Solace Systems

About Us

Solace Systems is the leading provider of middleware appliances. Middleware, which has historically been software-based, enables disparate enterprise applications and information systems to share information. By performing this function in purpose-built hardware, Solace products accelerate information flow while reducing the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure. Solace products have been successfully deployed by global leaders in many segments of the financial services market (buy side firms, investment banks, exchanges, and financial information providers) and other markets such as government, telecommunications, transportation and logistics, and utility computing.

Value Proposition

Solace middleware appliances help organizations:

Reduce the cost and complexity of information distribution.

  • Solace products replace conventional software-on-server solutions at a ratio of 10 or more to 1, reducing architectural complexity, resource consumption and operating expenses.
  • Solace products deliver a consistent out-of-the-box experience that costs less to deploy and operate.

Accelerate information distribution even in the face of increasing volume and volatility.

  • By eliminating the performance constraints of operating systems and general-purpose servers, Solace supports high throughput and low latency.
  • Eliminating software from the datapath enables Solace products to offer performance that’s consistent and predictable even in the most demanding circumstances.

History

Solace Systems, Inc. was founded in 2001 with the goal of applying proven networking techniques to the technology areas of messaging middleware and content distribution. Solace was established in Ottawa, Canada, known around the world as a center of innovation in the areas of networking and telecommunications. Its location has been instrumental in building an outstanding team of engineers and executives with expertise in this area, from companies like Alcatel, Cabletron, Cisco, Newbridge Networks and Equant. The company has also attracted numerous employees with backgrounds at financial services leaders such as Goldman Sachs, Reuters and TIBCO Software.

Solace initially focused on the communications services space, specifically the value proposition of improving the flow of high-volume, low latency data over global data networks. After its initial R&D efforts, Solace signed its first beta customer in 2004, and was shipping product for production deployment by 2005.

Since that time Solace has expanded its product line and built relationships in other industries as more and more businesses have expanded their real-time global data requirements. Today, Solace actively provides solutions for the following types of firms: financial institutions, telecommunications service providers, mobile service providers, logistics firms, government agencies and cloud computing providers.

Vision

Today the driving force behind IT activity and innovation is clearly the burgeoning volume of information being shared and stored across distributed networks. It’s the common thread between the participation and content contribution of users brought on by Web 2.0, the prevalence of automated rules-based trades and transactions, and the increasingly distributed computing model enabled by cloud and grid architectures. As these data volumes continue to grow, expectations in the area of availability and timeliness are simultaneously also going up.

Special purpose hardware has been the end game for virtually all computing-intensive technology where performance matters: network gear is how the Internet works at such massive scale, video chips have created a gaming industry worth billions of dollars, and compression and encryption at scale are orders of magnitude better in hardware. Business requirements have reached or are reaching that point in data-centric markets like financial services, telecommunications, cloud computing, transportation and logistics.

Solace believes that the core requirements of distributed computing (i.e. messaging middleware and content routing) can and should be met by a layer in the network, just like IP routing hardware meets the need to get packets where they need to be. Solace hardware makes messaging middleware and content routing capabilities available as a service in the network so applications can access and utilize them just like IP networks. This enables faster performance, higher capacity, simpler operations, easier procurement and much lower costs.