PubSub+ Platform Reviews

One of our use cases at our global company went live recently. We have a lot of goods that move via sea routes. While there are other modes of transport, particularly for the sea route, we wanted to track our shipments, their location, and that type of information and generate some reports. Also, there are multiple applications which need this data.

With Solace, we are bringing information in every minute (almost real-time) from our logistic partners and putting it on Solace. Then, from Solace, the applications that want to consume the information can take it. E.g., we are generating some dashboards in Power BI using this information. We are also pushing this information into our data lakes where more reporting plus slicing and dicing is available. In future, if more subscribers want this information, they will also be able to take it. 

We have both our private cloud and a version completely hosted on SaaS by Solace. 

The base use case is that we wanted the shipment tracking information in multiple applications, like Power BI and data lake, for the more reporting, etc. If we would not have got Solace, then we need to extract this information multiple times from source application. Now, we pull this information only once and then put it on Solace. Anybody can take it from Solace because the information is readily available. We are generating the data only once. 

Every organisation has exposure of their data with their devices being interconnected. We don't want to transfer the same data multiple times. Solutions like Solace can help us in publishing data only once, then anybody can pick it from there. This reduces costs of data transfer. It reduces the load on data sources, because we aren't asking them to generate the same data multiple times.

Our company is an SAP centred company. A lot of our key applications are using the SAP product suite. When we talk about transaction data and master data, that is where the real complexity comes into play. There are a couple of use cases that we have discussed with Solace for topic hierarchy. E.g., a product master might be sold by multiple channels, produced in multiple factories, and sold in multiple geographies, so creating a topic hierarchy for these could be challenging. When we started, we discussed this complexity with Solace. They helped us arrive at an initial topic hierarchy based on some similar use cases which have been implemented for other customers, sharing their insights.

Another point is their overall approach to topic building. They have very good documentation. It will be our own internal complexity that will drive the topic hierarchy. We are currently in the early stages, and so far journey has been good. Right now, we are comfortable with information and help we are getting from Solace along with the overall approach recommended for topic building. However, time will tell, especially after we generate very complex cases with Solace, how this topic hierarchy functions.

The most valuable thing for us is being able to publish a message, then have the ability to subscribe it on the fly. We want to democratize the usage of this going forward.

We are currently using the basic platform, and as we become more mature, I am particularly excited about using the Event Catalog. This was launched recently. There are certain features like event visualisation and event discovery which we want to see in action. It will take some time for us to make more events published on Solace. 

The software has been very good because:

1. You can spin off a Solace instance very quickly. 
2. Based on your requirements, there are various size levels, similar to t-shirt sizing. 
3. When we went to add another installation in our private cloud, it was easy. We received support from Solace and the installation was seamless with no issues. 

After publishing, we have seen the solution’s topic filtering go into approximately six levels, which is quite granular. These many levels are good enough. Also, the business payload lookup is supported.

We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and can be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, ease of use etc.?

The second challenge is about skills and not related to product directly. Resource availability can be a challenge, e.g. if we have a lot of use cases for this and insufficient manpower, which comes from our partner companies and other IT companies, that will slow us down. This is an area that if Solace could do something, it would be good. If they could add some training or certification, that will be good. From a product perspective, so far in journey, it looks okay but time only will tell once we have put lot of volume and use cases on it.

The topic catalog was actually a gap in the product about a year and a half ago when we started. It was not available in the basic platform, and we said, "This will become a challenge." Now, they have recently launched the Event Catalog and event visualization, where you can do an impact assessment if you change something, e.g., you can see the whole visual of impact. If you are publishing an event, you can see who are the subscribers, etc. It does look good, but we are in a very early stage. Therefore, we want to see it in action for a broader base and more use cases, before we say, "Yes, from administration perspective, this makes sense."

We have been using the solution close to a year. Our use case recently went live. Now, we are working on a couple more projects.

So far, we haven't seen any downtime or issues. We are in our initial journey, but we don't see any such challenges of instability at all. In fact, during the platform setup or during initial test cases, we never encountered any issues of services not working or downtime etc. 

As far as the SaaS solution is concerned, this solution is available in the t-shirt sizes. On the fly, it can be added to the existing subscription. Scalability should not be a challenge.

We keep on looking at our usage and approach. When we reach 70 percent usage, thats an indication of need of further scaling up. By the time we reach 85 or 90 percent, we would have already added capacity to your solution.

Our users are IT teams, not business users. Our use case originates from the supply chain, then the integration team manages Solace. We have around five to six IT users who interact with the platform to develop the solution. Once it has gone live, they support it in the production environment.

The technical support helped us in all the aspects. So far, there are no complaints. We got really fantastic support from them. Their leadership is also very much committed. Their senior VP joins us in weekly review, which is the kind of commitment coming from them since their leadership is involved. Their technical teams are definitely involved and fully committed to our success.

A year and a half ago, the Event Portal was not available when we started our journey. This is a strong feature that they added based on feedback that they heard from us. This would not had been something that we could have requested with an open source, like Kafka. We would have had to outsource it to a partner for them to build it.

Solace is a new product for us that changes the way we approach towards architecture. Solace is helping us to add some workarounds which will convert messages into event enabled messages. That is how we are using Solace right now. However, before this solution, we did not have anything.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The deployment took four to five weeks. When we got the first use case, we started understanding the requirements pretty well, then built the solution, did the testing, and made it live. After the solution is live, if anyone else needs data, that can be done very quickly. It won't take a couple weeks like first time. You can just connect, pull the data, and test it. 

From implementation strategy perspective, we wanted a simple use case, e.g., just publish and subscribe. The easiest case could be a point-to-point where there is only one publisher and one subscriber. Things that are non-business critical, we wanted to put them first on Solace and see the performance, learn how they worked, their challenges, and dos and don'ts.

Later, we gradually wanted to move into business critical cases. The next set of our use cases, which are running on other middleware, we are trying replicating them on Solace. However, we will not be jumping to Solace directly. Rather, it is like a parallel solution, which is being built on the Solace layer. We want to see whether it is working fine. Gradually, we'll start switching from those scenarios which are running on other middleware to the Solace layer.

During this journey, we have also been targeting our topic building mechanism/approach, which will get firmly established. That is how we are approaching Solace overall. At the same time, we have also brought in our partners of other middleware - MuleSoft, Dell EMC, and SAP. These are some of our strategic partners. It is not just a big product which you take, then you forget. It's ability of that tool and how well it fits into your ecosystem as well. Solace can be a very good tool, but if other applications are not able to communicate with it, then it will be not of use to us. Therefore, we are also seeing that how Solace with Dell EMC, MuleSoft or SAP could create value for us. That's another thing which we are doing from a strategic perspective.

The technical support partnered in creating the initial use cases and setting up the platform. Our IT team and infra network team from the back-end worked to install Solace on our private cloud.

When we did the first project, we worked with the Solace team. They were good people who helped us go into the smallest level of detail for the project requirements. 

Our staff resources customize whatever work has to be done on the Solace piece. Once it goes live, they do regular monitoring. For a new onboarding project, we rely on these staff resources.

We have just started. The journey for us is new; we are not mature yet.

Go for the best deal that you can get from Solace. Primarily, the licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey.

I don't think it makes any difference if somebody gives us a free version. That would be very small from a capacity perspective. For an enterprise organization that would not be sufficient, so we are not looking for freeware. 

We are looking for something that will add value and be fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only.

Our journey to Solace was not very long. We started interacting with Solace leadership probably about a year and a half year back. That was the first time that we spoke with them about this concept and product. There were a few things that we asked for as part of product roadmap. Then, we moved to the product evaluation where we also brought in a couple of other competition tools. Finally, we selected Solace.

The challenge with open source is they give you a basic flavor, which is decent enough. However, when you look at enterprise level, you need the following: 

• A good support mechanism available
• Reporting 
• Administration
• A distributed license, since there is talk about how to decentralize usage.

These are the challenges that come with an open source product. They do the basic thing well, but if you need to make the solution fit for purpose, you need to maintain the custom solution on your own. This becomes a problem from a resource and investment perspective, as technologies keep on changing.

If we talk about Solace, you see the value-add layer. I can say that Solace is a basic Kafka. But on top of that Kafka layer, they have added their own layer. That is really good, as this is where it adds value and why we went for it.

There are a lot of good things that made us decide to go for Solace. Looking at Kafka, the value-added monitoring, Event Catalogs, and visualization are not there. When we talk about Solace's competitors on certain aspects, we rank them a little lower. Overall, when ranking them, Solace was the one who has scored highest, so we went for it. 

We do not use other competitor products, so we don't have direct experience with their ease of design. We also evaluated:

• A Microsoft solution: This solution was the closest to Solace.
• OpenText
• Kafka (open source)
• Confluent
• Also, two data stream solutions for high volume data.

The challenge with Kafka is you have to think of everything on your own. You have to build the complete service part of the solution on Kafka. Solace compared to Kafka was a no-brainer. Solace distinguished itself with topic building and scalabilty. When in cloud, you can quickly scale up.

With Kafka, the challenge comes when you design a solution that has topic management. How do you make a topic discoverable? How do you define the dependencies between one topic and a subscriber?

From a monitoring perspective, I also feel Solace has a better product. More than that, there are commitments which comes from the Solace product, such as improvements. They are open to hear what we were saying. If there are certain things which are not available, they said that they will try to plug those gaps.

Start with the simplest use case. Learn how Solace operates and about the ways it will work in your own internal organization. You will have to come up with standard guidelines, best practices, ways of working, etc. Once you understand all of these things, then start picking more use cases at the next level of complexity.

Before you put anything directly into production, do a pilot run. Once you are pretty comfortable with this new technology, only then switch over to new technologies.

We want to use the solution's event mesh feature, but we are not there yet. Currently, we have two instances of Solace that are connected in a small mesh, but this is a very basic thing.

We have the software but did not go for the hardware part of the solution.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We are using Event Broker to publish data across the enterprise, then share the transaction data updates in real-time across the enterprise, and also in some cases the telemetry data.

We do use event mesh, but our use is limited. The reason for that is we have our publishers and consumers on-prem while have our applications on AWS, Azure, and SaaS. It's a multicloud hybrid infrastructure, but the majority are still on-prem. We are slowly moving to AWS, Azure, and SaaS. As we expand to AWS and Azure, then event mesh will be a key feature that we would like to leverage.

We are using the latest version.

When publishing a product, it updates across the enterprise. We have 100 to 200 consumers, which are basically the applications interested in product changes in real-time. We could publish these product changes to Solace Event Broker with one update. Then, all 100 to 200 consumers could be listening to this topic or queue. Any time a change happens, it's pushed to this topic. They have access to it and can take whatever actions based on those changes. This all happens in real-time.

We used more point-to-point integration in the past. This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker.

With the event mesh feature dynamic message routing across the enterprise, you could have an event getting published from on-prem and consumers in the AWS public cloud. The publisher doesn't have to know where the consumers are. The publisher will publish it to the event broker, which could be on-prem, and the broker will have the intelligence to route the events to wherever these consumers are, whether it's AWS or a broker. If there's another broker in agile, then it will have the intelligence to route it dynamically so the publisher doesn't need to know where the consumers are. Event mesh's ability to have brokers installed across a diverse multicloud on-prem infrastructure gives us the flexibility to support applications across our enterprise. That has a big advantage.

If you just have one broker trying to do all this routing of events to different subscribers across different infrastructures, it will have a huge impact on performance. With Solace, events are routed based on the load of the broker. It can dynamically adjust the burst capacity and scale based on the events being pushed as well as events that aren't getting consumed. The logic about how to manage the routing and scaling happens dynamically between brokers. 

• The ability to publish data events in real-time to the broker.
• The ability to add multiple subscribers seamlessly to topics and queues using different formats and protocols.
• The Solace Admin Utility is pretty intuitive and flexible.

E.g., if you have to configure these manually, then the publisher of each event would have to manually configure these events to the topics, provide access, and do monitoring. All these activities would have to be done manually without a Solace Admin. The Solace Admin provides you a UI where any publisher with appropriate access can create their own topics and queues. It can also provide access to subscribers so they can administer their own events.

There is another feature where subscribers can easily discover different topics to consume. If they can find it, then they can, get access to it through the workflow in the Solace.

An advantage of Solace is the way they define their topic hierarchy. With the whole filtering on the topic, we are able to publish data to multiple systems without creating new topics fragments. For instance, if you didn't have that flexibility of the topic hierarchy and ability to do filtering, then you would have to create new topics for a different combination of data sets. This filtering ability creates a lot of flexibility in creating generic topics, where subscribers can just do a filter and consume whatever data they need. That's a powerful feature.

It's very granular. If you can define your topic schema with some order, then you can pretty much do whatever data set at the lowest level. It does provide a lot of flexibility that way without making any changes upstream.

The solution’s topic filtering, in terms of the ease of application design and maintenance, provides us flexibility. The solution makes it easier to consume data on same topic but also change the logic or filtering. E.g., if you want column one, two, and five from a topic schema today, but then you may decide the next day that you need column four and seven.

The solution's event mesh has the ability to make a network of brokers look/seem like a single broker. E.g., if you have consumers in on-prem, AWS, and Azure, along with some SaaS providers, external customers, or partners, you could have brokers deployed for AWS, Azure, and outside for external customers, respectively. If the publisher is publishing an event from on-prem, then they just publish the one event to the broker deployed on-prem. The on-prem broker will route the request to the AWS broker, Azure broker, and the external broker seamlessly. This is transparent to the publisher and consumers, which is a positive feature.

The discovery part needs improvement. E.g., if I have a topic or queue, I want a common place to look at all the different subscribers who are using them. I think they have added this to the Event Portal, but it's not live yet. If they could have the ability to discover events and the relationship between publisher and subscriber for each topic, that would be a very powerful feature. 

I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure. We have recommended this feature to Solace. 

About eight months.

It's very stable. There's high availability. The architecture is pretty robust and can fade over. It's pretty much a NonStop platform as long as it's architected the right way. 

We have a small team who is responsible for monitoring the alerts. However, they're not dedicated to Solace as they also look at other platforms. The maintenance is low because you can pretty much automate all the alerts. In a lot of cases, you can also resolve them systematically. 

You can scale it across multiple instances seamlessly. You can add instances without really disrupting operations. It's obviously not on multiple environments so you can easily add hardware or resources as required. It's very robust in that sense.

We have about eight people using the solution. Their roles are mostly cloud architects and integration architects, as well as some integration developers. 

Right now, we have about 25 applications using Solace, but we anticipate this to increase significantly as we onboard more data sets. By the end of this year, there should potentially be about 100 applications using Solace.

We have used their technical support as well as their professional services. 

• They have a very strong support team. 
• Some improvement is required with Solace professional services. The professional services really needs to drive the solutions for the customers and share best practices. They also need to guide the teams through the right things.

We use Apache Kafka, which is more of an API gateway. For us, events is a new concept. We do more request/reply, API-based integration patents. We also have typical event-driven architecture. This is still a new concept for us that we are trying to evolve.

The initial setup is straightforward. One of the good features about Solace is their documentation and onboarding scripts are very intuitive, easy, and simple to follow.

The broker took three to four hours to deploy.

We had an implementation strategy before we actually deployed it. In terms of:

• How are we going to create this event mesh across the organization? 
• Where are we going to deploy this broker? 
• Which applications are going to onboard as a publisher, or which events? 
• Defining the topic schema. 

We did spend some time planning for that process in terms of how we were going to do the maintenance of the platform.

We have seen ROI because we started with the free version. Even now, we have a basic enterprise license and are getting the business value from its cost.

We have seen at least a 50 percent increase in productivity (compared to using Kafka) when using Solace for the following use cases:

• Sharing changes in real-time.
• Onboarding new subscribers.
• Modifying data sets.

The pricing and licensing are painless. Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version.

For simple use cases, the free version works. Because we wanted the maintenance and access to the technical support, we went with the enterprise license which is pretty cost-efficient compared to other commercial products. Licensing-wise, it's pretty much free if you want to start off with the basic version, then you can expand to other additional features as you feel comfortable and confident. You have that flexibility from a licensing perspective.

Once we decided to go with Solace, we then evaluated Kafka and also looked at RabbitMQ. However, this was mostly to ensure we were making the right decision.

Some of Solace's key differentiators versus Kafka and RabbitMQ are its free version with the ability to deploy and try the product. It's very easy to implement the broker and create the topics and queues. It also has helpful documentation and videos.

Kafka has some admin features, but not like Solace Admin or Solace Portal. It has limited UI features, as most of it is through a CLI. The key difference would be that you need a specialized skill set to be able to administer and maintain an event broker, if you are using an open source.

This solution has increased application design productivity compared with competitive or open-source alternatives. The key is it's a concept that is not obvious. Event-driven architecture is still evolving, as people are still comfortable with the traditional way of designing these products. If you purely compare it with open source, this solution has a lot of advantages. In our case, the adoption is still slow. Primarily, that is because of the skill set and maturity of our architecture.

The solution management productivity increased by 50 percent when compared to using Kafka.

Compared to Kafka, with our internal use cases, Solace is definitely the right solution now. If we use the telemetry IoT use cases, such as real-time streaming and analytics, then Kafka would probably have an edge. However, for our use cases and the volume that we have, Solace is good for us.

It would be good to think through your event-driven architecture, roadmap and design.

It is very easy for architects and developers to extend their design and development investment to new applications using this solution. Compared to the legacy integration pattern, there has been mindset shift because the changes are coming in real-time. The solution has the ability to consume those events in real time, then process them. While there is a learning curve there, it's pretty easy to consume changes. 

Biggest lesson learnt: Think through the whole event-driven architecture and involve other stakeholders. Prepare a good business case and have a good MOC before getting started.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We have a hybrid model because we have a lot of systems on-premise as well as a lot on the cloud. We have one instance of Solace in AWS Europe, and the other one is an on-premise setup in our data center, also in Europe.

Given the levels that we have designed into our topic taxonomy and the hierarchies, Solace gives us decent levels that we can get down to, in terms of granularity. It supports two to three character sets of their entire, end-to-end topic structure, so I can actually get down to level six or seven, or even more than that.

The last couple of releases have brought about event life cycle management. That changes the way a designer or an architect will design a topic and quickly discover what is available, and whether something has to be built out. That's pretty easy. With the life cycle of the event portal and the event cataloging that is available, it makes life easier for them. With all these new features in place it increases our productivity by something like 50 percent. Now, because we have a nice, curated view of the contents of the event in the event portal, it is easy to discover and to publish new topics. What used to take one day can be done in half a day, leveraging all the best-practices and the features that come with this product. Of course, you need to pay more if you use the event portal or catalog, but assuming all those tools are in place, it is beneficial for the productivity side.

There has also been an increase in productivity around solution management because of the ease of the key features that they offer. You don't need to spend time moving around multiple screens to manage something on the monitor, implement fixes, find hotspots, or even to publish something new. Because it is easier to navigate around, following the life cycle of an event, it definitely increases the productivity, whether it is from a solution management point of view or an operations point of view. From whichever angle you look at it, it makes life easier for that particular person.

We are implementing the event mesh feature right now. In my previous organization, we used the event mesh. Solace DMR, which is its dynamic message routing, and their event mesh capability is one of their unique selling points. It's a stand-out, a distinctive capability and a differentiator. It is a great feature and, honestly speaking, it is one of the biggest differentiators they bring to the table, compared to many of the message broker platforms or event broker platforms that I have used in the past.

In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting, as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view. It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator.

It is completely self-sufficient when it comes to connecting the brokers together because it uses a proprietary protocol over the TCP layer. It is a Solace messaging protocol and it is not very difficult to configure it and use it. It is easy to use, easy to configure brokers and to connect them all together. 

From an administration point of view, Solace gives us a visual view of all the brokers in there. The capability of spinning up a broker and connecting it visually is still in progress in their roadmap. But, technically speaking, if somebody knows the administration of Solace very well, they can actually spin up a broker easily, either on a cloud or on-premises, on Kubernetes or on Docker, and can quickly connect them all together, and it starts showing up in their portal. It is pretty straightforward and pretty easy to implement. Here, we have been able to quickly set up the basic mesh architecture for the sandbox environment. It's straightforward and pretty cool as well.

Another feature and selling point of Solace is that it promotes and uses open standard protocols like SOAP or REST. We use AMQP in some scenarios and there are multiple other ways that we could connect as well, including JMS and TCP. There are five or six different ways that we could integrate with other inter-operating, distributed applications within our enterprise. Since Solace supports all of these open, standards-based protocols, it is pretty easy to connect.

It is also pretty simple to manage. The two major standout points are a very simple architecture and that it's a lightweight middleware platform. You just spin up somewhere and connect. On the top layer there is a single pane of glass to monitor and to keep the checks and balances in place, and also to administer from a cloud platform. That's a pretty simple, straightforward setup, like any cloud-based or middleware platform. The model that I have for MuleSoft in my company is the same thing for Solace as well. I would rate it as simple and straightforward.

I would rate Solace's ease of management better than competitive or open-source solutions, because they have brought thought leadership to the table for looking at event management and building a complete life cycle view of an event. Right from the time an event starts in the company, until the time that the event has to be retired, it goes through a life cycle. That includes discovering an event, designing the event, adding certain rules to it, configuring it, and deploying it. Finally, you'll want to monitor and operate it. The whole life cycle is completely manageable using Solace's UI. That is a great deal. None of the competition has brought that view to the table yet. This is another distinctive differentiator that Solace has.

In terms of the solution's topic hierarchy there are two ways to look at it. One is that there are particular topics that we set up and that are very static in nature because we know about their data already. For any other areas that are fixed, it is pretty straightforward because the topic taxonomy is already agreed on. It is already aligned with the stakeholders and it is easily implementable in Solace.

The other side is that if a publisher chooses to dynamically post a topic  — a new topic — if they know what the topic taxonomy model looks like for our company, then it is also possible to dynamically put the topic in place and publish it, as it is. 

It also gives you wildcard-based routing rules. Based on the topic taxonomy and hierarchy, I am able to route a message or use the wildcards that are placed in the higher topic hierarchy to even put in security. If a particular group shouldn't see a particular message coming in on a topic, I can control that as well using the right topic taxonomy or the topic hierarchy. In Solace, that is also pretty straightforward because their topic taxonomy definition and the way that they promote it and the way that we have understood it from them is pretty easy.

Kafka has a different way of doing that. RabbitMQ is very similar to the JMS-type of message platforms. Solace is very similar and it supports both dynamic and static. The solutions are even, from that perspective.

Another product that I use very much in my current portfolio is MuleSoft. It's an API management platform, and also iPass, which is Salesforce's company now. Both these products have to work together to give an assured-delivery type of middleware platform. We felt that having a connectivity layer or a connector or an adapter already pre-built in Solace for platforms like MuleSoft, Dell Boomi — middleware especially — would be pretty interesting. It would make it a more authentic and credible connector as well.

Today, we have to rely on JMS or a REST-based protocol but we have raised this request with Solace. While connectivity is definitely easier, at the same time, Solace needs to work on some of the connectors for industry-leading applications like Salesforce, Workday — multiple typical distributed applications that we might have. It is pretty good at this point but they can do better on that.

Also, a challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers. 

We have one critical step, from an IT security point of view. If there are any SaaS applications or cloud applications which are hosted out of our cloud platform, then the only way that we can do SSO is through a SAML-based or another specific protocol. Solace doesn't support them at this point in time and we have raised this as a platform request. I think it is on their roadmap. But currently, it supports only LDAP. That is an improvement area for them.

This is going to be my third year using PubSub+ Event Broker. I was with another company earlier on before I joined my current company. It was on the fast-moving consumer goods side and I started using Solace there. In my current company, this is a very new platform and I'm setting it up. But my overall experience on Solace would be two to three years' time.

Stability is definitely one of the key factors for us. My experience is that it's one of the robust platforms, because of the way that it's engineered and designed to work. It's absolutely a stable solution. We've never had any problems, given the way that we have implemented it.

It's a completely scalable solution. Our architects have been looking at using Solace for multiple different use cases, whether it is to do with event architecture or assured-delivery types of projects or even for a simple publish/subscribe type of messaging or an async-API type of model. It seems that our architects find this to be a tool that can extend across these lines of capabilities. Solace brings that to the table.

From the developer's point of view, it provides ease of use and ease of configuration. After somebody has worked on and is really proficient in IBM MQ or TIBCO EMS, which are heavyweight platforms that come with certain benefits, those architects and developers find Solace pretty easy to handle and to extend it to other application areas or use cases, including IoT, async APIs, pub/sub, and event-driven messaging. We also are using it for assured delivery, leveraging their queues and persistent layer. It does help our architects and our developers to extend their applications to all of those areas.

Their technical support is pretty quick. We are bound by an SLA and we have the highest tier of support from them. The turnaround time is pretty good and they are strong technically. I would rate their technical support as good.

The fact that there is a free version of Solace was something that we looked at from multiple angles. For example, when we need sandboxes, the question we had in mind was whether we should go for the paid version or use the free version. The free version doesn't come with support but it offers a lot of capabilities which a developer can play around with. 

But when we had to choose between the free version and the licensed version for anything on our test stage, pre-prod, and prod, which are the other instances that we have, it was a no-brainer that we wanted to go with the paid version, because that brings in a whole lot of enterprise-class support and multiple other things along with it. We take advantage of the free version for sandbox, for a little bit of training, and PoCs. But predominantly, we use the enterprise-class version for the other instances we have.

The initial setup was straightforward in terms of: 

1. The architecture design. The tool is organized in a very clean way, the mesh is organized. It is easy to spin up a particular broker in an instant, purely from an architecture point of view, as compared to real heavyweights like IBM MQ or TIBCO EMS.
2. From a solutioning point of view, because they have features which were released recently which cover the life cycle of an event, it is easier and quick to handle the event flow from start to end. Whether it is for an architect or for a developer, it's a pretty nice tool to have. That's the second point: the simplicity of their UI and the way the life cycle works.
3. From an ops point of view, after our applications go live, the dashboards and some of their operational monitoring capabilities or features are also simple and straightforward.

We haven't found anything significantly complex.

We haven't seen return on our investment with Solace yet because it's pretty new in our environment. But we do see there is a value it brings to the table from a digital-transformation point of view. Both the companies that I was part of, where I was fortunate to lead the digital transformation projects, identified Solace as the platform to make that change: from a heavyweight, old or legacy model of middleware, or MQ platform, to a very lightweight, modern, completely distributed model. It's quick and nimble and agile in all types of setups. That is a huge shift in the way that we do things and make things notably faster. Qualitatively, this has definitely been a great tool.

Quantitatively, I would not be able to disclose any numbers, but we sense that there is going to be a huge return on investment because we might shut down some of those old, heavyweight, on-premise-only platforms. Because this is also a pay-as-you-use model, we can effectively make use of the license, as and when we require it. There are definitely going to be good cost savings as well.

They have good pricing in place. Their licensing model is a simple model. 

There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use. 

If you know that it is going to be between 50,000 and 100,000, while there is a large gap between those two figures, you can start small and scale it over a period of time until you reach 100,000. You might start with 50,000. Since it might take six months to reach 100,000, what I would suggest is starting with the lower tier, because you don't need to pay for something that is higher. Then, as the demand grows, the tier can be revisited. That's based on the license agreement that you should have as part of the contract. You should agree with Solace that you will start small but that your intentions are to grow, depending on the demand that's coming in. Provide a roadmap of how long it will take to reach the next tier.

Solace appreciates that view of your roadmap, and they will also come along with you in that journey. They will tell you, "Okay, start with a giga tier, don't go for a tera," or even start with a kilo tier. Slowly, as you see demand going up — it could be once every two or three months — you can have a look at it. It could also be once in six months if you don't want that many interactions. See how many you have done. If it has not gone beyond 75,000, you can continue to operate under the current tier. But if you think it's going beyond 75,000, you can move to 100,000 tier. It's a staged and calculated approach.

You also have to choose which of their product models would work for you. They have an appliance, they have a software as a service model, and they have an on-premise model, using a Kubernetes based setup. You need to look at your architecture and where your real needs are for event-driven brokers to be sitting. The licensing model also changes accordingly.

You have to have the right contract in place so that you can reassess that contract every few months to see whether you have breached your threshold. It's not that it's going to stop working, but you need to have that as part of your agreement, that even before it reaches the 70 or 80 percent of the threshold you will have a call to see whether you want to upgrade or not. That's all part of the contractual terms and conditions and negotiations. 

There are two important things to keep in mind when considering this tool. The first is to know what kind of problem that you're trying to solve. If it is just about having a pub/sub, there are a number of other tools in the market — including Solace as well, which offers a simple, straightforward solution. But if you are looking at completely digitally transforming your company and bringing in event-driven architecture as a key factor in your integration strategy, then Solace is definitely a go-to tool. Knowing the end-goal that you're going toward, the objective that you're trying to meet, is very important. That is the first step one needs to be aware of and clear about.

The second thing is the engagement model with Solace, whether it is the terms of the licensing model or the way you will work with their Professional Services team or their support team. All that has to be discussed and agreed with a clear customer-success plan in place.

Thirdly, you want to clearly identify what architecture you want to implement because the mesh can span across anything. But you don't want to start a big-bang approach. Start small and then grow. So you need to know how your architecture is evolving. Start putting that simple MVP in place and from there you can grow it into multiple phases. That's what we are doing.

Have the right people in place. Somebody who has a good background and experience in implementing Solace can turn things around quickly.

We have four or five architects who use Solace, and we have two administrators of the platform, or platform architects. And we have about five developers now using it, but that will probably go up a little bit once we extend the mesh further. We also have two or three in support.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. I don't want to give them full marks because there is a lot that they could improve on: the SSO front; there is also the community front, they are also changing their architecture depending on best practices of communities, the way the community works, and so on. There's a lot of work for them to do to re-invent their on-premise model for a Kafka container-based solution. I would give those additional two points, out of 10, if I had seen all of that in action. There is definitely thought leadership within Solace, so I'm assuming that it will come through at sometime.

We're a capital markets organization, so we primarily use it for our trading algos order management, streaming market data, and general application messaging. Those are our key use cases. 

Our other use cases are for more guaranteed messaging-type or things where we absolutely need to have the resiliency of every message for higher performance streaming market data, meaning, millisecond latency-sensitive algorithm operations that are running as well.

We also use it for general messaging and to displace some of our legacy messaging applications such as MQ, EMS, and things of that sort. We are standardized on Solace PubSub+; it's an architectural standard at our company.

Our standpoint is, Solace has been tremendously successful in allowing for businesses and cross-business synchronization to be able to share data across application teams and across business verticals. It's been the success and the uptime stats that Solace has been able to provide that have allowed for more and more users to use the system. 

Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40-plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days. We never had any outages and never had any issues despite those massive spikes. The system was able to cope. There are things that we needed to do and work off to make sure we had headroom and then we were able to scale out, but we can do that seamlessly without our users even knowing.

It has increased application design productivity compared with competitive or open-source alternatives. From my pursuit of the "secret sauce", I found that Solace really is, for us, the service and the partnership that we have with the company. Having the level of expertise and the subject matter knowledge available to us is second to none. It's not just that Solace is entrenched at my company, is the standard, and it would be too hard to roll off. It's more that the level of performance and the level of service we get from Solace precludes that. I'm looking at where other vendors are and I just can't see them getting to the level that Solace is at for us, to really make an impact. Again, there's a small use case here and there where potentially it could be of use, but for the most part, it's not something that's going to get too much traction, given the success of the platform currently.

Performance and stability were a absolutely key areas for us. Having a rock-solid appliance-based architecture with the support that goes behind it from Solace is the most valuable aspect of this solution. From our perspective, it's the background of Solace as certain network devices that have very low error. Tolerances are key for us. What separated them from other vendors, at least initially, was that the appliance option versus the commodity hardware was definitely a very important distinction for us. From a management standpoint being able to have a system, we can manage internally, and have access to keep that within our engineering group is key. We isolate it from our standard infrastructure and commodity hardware group.

If we had to deploy to a messaging platform that uses commodity hardware or converged infrastructure, the costs would be much higher for us, especially due to the certain internal cost. The appliance-based architecture is, at least initially, absolutely a big advantage for Solace. And on the other side, the support that we experienced with Solace as a company has been very positive.

Our background is primarily on the market data side where we deal with a lot of different vendors from Reuters, Bloomberg, very big systems as well as vendor appliance hardware. The support we receive from Solace is by far much better. It is the top of the market. The level of expertise in troubleshooting or identifying issues is absolutely key. 

Our messaging platform is the largest thing on our internal network, as the last messaging spike was close to 10 billion messages a day. We're very large consumers on the network. We need to have key exposure to everything that's going on within our platform. And when we do need to get Solace on the line, they know more than our network team does about troubleshooting; where our constraints are in the system and what's going on. I think those are the key advantages for us. Solace support is the best that I've experienced amongst any of the vendors that I deal with. The competitors I am referring to are TIBCO, Kafka, MQ, and EMS. They are messaging platforms that are on the ultra-low latency side, like Dell. We have various small installations and pockets of those various technologies everywhere, but compared to other vendors and database companies, Solace's response time is better. The depth of knowledge and the consistency of knowledge are far and away better than any other vendor partner that we deal with.

In terms of the ease of management, we have a very large deployment. We've globally deployed dozens of appliances in various data centers across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Being able to manage that, we do require an organized team, good infrastructure, and support structure. Solace, as a partner, helped us in the initial installation to get to the point of doing the leg work and initial analysis to give us space to be successful with our deployment. It's a complex messaging platform. It is not a simple thing to do, but the tools and the support you get from Solace definitely enable you to be successful with that installation.

The topic hierarchy in terms of how dynamic and flexible it is is one of the initial definite benefits of Solace compared to other legacy systems. The ease of doing in-service upgrades and in-service deployments without affecting the environment was less key, coming from more legacy platforms where deploying any new topics, topic structures, and publishing structures wouldn't be allowed. It would force you to do system-wide restarts and involve every user on the platform. Whereas, with Solace being able to not only deploy up-to-date changes without any issues but being able to do so without impacting clients is an advantage. Similarly, upgrades and patches and things of that sort are much more seamless compared to the legacy systems that we supported in the past. Reuters to EMS were the systems that were displaced by Solace.

In terms of the granularity of the topic filtering feature, Solace was heavily involved from a professional services standpoint to help us define our topic structure and our topic hierarchy with ourselves and our architects for the initial deployment, being able to get that structure and helping define that structure. Only recently did we make some structural updates to enable more agile, cross-business sharing. But for the most part, it's been a very successful deployment of the topic hierarchy. It is flexible enough to allow us to use subscriptions and publishers. We have a strong process to make sure that folks are conforming to those topic structure formats but Solace was involved in the development of that structure initially and we have been pretty successful with it.

We do have Kafka deployed to serve some use cases in capital markets. We've evaluated it and continue to evaluate it. But from our perspective, the performance and scale that we have in Solace preclude a large scale deployment. It's also a platform that requires a significant commodity hardware installation along with that we are always going to be licensed while we use open source software and platforms. We always make sure that we're fully licensed from the support perspective. From a regulatory and risk perspective, it's something we always operate. It doesn't make a lot of sense to move there, also, given the layer of investment and performance that we have currently. In cases where certain vendors have out-of-the-box plugins with Kafka, we build connectors to allow them to publish onto our platform and that's worked seamlessly for us.

Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement. Obviously, their movement to cloud and integration is there. There's a need to keep investing in that area to make sure that there's feature parity with their competitors and have that seamless burst to the cloud available like all the vendors that are out there. But from our perspective, if they can keep that feature parity, there'll be little appetite to move.

We have been using Solace since 2012 or 2010. We've had them for quite some time so it has gone through multiple interfaces and many iterations of product names but we're using direct event messaging, Solace caching, their VMR, or the other PubSub+. We use all of their products that I can think of, so we have had a pretty large installation of Solace for quite some time.

We're primarily on-prem. As we're a bank, the biggest installation is for some privacy concerns, but we have primarily deployed appliances. With some of the Event Broker software and some of the virtual appliances, the majority are for them in that regard. We have deployed both in internal data centers, as well as colo data centers for connecting us to certain trading and market use cases.

We started the deployment in the fall. The bulk of the fixed income use cases was rolled out within around three months for the initial use case. At that point, to fully migrate every last legacy publisher over, probably took another year or two, but that's really not on the vendor side. It's more that application teams and legacy systems are slow to move away, but we were able to fully remove every trip publisher, EMS publisher, and few publisher with capital markets and were able to fully migrate over to Solace.

We have roughly 200-plus applications across capital markets and over 1,000 client end-user subscribers. That doesn't even count the clients on the application side as well. Our large applications have a billion messages across our global architecture.

ROI would be hard to calculate but just talking from a storage perspective, we've been able to use Solace storage appliances. We've been able to say that would have cost around $2 million a year in storage costs to half that amount as an initial investment. We've been able to pay that business casework off in year one, whereas three years would be perfectly acceptable from a cost-savings perspective. And that's just on the storage side. We can pay up to $10,000 and $20,000 a year for internal charges per server versus just paying for rack space costs for our infrastructure. It's a significant amount when you consider that often you'll need many commodity hardware servers to replace a single appliance pair. It's a significant cost saving.

In terms of pricing, you need to take into account the internal infrastructure chargebacks, monitoring, and service chargebacks that you get from using your internal hardware versus what you get by deploying via an appliance. In many cases, the cost is your service costs for having your infrastructure manage your underlying hardware, and the monitoring and service costs can quickly spin costs. Storage can spin costs to be much, much higher. Whereas, sitting on an appliance-based software where you can manage that internally within your own engineering team, has been much more cost-effective for us. The amount of internal chargebacks we've been able to avoid is significant.

It's really the reason we're able to pseudo have a cloud-based costing model by using appliances, which is fine. Everyone's going cloud. It's a cost-play as well as an agility play, but we get that cost play by using the Solace appliance model on our side. I think many people that deal with similar large infrastructure teams are trying to get the same sort of process.

The key is defining the topic structure and working with Solace, the pro serves, and engineering team to define a flexible and also defined and extensible topic structure. It's also important to put a very defined process around application onboarding. Do proper monitoring post-onboarding to make sure that as application publishing subscription, and behavioral changes occur you can be on top of it, be aware of it, and monitor for it. Initially, the key is to set up for a very good governance structure for onboarding, and then go back and make sure you monitor onboarded applications for changes. Know your clients, your applications, and their behavior and be on top of that.

From our perspective, Solace has been a true partner in a sense. We work with not only our sales, engineering teams, and support teams to make sure we're aware of all the processes, but we also make sure to keep on top of the product roadmaps. We're constantly talking about what we're doing, sharing with other clients and learning about what they're doing at different customer events. But really, it's being a true partner, having transparency into what's going on, on the platform, what's coming down the pipe and then that world-class support that are the key takeaways from Solace as a company.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it.

It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use.

I have been using this solution for several years.

It is a very stable product.

It is scalable. We have a couple of hundred users.

Their technical support is very good.

We just used MQ before this. We found out about PubSub, and we started using it as well for its benefits.

It is a bit complex, but you get instructions. Once you know what to do, it is fairly straightforward. The installation takes about 30 minutes, but configuration takes a long time. After you gather all your data, it could sometimes take a day or two.

I have done it myself. We have around 50 people for maintenance.

It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use, so you need a deep understanding. There is good information. They have thought of everything and noticed what the customers tell them. In every release, there is something better in it. I would definitely recommend this solution to others.

I would rate PubSub+ Event Broker a nine out of ten. 

We use it as a central message bus to interconnect all our applications as well as for the transportation of market data.

We're using the 3560s for the hardware appliances and version 9.3 for the software.

It has helped a lot in the unified way of how we develop software. Having a common message processing protocol has helped a lot with maintainability and how software has been designed. It also removes the worries that the message bus is not performing well, e.g., the throughput rates are so high that it works very well.

The solution has increased application design productivity.

It is easy for architects and developers to extend their design and development investment to new applications using this solution. That's never been a roadblock.

PubSub+ capabilities make it all work. 

Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data.

The solution’s topic hierarchy is pretty flexible and works well. It does require some engineering thought in the beginning to ensure that the hierarchy works and you don't shoot yourself in the foot. But if that is architected well, it allows for very nice filtering and subscription based on what you are interested in. 

The topic hierarchy's application design and maintenance works very well.

The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances.

Monitoring needs improvement. There is no way to get useful systems to test out the machine without having to implement our own monitoring solution.

I would like to see improvement in the message promotion rate for software-based brokers.

More than 15 years.

It is extremely stable. The amount of hardware-based interruptions that we have had from the Solace products are less than 10 in the last seven to eight years. It has extremely high reliability.

Since it is a hardware-based solution, what you buy is what you get. You can then upgrade it, but we have never had a need to upgrade and scale the solution.

It is used for all our applications. The whole company is using it, including traders, developers, and risk.

The technical support is very good. Our questions have always been answered and resolved in a very good way. They seem very knowledgeable about their product and can go into depth about how and why we should implement it in certain ways.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The deployment was part of a larger rollout. For just the physical deployment, it took a day per site.

We had good support Solace during the deployment and the architecture phase of designing how we would use the product.

It has provided us with a return on our investment. It has enabled us to do what we do now.

The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager.

There was no free version when we evaluated it.

We compared a few messages bus solutions, like TIBCO. At that point, Solace came out ahead, both in throughput and probably cost.

We haven't really used any competitors. I don't think there are many on the market still. I don't think the solution really compares that well with any of the open source solutions. Maybe the setup ease with MQ is similar to Solace, but then to keep it operational, Solace is much easier. It's a hardware appliance that you can install in a data center, which just keeps working. That is amazing. It is something that software or open source solutions don't offer.

It is a product that is more like a switch or router, where you install it, then it keeps on working. The operational maintenance is extremely low.

Read the documentation. Talk to Solace about any questions that you might have to find out the best implementation for whatever it is you need to solve.

I would rate the product as an eight (out of 10).

We use it as a message bus for our different systems to connect to Solace on a pub/sub basis. We have about 10 systems interfacing with it. It is used for our critical payment systems which are mostly online payment transactions. There are also messages for streaming and data warehouse info.

We are using the Solace PubSub+ 3530 appliance, and the AMI (Amazon Machine Image) version. We have a mixture of an on-premise deployment and a cloud deployment. The cloud part is more the AMI.

Because we use it as a message broker, it makes information flow very seamless.

When we do the setup we establish the naming conventions. So all we need to do is to tell our stakeholders who are interested in using Solace to follow the naming convention. That way, everybody can implement things according to their own timing and schedule. We decouple implementation from the various systems. We just publish things and whoever is ready to consume does so.

From an application design perspective, it is quite easy for them to interface with it and they don't need a lot of rules. Solace has increased application design productivity. It has reduced dependency. Anybody can work with it based on their own timeline so, to a certain extent, there's no bottleneck when they use it.

We have also seen an increase in productivity when it comes to solution management, by about 30 percent.

It's very easy for architects and developers to extend their design and development investment to new applications using solace because it's quite standardized, as long as they follow the template when they do the design. They just have to publish according to the particular template. There is no need to redesign.

• Everything is good in this solution. We only use the PubSub feature. We use a minimum of topics to publish and they are consumed through the Solace message broker.
• We have a standard template for any new configuration, so it's very easy to manage.
• The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there.
• Topic filtering is easy to use and easy to maintain. Sometimes we go into a lot of detail on the content and it can be affected at a higher level. So it's very flexible.

The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary. It doesn't allow third-party agents to be installed.

I have been using Solace PubSub+ Event Broker for three years.

The product is pretty stable. Since the time we set it up, there has been no need for us to reboot the appliance. We have had zero downtime.

It's quite easy to scale. We just have to build in another set.

We have plans to extend it into our warehousing systems — those are portals — so that the information can be shared.

They are very knowledgeable and their responses are pretty fast.

We did not have a previous solution. We went with it because we liked the features that Solace provides and, to date, it has delivered.

The free version allows people to do a proof of concept easily. It helps people when they want to see how easy it is to use. The free version helped us to decide to go with the solution.

The initial setup of Solace was straightforward. We just had to buy the product, install it, have a few templates, and that was it. We were already good to go.

Our deployment took about a week or so. After that, we did integration testing. Once that was okay we had to come out with a template for people to follow. The learning curve is quite small.

To administer Solace we only need two people. That's because it has role segregation.

In terms of dollar value we have not seen ROI, but in terms of availability, we have, because the product is very stable.

So far, we are okay with the pricing and the licensing.

We didn't compare Solace with competing solutions. 

It's a good product to go with if you are interested in uptime and availability, and ease of implementation.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Solace is that once you get the design correct, everything flows very seamlessly.

An enterprise-grade event broker for mediation of events produced by a heterogeneous hybrid landscape of SAP and non-SAP systems at scale.

An event registry/catalogue and a user-friendly visualization of event flow.

The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features.

The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls.

I have been using the solution for almost two years.

It is a very scalable and robust solution. I rate it a ten out of ten.