The Long and Winding Road…to Solace Cloud

Editor’s Notes: 1. Solace Cloud is now Solace PubSub+ Cloud. 2. The VMR (Virtual Message Router) is now Solace PubSub+. 3. In September 2019, Pivotal changed the name of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) to Pivotal Platform.

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As the Beatles famously sang: “I’ve seen that road before, It always leads me here, Lead me to…the cloud.”

OK, so I paraphrased the punchline, but anybody who’s been following Solace for a while knows it really has been a long road to today’s announcement of our new messaging as a service platform called Solace Cloud.

Our chairman of the board Craig Betts founded Solace with a big idea – solve the problem of routing messages using the same proven approach that had enabled the Internet, by routing packets in hardware. IP routers and switches for the former, messaging appliances for the latter. The financial services space ate up this innovative approach, which slashed the cost and complexity of their massive messaging estates and massively improved reliability. Other markets wanted the ability to implement our powerful messaging in either hardware or software form factors, so a few years ago we introduced our Virtual Message Router software – the same capabilities, and the fastest software-based message routing you can find, in a package you can easily deploy in a variety of on-premises or cloud environments.

For years we’ve had more expert engineers focused on the task of creating message routing technology than any company in the world –even the big dogs – and we’re extremely proud of our solution’s clear technological advantages. Our platform offers superior performance, reliability and scalability, and we’ve dedicated ourselves to embracing support for standard protocols and open APIs so you can meet every application’s messaging needs with the right tool for the job, without ever getting locked in to any cloud, runtime environment or…wait for it…messaging platform. Yes, even ours.

And while we are extremely passionate about messaging, we recognize that not everyone who uses it needs or wants to be. We’re launching Solace Cloud so developers can focus on building their apps and take advantage of Solace messaging technology without having to set up, host, manage or upgrade their messaging infrastructure. They can leave that all to the experts at Solace.

With the launch of Solace Cloud we are the only company in the world that offers an enterprise-class messaging platform you can consume as hardware, software or as a managed service. The three offerings are completely interoperable and give you access to exactly the same capabilities, so your applications don’t even need to know if they’re connecting to an appliance deep in your datacenter, a VMR running in OpenShift or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, or an instance of Solace Cloud running in AWS. The video to the right gives a good high-level introduction, and this demo shows you exactly how you can set up your own messaging environment in less than 90 seconds.

Dozens of folks working for the world’s biggest banks, telcos, gaming companies, manufacturers and more have been playing around with Solace Cloud as part of an internal/private beta for a few months now. The feedback we’ve been getting is phenomenal, and we’d like to thank you to all those who have offered up both pats on the back and the constructive criticism it always takes to be your best.

We’re excited about opening up Solace Cloud to more users as part of our public beta, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride! Sign up for your free account now, play around with it, build some cool apps, and please tell us what you think!