Ventana Research Validates Solace’s Massive 2018

On November 6^th Ventana Research awarded our Solace PubSub+ advanced event broker their 2018 Digital Innovation Award, which recognizes the technology that best exemplifies innovation in the technologies that support big data, business analytics, business collaboration, cloud computing, IoT, machine learning, mobile technology, social media or wearable computing.

We are thrilled to receive this award as it acknowledges the work we’ve done to break down the barriers of cost and access to robust messaging technology by making Solace PubSub+ available for free, giving developers an easy way to upgrade from open source alternatives.

This award is a particularly gratifying way to wrap up 2018 considering we opened the year by winning a DEVIES award for PubSub+ Cloud in February. We are still working to become better known and, of course, to enhance our solution, but what a difference a year makes.

I hadn’t heard of Solace until a year ago. I first heard about the company when they hired veteran industry executive Les Rechan as CEO. I’d worked with Les at IBM, and he quickly started adding to the already strong executive team by bringing on board Mychelle Mollot as CMO and Paul Fitzpatrick as Chief Business Development Officer. Mychelle and Paul have tripled the sizes of their departments, which has had a tremendous impact on our market awareness.

I was hired to build up our reputation and relationships with industry analysts. At the time, Solace was known by a handful of analysts at Gartner and elsewhere mostly as a result of our clients in financial services who informed them of their use of Solace in trading and capital markets applications. “Good, solid technology – hardware based. Customers seem to like your stuff” was the common theme. Some analysts knew we’d expanded into software brokers and the cloud, but not many.

In the over 130 discussions we’ve had with more than 60 industry analysts throughout 2018, we’ve seen a marked improvement in awareness and in opportunities for the advanced event broker technology we offer.

The Event-Driven Model was identified as one of the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018, and Gartner said event brokers are the key technology needed to enable this new world of event-driven architecture. Gartner even differentiated between basic and “advanced” event brokers that include purpose-built capabilities for event-driven architectures.

These developments add up to the realization that, for event-driven computing to succeed, organizations need a dynamic, open, and simple way to distribute events across their enterprise, customer base and ecosystem of partners. Solace calls this an event mesh, and enables it with the only event broker recognized in Ventana’s 2018 Digital Innovation Awards list.

It’s been quite a year for Solace, and this award points to an even more exciting 2019.