Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

I have written recently about the increasing importance of managing data in motion and at rest as the use of streaming data by enterprise organizations becomes more mainstream. While batch-based processing of application data has been a core component of enterprise IT architecture for decades, streaming data and event processing have often been niche disciplines typically reserved for organizations with the highest-level performance requirements. That has changed in recent years, driven by an increased reliance on streaming data and events to identify trends and anomalies and enable real-time responses through uninterrupted processing and analysis of data generated by applications, systems and devices on a continuous basis. Companies like Solace have been integral to the development of event-driven applications and increased adoption of event-driven architecture (EDA).

Solace was founded in 2001 and established itself initially as a provider of event-broker technology. The company has expanded its portfolio over the years and is now positioned to help companies adopt and manage event-driven applications and EDA with a variety of products that combine event-broker technology with event management. Solace has been adopted by numerous customers in a variety of industries, including financial services, automotive; gaming/gambling, food and beverage; and retail. Healthcare company Roche was awarded Ventana Research’s 2022 Digital Leadership Award in Digital Technology by using Solace for event streaming and management. Data from Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research highlights the benefits of event streaming. Almost 9 in 10 organizations in production with event-streaming technologies (86%) are confident in their ability to analyze the variety of data needed to make informed business decisions, compared to 65% of those that are not using these technologies. Organizations in production with event-streaming technologies are also more confident in their ability to analyze large volumes of data and their ability to analyze high-velocity data. In addition to working with customers to facilitate the adoption of individual event-driven applications, Solace is also positioned to assist companies in becoming event-driven organizations. This requires the adoption of events as a core component of the business and the functionality to manage and govern events and event-driven applications across an organization.

Solace’s product portfolio is designed to support streaming of event data, as well as managing and governing events and event-driven applications. At the heart of the company’s offering is Solace PubSub+ Event Broker, which provides the functionality to stream events across an organization, including cloud, on-premises and edge environments. While closely associated with publish and subscribe messaging, from which it gets its name, PubSub+ Event Broker also supports request/reply, queuing, streaming and replay message patterns. It is available as software, a preconfigured appliance and as a managed cloud service. Earlier this year, Solace announced the addition of distributed tracing capabilities to PubSub+ Event Broker to enhance observability of event streaming. Solace PubSub+ Distributed Tracing is based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s open-source OpenTelemetry format and complements the company’s existing support for observability of logs and metrics to enable debugging, troubleshooting, monitoring and optimization. It is also designed to enable users to identify the lineage of events, particularly in distributed, rather than monolithic, environments, where tracing is especially important. Support for the OpenTelemetry format also facilitates integration with observability platforms from the likes of Splunk, Dynatrace and Datadog.

I assert that by 2026, more than one-half of organizations will invest in functionality to discover, catalog, monitor and govern events and event flows to generate greater business value from event-driven architecture. EDA requires organizations to not only stream event data but also manage and govern events and event-driven applications. Solace PubSub+ Event Portal is designed to facilitate EDA by enabling organizations to design, discover, catalog, visualize and secure events and event-driven applications. PubSub+ Event Portal enables users to discover and catalog events generated by PubSub+ Event Broker, as well as Apache Kafka brokers and brokers of other Kafka distributions from Confluent and Amazon Web Services. In late 2022, the company announced version 2.0 of PubSub+ Event Portal with additional life cycle management and version control capabilities. Version 2.0 also added the ability to create, manage and share event application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as event API products based on combinations of multiple event streams. The company’s flagship offerings are its PubSub+ Platform and the PubSub+ Cloud managed service, which combine PubSub+ Event Broker and PubSub+ Event Portal to serve as a complete platform for event streaming and management. Solace PubSub+ Platform also includes PubSub+ Mission Control for configuring, deploying and managing event brokers and event meshes of interconnected event brokers, as well as PubSub+ Insights for operational monitoring of the health and performance of event-broker services, related resources and event-based applications.

Solace has been steadily adding functionality to enable the management and governance of events and event-based applications, and this looks set to continue with enhanced observability functionality and tighter integration with Apache Kafka. There are also opportunities for the company to provide integration with other open-source event/streaming technologies to further demonstrate its value as a higher-level enabler of EDA. As organizations increase their use of event data and event-driven applications, trusted partners with expertise in event technology and business processes are important. I recommend that organizations investing in event-driven applications and EDA include Solace and its PubSub+ portfolio in their evaluations.

Regards,

Matt Aslett