About Us

Solace Systems is the leading provider of hardware-based messaging middleware and content networking solutions. With Solace hardware, distributed applications share high-throughput, low-latency content distribution in an easy to manage,  lower cost of ownership form factor. Solace has a growing customer base that consists of blue chip brands in key markets, and a performance advantage that has been validated and documented by an independent third-party benchmarking agency.

Offering and Value Proposition

Solace’s content routers perform the core functions of messaging middleware and content routing in purpose-built hardware based using FPGAs and network processors. By eliminating the performance limitations and inconsistencies introduced by software and operating systems, Solace delivers performance that’s as predictable as it is unprecedented – millions of messages a second with microseconds of latency.

  • High-throughput, low-latency messaging and persistent messaging delivery at rates 10 to 100 times that achievable in production software environments.
  • Unprecedented content routing, content filtering and data transformation performance made possible by parallelizing and accelerating functionality directly in silicon.
  • Fully redundant system elements to assure high-grade security, reliability and availability.
  • Dramatically reduced deployment and operational costs. The number of distribution servers in equivalent software deployments can frequently be reduced by 10 to one or more.

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’s 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.

Solace is working with industry leaders and participating in key industry initiatives and committees to identify and seize opportunities to improve the role that its innovative hardware can play in helping companies address the challenges they face in the area of high-volume distribution of data.