A Uniform Supply Company Replaced Its Legacy MFT With Hosted File Exchange for Every Vendor—No Server Required

A North American uniform rental and workplace supply company delivers uniforms, workwear, and facility and hygiene products to business customers through a recurring route-service model.

A route business at that scale runs on a web of external counterparties: logistics providers, suppliers, service vendors, consulting partners. Orders come in, acknowledgments go out, and logistics data moves in both directions, around the clock. Those counterparties vary wildly in technical sophistication. Some run full automation stacks. Others have nothing but a web browser. Exchanging files with all of them is not a side task at the company. It is how the integration backbone of the business reaches the outside world. To reach both kinds of counterparties without becoming their infrastructure, the company moved the exchange to Files.com.

A Blocked Delivery and Partners With No Infrastructure

In 2019, the company ran partner file exchange on a legacy SOA/MFT platform, with an on-premises FTP server handling scheduled file drops. The MFT's SSH encryption had aged out of the modern internet. It supported only outdated CBC ciphers, so it could not negotiate a session with a modern SFTP endpoint at all. When the business needed to deliver files to its provider in China, the transfer did not fail intermittently. It could not start. The limitation lived inside the platform itself, and no configuration could bridge it.

The other half of the problem sat on the partner side: many counterparties had no file transfer infrastructure of their own.

The default answer would have made the company the infrastructure: directory accounts for every external party, an SFTP server to stand up and patch, a repository to manage forever. So the fix had to do three things at once. It had to speak the modern protocols the legacy MFT could not. It had to give every counterparty a usable endpoint, whether that counterparty ran automation or only a browser. And it had to do both without the company hosting anything. The company selected Files.com to be that hosted exchange point.

One Exchange Point Between SnapLogic and the Outside World

Files.com became the neutral exchange layer between the company's backend and every external counterparty. Neither side hosts the other. Both sides connect to the same place.

On the machine side, backend integrations write files to the Files.com site. SnapLogic, the company's standard integration engine with thousands of interfaces, reads, writes, and moves files over SFTP, FTP, and the Files.com REST API. That flow carries all inbound orders and outbound acknowledgments, 24x7.

On the partner side, each vendor or partner is provisioned as a Files.com user against its own folder. A partner with automation connects over SFTP or FTP with its existing tooling. A partner with nothing logs into the browser to pick up and drop files. The site runs on a company subdomain with the company's branding, so the front door external users see carries the company's own name.

Tens of Thousands of API Calls a Day, and No Server to Run

With the Files.com workflow in production, the company replaced a cipher-bound legacy MFT and a self-hosted FTP server with an exchange layer it does not host, patch, or staff.

• The delivery to China that the legacy MFT could never complete went through Files.com, which negotiates the modern ciphers the old platform lacked.
• The workload is overwhelmingly machine-to-machine, at tens of thousands of API calls a day, carrying every inbound order and outbound acknowledgment around the clock.
• External exchange now supports logistics, network optimization, and BI workloads, and the integration team runs this layer as part of the SnapLogic estate.

The Endpoint the Company Never Had to Build

Today, there is a question the company no longer has to ask before working with a counterparty: is this vendor equipped to exchange files? A partner with a full integration stack connects to Files.com over SFTP. A partner with nothing but a browser logs into a branded portal. The company's pipelines on the other side read both the same way. What once meant standing up a server, creating directory accounts, and running a repository is now provisioning a user against a folder. After more than four years in production, Files.com is the endpoint for every counterparty the company works with, and the company never had to build it.