Innovations and Disruptions: Solace, the “One-Stop Shop” Enterprise-Grade Messaging Fabric

As data is increasingly gaining importance for enterprise, telecoms and government segments – Solace is powering innovative solutions to enable event-driven communications across all on-prem, public cloud and private cloud environments.

In an interesting discussion with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com - Les Rechan, President and CEO, Solace and Arvind Khurana, Regional Vice President, Indian Subcontinent, Solace – describe how the company is bringing data-driven innovation towards handling multiple cloud environments, big data and IoT on unified platform.

How do you view the changing landscape around the way data is moving in fast-paced digital economies such as India?

Arvind: Fast-paced digital economies both produce and consume massive amounts of data. India is a shining example of this, as our government has made digital growth and literacy one of its core tenets. When you combine that with widespread mobile use and the rapid rise of mobile network operators such as Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, it’s easy to see why India is the world’s top mobile data consumer.

Maintaining such growth depends on the usually unheralded data movement infrastructure that allows it all to happen. When you think of a country such as India, where digital initiatives are spread across the government and private sectors, it’s critical that the infrastructure can scale with the pace of growth and maintain reliability during unexpected usage spikes.

What role can Solace play to reduce data movement complexities?

Les: Solace lets enterprises and government agencies meet all of their data movement needs with a single technology that’s easy to deploy and manage, and is battled-tested in its ability to remain secure and scale. We do this by supporting all kinds of messaging, by running in all of the most popular clouds and containers, and by embracing open APIs and protocols to free folks from any risk of vendor lock-in.

What are some of the big advantages that you bring to the table for government, enterprise and telecoms customers who are looking forward to doing more with their existing data?

Les: Solace is unique in that we can handle hybrid cloud, IoT, big data, and microservices use cases with a unified, high-performance platform and solution set. We help our customers break down data silos, move data faster and more secure than ever before, and get into the mindset of acting on real-time data now rather than storing it for after-the-fact analysis. By allowing leaders across the organization to tap into a flow of real-time information and events, they can do their job more efficiently, and more quickly.

Please share some of the innovations that Solace is spearheading today in the middleware space?

Les: Solace is the only company committed to enabling event-driven communications across all on-prem, public cloud and private cloud environments. We’re actively opening pathways between legacy systems and microservices, enabling event-driven architecture that spans not just applications and cloud services but the sensors and control systems of the Internet of Things. This allows us to impact a variety of sectors – from telecom and aviation to trading and speech analytics.

Please share your global go-to-market, as well as your plans for India

Arvind: As the leading provider of enterprise-class messaging middleware, our go-to-market plan revolves around making our technology more easily accessible in the leading clouds and containers. This includes the introduction of a completely managed service called Solace Cloud that lets companies establish event-driven communications between applications, devices and microservices without the overhead associated with deploying or managing messaging infrastructure. This strategy is especially important in India, where the massive scale of all kinds of digital initiatives leads companies to migrate workloads to the cloud for cost effective capacity and burst handling during periods of peak volume.

We offer a solution for every customer requirement: appliances for those needing unparalleled capacity and performance for their serious big data, cloud and IoT initiatives; VMR (Virtual Message Router) software for localized messaging, hybrid cloud and NFV strategies; and Solace Cloud for distributed environment requirements and those needing to spin up a world-class messaging fabric in minutes.

How do you look at the competition in this space? How is Solace different from the rest?

Les: Solace is the only provider of messaging middleware that offers a truly one-stop-shop solution to meets all messaging needs, runs in all on-prem, private and public cloud environments and supports all APIs and protocols so customers are never locked in to any approach or architecture – not even our own. We provide reliable messaging infrastructure at very high scale. We are also a great smart data movement solutions partner to our customers, offering them best-in-class expertise, support and services on a global scale at every step of their digital transformation journey.

India is becoming very big in terms of embracing digital space and a lot of cities here are moving towards creation of smart city infra. How does Solace look at these two trends and how do you target such opportunities?

Les: For years Solace has been at the forefront of enabling “smart city” initiatives. Our work with the world’s largest rail operators and the government of Singapore has seen our technology link mission-critical infrastructure and vehicles with back-end applications and interactive dashboards. At the same time, our work in the financial services sector is enabling cashless transactions, which paves the way to increasingly electronic, automatic recognition of individuals as they consume services provided by not just businesses but government agencies.

We’re uniquely capable of helping cities “get smart” because our technology breaks down barriers between physical and digital worlds through the smart movement of data. We target these opportunities by showing cities how our data movement infrastructure and solutions can solve their most pressing digital transformation challenges. With our deep capabilities and experience, we can positively impact and accelerate smart cities initiatives in areas as diverse as transportation, healthcare, and housing, just to name a few.

This interview first appeared inside the Disruptive Telecoms, April 2018 report.