Software as a Service
The value of outsourcing extends beyond overseas call centers and SaaS applications. Developers, IT managers and CFOs alike are questioning the logic of building out their own datacenters when they can tap into the assets, equipment and experience of partners with economies of scale that let them provide on-demand IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in a much more cost-effective, scalable and on-demand manner.
The most obvious potential providers of IaaS are communications service providers that are looking for ways to leverage their massive networks amidst the shift from voice to data. Then there’s the leading Web companies that have developed cutting-edge architectures and infrastructure to support massive amounts of traffic. Some of them, like Amazon and Google, are leveraging this experience to start offering services such as on-demand CPU, storage, security, database access and message queuing.
The challenges of delivering IaaS are considerable. Providers need to be able to deliver reliable, high-volume queuing, messaging and queue related services that can scale to extremely high volumes. They need to provision and bill for these complex services across many customers, and be able to quickly scale, up or down, to meet the changing requirements across an unpredictable set of customers.
Solution Summary
Solace content routers are the ideal platform for IaaS, delivering capabilities such as high-speed messaging, message queuing, content routing, and content distribution in a highly reliable and easily repeatable form factor. Solace’s hardware was specifically designed to support multiple companies with one set of equipment in ‘multi-tenant’ deployments, conveniently matching the business model of IaaS/SaaS providers.
With Solace, cloud or utility computing suppliers can offer IaaS so customers can loosely couple applications across machines and geographies, passing information between them using real-time messaging or persistent queues. When all parties are online and working, Solace introduces less than a millisecond of latency to the equation. When some of the applications or infrastructure components are not available, Solace’s queuing feature can automatically store messages, guaranteeing they are never lost, and deliver them in the proper sequence when the receiving application is online.
Value to Customers
- Rapid deployment: Solace’s turnkey content routers allows IaaS providers to rapidly deploy messaging, queuing, content routing and other infrastructure capabilities as a service at high scale and across many customers.
- Easy billing and operational integration: Solace makes it easy to map customer features to billing events in real-time so providers can implement any combination of flat rate, pay as you go, or limit-based billing.
- Reliability: Solace’s content routers feature redundant components, and can be deployed as fault tolerant pairs to ensure transparent and worry-free operations.
- New sources of revenue: Solace content routers provide messaging and queuing services that become interesting service opportunities on their own revenue merits, but they also encourage distributed application design more in line with many SOA or web 2.0 architectures that are used to blend applications and cloud resources today. For firms with network assets to leverage, distributed queuing leads to greater use of bandwidth resources since more data is likely to move between components as architectures become more distributed.
- Improved customer retention: Providing application layer services makes the IaaS provider a more integral and valuable extension of the customer’s business, which in turn makes the relationship significantly stickier.