Solace: Spearheading Innovations in Data Movement

In a world of an ever expanding digital universe, data is becoming one of the most important entities. Effective management of its movement – across multiple platforms, applications and devices – is the key to success and increased productivity for any enterprise. This is where Solace is coming to the fore and powering innovation for its customers.

Arvind Khurana, Regional Vice President, Indian Subcontinent, Solace speaks with Zia Askari about the way Solace is enabling innovation through ‘data movement technology’ and why India is an important market for the company.

What are the key priorities for Solace today?

Our top priority is leveraging success in markets like energy, government, telecom and transportation to become the #1 provider of data movement technology in those industries, as we are in financial services.

In terms of technology, we’re focused on giving our customers the flexibility to use every open protocol used for data movement, and run in every cloud and datacenter environment.

We live in an age of Data - it is fast becoming the most important entity for any enterprise. In such a scenario what is your unique value proposition to help organisations do more with their data repositories?

We supply the core technology that routes relevant information to any number of recipients in real-time while simultaneously delivering all of it to “data lakes” for after-the-fact analysis and processing.

This lets these other systems and people leverage real-time information to immediately identify problems and opportunities, make smarter decisions, and better serve customers.

How is the company positioning itself to provide data driven business flexibility and agility to its customers?

We enable business agility by providing data movement infrastructure that enables their big data, cloud and IoT strategies using open standard protocols and clouds so they never get locked in to any technology or architectural approach.

This lets companies mix and match the best available clouds and protocols today, shifting as their needs change or available technology evolves.

What kind of innovations are you as an organization bringing to the market today?

Every business is now an information-centric business, and the volume of data that companies need to manage is escalating rapidly. Our products give companies the elastic scale they need to tackle these projects using open standard protocols without worrying about overrunning their infrastructure.

This allows companies to more aggressively go after their competitive goals, tackle business expansion objectives, while optimizing operations and reducing costs.

Please share your go to market strategy for your operations? How do you look at partnering with channel partners, technology integrators and develop communities?

Our expertise is in supplying flexible enterprise-grade data movement infrastructure that’s needed by the many applications that companies use to automate and run their business.

Many other businesses – like application or SaaS providers, systems integrators, data analytics and reporting tools vendors – focus on their expertise and assume the customer will built or buy a rock-solid infrastructure for moving data.

Our infrastructure is the ideal integration point for sharing between applications and projects, so all of those ISVs, SIs and analytics providers are natural partners for us. Their business functionality generates the traffic to our infrastructure, and our infrastructure makes their business functionality more responsive and reliable. We have dozens of partners that fit this model, such as SAP, Tata, Cloudera, Cisco, Microsoft and many more.

What kind of market verticals are you targeting today?

We made our name in the financial services industry over a decade ago, and continue to find opportunity there as our business has grown beyond capital markets to payment processing and retail banking. We have also leveraged horizontal trends like big data, cloud and IoT to win business in nearly every industry, and see distinct opportunity to quickly replicate our successes in markets such as government (“smart city” initiatives in particular), telecom, transportation, energy and online services.

Please share details about your employees and operations in India. Are you looking for any kind of manpower and business expansion here?

We have offices at Delhi and Mumbai, both staffed by professionals in Sales, Presales and professional services. As we continue to grow our business, we will be adding resources in South and East India.

How important is India for Solace and how do you look at developments here, especially the government's push digital enablement?

India is very important for us and we have customers across verticals. Being into data movement, digital transformation resonates very well with us. We are already deployed with one of the major initiatives of Government of India through one of our SI partners, and leading telecom providers.

India is also strategic as many of our SI partners are headquartered there. While we have global relationships with these firms, India plays an important role in all our global engagements.