, Earthquake)
• General Liability 
• Environmental Liability
• Inland Marine
• Auto
• Umbrella
• Package/Programs (including Artisan Contractors, Habitational, Restaurant, Mercantile, and Wholesale)
• Workers Compensation
• Special Events Liability

Accident and Health Product lines: 

• Special Events Accident
• Business Travel Accident
• Student Travel Accident
• Sports Team/Camp/School Accident
• Group Accident
• Individual Accident

Personal Lines (P&C)

• Homeowners
• Dwelling Fire
• Builders Risk
• Vacant Property
• Vacant Land
• Umbrella
• Leisure Travel
• Personal Auto Ride Share
• Earthquake
• Jewelry 
• Mobile Device

A game-changer feature of the Solartis Platform is our consumption and use of ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC) for ISO Commercial Lines of Business. Solartis engineers have spent the past three years “cracking the code” on how to natively consume ISO digital rating, algorithm, form selection, and statistical coding data. The result is an ever-growing library of pre-configured pure ISO Commercial Lines of Business versions with the latest ISO Circulars and updates.

We take the electronic content from the hundreds of ISO ERC files, consume it into our platform, and make it usable and accessible to you in any way you want to see it. You can view, work, analyze, and manipulate this data across all states from a graphical representation versus individual Excel spreadsheets or PDF manuals. Rather than shifting through dozens of complex spreadsheet files, streamline your content consumption process with our user-friendly interface and state-of-the-art tools.

Your Carrier exceptions or deviations to ISO are configured in our Solartis Builder. These carrier exceptions sit “on top” of the ISO ERC countrywide and state versions, thus preserving the carriers’ deviations upon subsequent updates to ISO rating content.

• The following ISO ERC product lines are available in our platform for your use: 
• Business Owners
• General Liability
• Commercial Umbrella
• Non-filed Inland Marine
• Commercial Auto (CA)
• Commercial Auto – OCP (AU)
• Commercial Inland Marine
• Commercial Package Policy
• Commercial Property
• Crime
• Workers Compensation
• Cyber  

Yes, Out of sequence endorsement processing in currently in production in Solartis. The Solartis Policy Transaction data supports versioning. Policy transactions are versioned during the endorsement cancellation and reinstatement processes, etc. In addition, we maintain an endorsement transaction that describes the actual endorsement/changes applied to the Policy. During an OOS Endorsement process, we void the endorsement transactions required to be re-sequenced, point the Policy to the policy’s appropriate policy version record, and rerun the endorsements to the selected prior version of the Policy.

Solartis microservice are headless, meaning that they are decoupled from the User Interface or Screens. For your insurance products, you can use the same underlying orchestrated microservices that you use for your internal users for your Consumer, Broker, Agent, or third-party distribution partners users. This allows you or Solartis to design a custom user Experience Layer that meets the needs of these individual user types.

Agent & Broker Portals: Most of our agent & broker users share the same screens (look and feel) as our customer’s internal users. They just have different permissions. We will be happy to demonstrate example Solartis systems that are used by both our customer’s internal users and their agents / brokers.

Solartis Insure supports full reporting and analysis on all data stored or imported into the Solartis Insure Platform. We provide:

• The Solartis Reporter Platform
• Custom Dashboards
• Canned Reports - predefined reports with filters  
• Analysis Reports – Point and Click Adhoc reports using OLAP Cubes
• Solartis Reporting Database 
• We provide a near-real-time replicated reporting database instance for customers to develop their own reports using their own reporting tool or to pass data to downstream systems. 

Business users can create custom reports without any IT resources

We use an agile methodology to perform our configurations and the functions are broken out into Epics and Stories. The output of this work is viewable in regularly scheduled Sprint cycles.
Each sprint lasts between 2 to 4 weeks & includes unit testing and a Quality Assurance process.
At the end of each sprint, we hold a Sprint Demo to show the work product, UI flows etc. to ensure that we are in sync with the business expectation of the functions.

Our 1st sprint usually consists of configuring your Insurance Products our Solartis Builder

Solartis Builder is the toolkit used by Business Analysts to create and manage P&C insurance products in the Solartis Platform.

It is here that you too will be able to Manage product changes, coverages, rate tables, valid values, policy forms, documents, and algorithms post go live.

Team size of each role is dependent on the size of the project and complexity of the insurance product line(s) to be implemented.

The size of your team and each role is dependent on the size of the project and complexity of the insurance product line(s) to be implemented.

Our team has a daily scrum meeting to ensure that all expected work products are progressing as planned, any issues are being monitored, resolved and communicated back to the Team.

On a Weekly basis, our core support application support team meets with the customer (typically in a 30-minute meeting) to discuss milestones, issues and priorities for upcoming sprints.

On at least a quarterly cadence, the Solartis Account management team will meet with the Customers management team to ensure that we are meeting our commitments and discuss any future strategic alignments we may have together.

For simple Insurance Products:

For the more complex Insurance Products

Key Risks: 

1. Requirements Finalization 
2. User Experience (Business User Acceptance) 
3. Change Management 
4. Integrations (third party support)
5. Data Migration (Data quality)
6. Business User Availability 
7. User Acceptance Testing  
8. Agent Rollout, Training, System Acceptance

We use the following tools / practices to best mitigate these risks:

• Using JIRA or a similar project management tool
• Employing training Agile practitioners
• Effective Steering Committee involvement
• Formal Change Management

All Solartis Insurance products are developed and maintained in the Solartis Builder. The Soalrtis Builder is built specifically for insurance and just like Solartis Insure, the Solartis Builder is built with true cloud services and no legacy applications. Here is a high-level overview of the Solartis Builder's components and capabilities:

• Create Insurance Products: A new insurance product can be either configured from scratch or can be created from a base insurance product built from scratch or from a bureau-based product like ISO ERC. Solartis contains the complete library of ISO ERC content—Solartis digitally consumes all the ISO ERC countrywide and state-specific files into the Solartis platform. Via Solartis Builder, all ISO ERC content (states, coverages, rate tables, algorithms, forms selection rules, and stat codes) are accessible for customers to manage and use. An insurer can view, work, analyze, and manipulate all the ISO data across all states via a graphical representation of the data or through downloadable spreadsheets. An insurer adds its carrier rate and rule exceptions and its carrier-specific forms, then tests and deploys the ISO based product(s) into production.
  
  
• Maintain Product(s): An insurer uses the Solartis Builder to manage all aspects of their insurance products; they can create and manage products and product versions, states and state deviations, coverages, rate tables, lookup tables, UI/UX pages and its attributes, all documents, their associated forms, processing rules and algorithms.
  
  
• Test and Promote: Solartis has one environment for development, testing and production. Changes are created, tested, and deployed into production using the Solartis Builder by business users without any assistance from DevOps
  
  
• Activity Log: Solartis Builder provides a full audit trail of all changes made to insurance products, as well as who performed the changes and when.

All functions other than editing of the algorithms and rules (BPMN and its rules tasks) can be performed by Business Analysts; Create Customer, Create Product (from scratch or from an existing product), Initial product, Create and maintain the product structure and its attributes, states, coverages, rate tables, look up (valid value tables), UI/UX pages and attributes, policy documents and their associated forms, Form authoring, testing on the microservice and system level, promote from DEV to TEST to LIVE.

Rate changes are easily configured by business analysts in our Solartis Builder. See example screen below. The business analyst user simply exports the table to be updated to excel and add the new rate values / versions. See example Excel file below. Once the updates are made, she imports them back into the Solartis Builder. Updated Rates table versions are then available in DEV mode so they can be tested before pushed to Live.

Rate tables and their values are versioned with an applicable, effective and expiration date to support all your ongoing changes.

Example ProductBuilderLCM Rate Table Screen:

Our Document Generation Microservice produces all your needed policy documents (i.e., proposals, rating worksheets, policy packets, endorsements, renewal policies etc.) and associated forms.

Business Analysts use our Solartis Builder to easily configure and maintain all policy documents (and their associated forms). All documents and each policy form are versioned with an applicable, effective and expiration date to support your ongoing changes.

Business Users use the Microsoft Word (DocX) to create all your proprietary static and dynamic forms. Simply use our Solartis Form Editor Plug-In to incorporate all your dynamic product attributes.

The Solartis Insure Platform is Designed, Developed, and Deployed based on a microservice-driven architecture model.

In the Solartis Insure Platform, the UI/UX is completely separate from our business functional components/services as webservice driven microservices. The UI/UX is an orchestration layer that glues all microservices to quickly build and/or rebuild UI/UX for a different set of user groups if required. All business layer components are enabled as granular stateless microservices which can be deployed in a clustered environment that provides unlimited scalability. The Solartis Insure Platform components/services are partitioned N+1 tier-based architecture where scalability and extend-ability are unlimited for extending new services/components and for deployment for High Availability (HA). Each of the Solartis Insure Microservices are enabled natively and independently from the ground up on the cloud. They support federated architecture which allows orchestration and interoperability between heterogeneous systems with integration over the cloud without dependency with other microservices. They are invokable from any cloud infrastructure platform such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.

Each Solartis Insure Microservice is independently subscribe-able over the cloud. They are elastically scalable by themselves without dependencies to other microservices or systems. Each microservice is independently designed, developed, deployed. They run standalone and are maintained on independent clustered environments without dependency with other services.

Solartis core platform framework is developed using Java Enterprise Edition 6(JEE 6). Each of the Solartis Insure Platform microservices are enabled on top of BPMN 2.0 driven jBPM ruleflows and Knowledgebase servers. Every business service is associated to a business user-friendly BPMN 2.0 driven jBPM ruleflows. Behind the ruleflow task, collection framework plug-ins are provided to common services like database access, send mail, document generation, etc. Solartis Insure Microservices are deployed on JBOSS Enterprise Application Platform (JBOSS EAP 7.x) in clustered mode.

The Solartis Platform uses Oracle's MySQL Enterprise Server 8 for managing and maintain transactional and configuration data. In addition, it uses Apache Camel and ActiveMQ for asynchronous processing. Apache FOP using XSL/FO and Microsoft Word DocX for document authoring and document generation. In addition, uses Alfresco for document management, Pentaho for reporting and Kettle for ETL.

We deploy our solution on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/) which always runs on latest hardware and network. Based on our experience with other Cloud vendors like Azure and AWS we selected Oracle Cloud because it is superior in performance, availability and scalability for our needs.

Our service layer is fully multi-tenant, but data tier is single tenant. Each customer will have their own data and file system repository, but our services are shared between customers. We configure our customer services to the commonly shared service pool during the initial setup to get shared.

Solartis Platform uses Oracle's MySQL Enterprise Server 8 for managing and maintain transactional and configuration data.

Solartis is a cloud-based platform that can run on any browser that supports HTML 5.

All Solartis microservices can be used on any device; Laptops, smartphones, iPad, chatbots and apps.

Solartis user interface (UI/UX) is configured, generated and runs on ReactJS UI/UX framework which inherently supports responsive for Mobile devices.

Solartis provides two support options: One option provides a dedicated support team while the other is with a commonly shared support team. The teams will be available 24x7x365. We provide IT level support on availability, performance, security and scalability support. We also provide business transactional support on business transactional issues on quoting, issuance, renewal processing etc. Solartis support will be to your IT team, we will act as Level 3 to your current support structure

Solartis provides 24x7 by 365-day production support as part of our standard SLA. We have various production support teams for managing and maintaining our infrastructure, customer products and transactions running on the Solartis Insure Platform.

Below are various production support team we have:

• You are assigned Solartis US Based Account Manager
• Infrastructure Monitoring team: maintains, manages, and monitors all infrastructure components and element of Solartis Insure Platform like VMs, Services, Network, Security, Storage, File system, etc.
• Application Monitoring team: monitors (only) all Solartis Insure Platform level and customer specific business services like performance, transactions, integrations, success, failures. They define, redefine and tune performance thresholds if required
• Business Unit Support team: maintains, manages, and monitors all customer specific business transactions like submissions, quote, policies, endorsements, payments, integration, configuration changes (if required), hot fixes (required), etc.
  

The following is a list of our Maintenance and Support Services:

• Software maintenance services include error corrections, maintenance releases and updates that Solartis makes commercially available. Solartis issues three types of Solartis insure Platform product releases:
  • Maintenance (x.y.z) releases provide bug fixes and/or platform updates
  • Minor (x.y.0) releases provide bug fixes, platform updates, and minor product Enhancements
  • Major (x.0.0) releases provide bugs fixes, platform updates, and major product enhancements or new features.

• Assistance with product installation and building of Solartis products on the customer’s platform
• Assistance with interactions of different components within the Solartis Platform
• Help with product issues involving general usage, implementation, operation, and functionality
• Problem isolation and identification
• Error message analysis and resolution
• Bug reporting and problem isolation

Definitions:

• Enhancement - Adding new functionality or changing existing functionality in a way that makes the software application more efficient, faster, more usable, more useful, and/or more desirable.
• Bug: A definable problem within the software that causes the application to not work as expected or give incorrect output.
• In scope versus out of scope: Activities that fall within the boundaries of the scope Statement of Work (SOW) are considered “in scope” and are accounted for in the schedule and budget. If an activity falls outside the boundaries, it is considered “out of scope” and is not planned for.

Insurance technology is becoming granular. Insurance Carriers, Managing General Agencies and Program Administrators are no longer constrained by using one monolithic technology platform for their insurance administrative needs. They can now easily create unique Cloud based API-centric technology platforms and customer ecosystems that simplify the management of their distribution partners and customers as well as the purchasing and administration of their insurance policies. This new “API” approach to technology provides nimbleness, decreased costs, reduced time to market and provides unlimited opportunities for new revenue and distribution channels.

1. Solartis is an Insurance Platform built totally on Microservice technology – It is a cloud-based, on-demand set of 100+ policy life cycle microservices that can be configured and orchestrated to meet all P&C based insurance products. Solartis microservices are decoupled from the user interface. This allows Solartis or you to create custom screens, business flows and branding for each user type, channel partner and insurance product. To extend your sales reach, your channel partners can use these same microservices in their tech platforms.
   
   
2. Solartis experience and knowledge of the insurance market and all its insurance processing activities. Solartis began in 2004, we currently support multiple insurance carriers and MGAs from both a policy administration technology and business process outsourcing perspective. We have deep knowledge and resources that are experienced in the day-to-day activities of insurance carriers and MGAs, as well as their unique and constantly changing technology and reporting requirements. We encourage you to speak with our customers to hear directly from them how we have supported their diverse and ever-changing policy administration needs.
   
   
3. Subscription Based Pricing – Solartis pricing is very affordable for Insurance Carriers, MGAs and Insurtechs. It is a subscription-based pricing model that is tied to usage and service level standards. We price based on the value we deliver to you, our customer.
   
   
4. Solartis Builder - Insurance product onboarding and maintenance has historically been difficult, expensive and time consuming. Insurance Administrators are now demanding that their information technology be intuitive, easy to use, efficient and self-maintainable. After the initial onboarding of your first product (which generally takes between 60 to 90 days) Solartis will provide you with a builder to maintain all aspects of your insurance products; your states, coverages, tables, user interface pages and page attributes, policy documents and forms as well as the rating algorithms, processing rules and needed microservices. In Solartis Builder you can also test and promote your insurance product from DEV to TEST to LIVE in one single environment.
   
   
5. Solartis - Our Company and our People - The Solartis senior technical and business leadership team has been single-mindedly focused on perfecting the automation of the insurance quote and policy lifecycle process since we founded the company in 2004.
1. Insurance Expertise - We consider ourselves experts in MGA and Insurance Carrier property & casualty insurance and policy administration.
2. Our technical development team – we hire strong technical programmers from college and train them to work in the insurance technology area. Our experience is that “old hands” in information technology are difficult to retrain. We prefer to build a culture from the inside while at the same time injecting it with “new blood” and ideas.
3. Our development approach – we are an idea driven, non-hierarchical organization. Anyone can challenge a current technology direction provided they can bring a new idea to the table.
4. Our ongoing, extensive spending on research and development in the insurance technology and broader information technology areas.
   
   
6. Our collaborative partnership / relationship with our customers - A partnering relationship for Solartis means that both partners are working for the same goal and share in the benefits and any losses. We have a collaborative, partnering approach with our customers – we only want to work with customers that treat us with respect and are willing to learn and grow together.