Just a few minutes after reading about that example of capitalism at work, I read a Yahoo! Finance article titled Hottest Job of the 21^st Century? Bet on This. It makes the case that data scientists are the new rock stars of the corporate world, and cites a May 2013 McKinsey study that estimates that by 2018 the U.S. alone will need 140,000 to 190,000 more qualified people with “deep analytical skills” than will be available. I can tell you from personal experience this isn’t just media hype either. Even with the bleak job market for new grads grabbing headlines, I know a very bright new grad who just completed a combinatorics and optimization math degree at a top university and was recruited by an online retail analytics startup while still a sophomore. She doesn’t have any groupies yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

Ultra-famous musicians have always created a wide economic wake for others to make their own high value place in the world. Examples include big-name producers like Brian Eno and Rick Rubin, famous critics such as Cameron Crowe and Lester Bangs, and celebrated artists like Annie Liebovitz and Andy Warhol. The same holds true with data scientists, as many related and supporting roles will see spikes in demand as the art and science of distilling insights from data takes hold across the business.

Within IT we’re already seeing huge demand for the big data architects who are pushing the envelope on next-generation scale architectures. It’s no trivial task to assemble continuously updating, up-to-the-minute, high-quality data sets as the starting point for analysis. The market is also craving innovative technologies that enable IT architects to collect, distribute and store massive amounts of data, and help data scientists mine it for invaluable insights. At the other end of the equation, business managers will need to upgrade their skills so they can understand the causes, effects and implications of the findings their data scientists dig up, and turn them into effective decisions.

The Rolling Stones, the Who and Neil Young (who by the way, I think we’re still waiting to burn out instead of fade away) may not last forever, but U2, Coldplay and Beyonce will be there to carry the mega-money tour torch. Are you and your career ready to embark on the “Big Data World Tour” that will clearly be commanding top dollar for the next several decades?

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In his book Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball, Peta tells the story of how he’s successfully applied the fact-based analytical approach of a hedge fund to the game of baseball. Using what amounts to proprietary sabermetrics, he claims he was able to beat the odds and return 40% on his capital over a year of betting in Las Vegas. He concludes that the Vegas baseball gambling market doesn’t have enough liquidity to do this on a large scale yet, but it’s an interesting idea with real potential.

Baseball games are a new spin, but lots of companies are finding opportunity in the trading of innovative new asset classes. Here are a few Solace customers that trade or make a market in non-standard assets:

• Brand.net/Valassis – a marketplace that matches ad buyers with ad inventory in real time, based on contextual targeting.
• Bet365 – sports betting, including in-game betting. Want to bet with some of the information already revealed? No problem, Bet365 continuously changes the odds as the events of the match and time remaining change.
• eBay – a marketplace where hundreds of thousands of buyers and sellers meet to exchange goods and services of every imaginable type.
• Mercuria – trading commodities related to energy to balance excess with need worldwide.

I’ll be thinking of Mr. Peta when I settle in to watch the San Francisco Giants begin defense of their crown later today. If I leave now, I can catch the game in Vegas and do a little first-hand research on this exciting new market opportunity…

The post Play Ball! – The Prospects for Baseball as a Hot New Trading Asset Class appeared first on Solace Systems.

These kinds of incidents have immediate consequences as customers close accounts and regulators levy fines, but the lasting impact, which can be far greater, is the damage to the firm’s reputation. The market has always had a long memory, and the stakes are higher than ever after a five year period marked by scandals and gaffes that have seen public sentiment turn against the banks in general.

In a conversation with the CIO of one of our banking customers, he pointed out that reputational risk has become one of his top priorities and something that’s always front of mind when selecting a technology or designing a new project.  He explained that he has come to view complexity as the main driver of risk, and therefore public enemy #1, and his project priorities have been affected accordingly.

Across the industry, the biggest risk factor for financial services systems is the layers of complexity that build up as generations of applications and infrastructure evolve and age over time. Innocent looking changes often lead to unintended consequences as they affect the behavior or performance of existing systems. There was a very good article earlier this year on the BBC’s website describing the causes of this problem, tying it to the concept of technical debt.

Technical debt is what you incur when your timeline or budget requires you to cut corners on a project, or perhaps you outgrow one technology, but avoid upgrading and work around the limitation to keep things going short term. Eventually you have to go back and address this problem before it presents –you guessed it – reputational risk.

What’s that mean? The best way to sleep well at night is to keep your system as architecturally and operationally clean as you can, and avoid cutting the corners that incur technical debt you’ll have to pay for later.

The post Don’t Let “Technical Debt” put your Reputation at Risk appeared first on Solace Systems.

As the megatrends of big-data-scale applications and the move from batch to real-time business processes merge, far more information than ever before is on the move. The resulting data volumes and increases in complexity are the key drivers behind the growing adoption of easier to manage and higher capacity application infrastructures.

In fact, we just prepared a fun little piece of visual collateral highlighting the crazy growth in data rates in virtually every industry and the changing requirements that growth places on your middleware  (…and yes, it also addresses what to do if zombies take over your datacenter).

It takes less than five minutes to read, check it out.

The post The Growth of Middleware Appliances and Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse appeared first on Solace Systems.

This is a rare, massive, greenfield opportunity in the US that is primed to unfold quickly. According to KPMG, the worldwide market for online gaming is about $32 billion per year today, and that is without meaningful (legal) contribution from the US, the world’s richest economy. Juniper Research estimates that worldwide betting on mobile devices alone will be a $100 billion market 2017. History suggests whoever gets there first with a quality offering will earn the early advantage. So who’s positioned to win?

The Competitors

There are three prime candidates: existing brick and mortar casino operators expanding into online gaming, overseas online gaming brands that adapt their offerings to the US, and startups that are coming at the market from a completely new angle. Let’s take a quick look at each.

Traditional brick and mortar casinos fall into two tiers, in one bucket you can put mega-players like MGM, Caesar’s and Wynn and in the other bucket goes everybody else. The primary asset that the big casinos have is a well-known American brand, and existing relationships with the prime target market (people who already like to gamble). Their liability is that they have no direct experience with what is unique about online gaming vs in casino gaming. There will be a learning curve as they figure out the best way to blend the two business models. Smaller casinos largely rely on vendors to supply their casino floor management system, and would surely do the same for online gaming. It is unlikely that local regional casinos will be major players in the online world, but some will give it a go.

Established online gaming firms like PokerStars and Solace customers bet365 and Unibet will surely want a piece of the US market. Earlier this week, there was a story that PokerStars is considering purchasing a run-down Atlantic City casino to help them re-enter the US market on the back of recent New Jersey law changes. These companies have good brands recognized by many US gamblers, and the experience of having run large scale online gaming operations for years. Expect the states to erect road blocks to foreign companies moving in on the action in the US, but many of them will find a way to be successful.

The wildcard in the equation are the newer companies like Zynga, Betable and other startups that see gambling not as an extension of casino activity, but as an entirely new thing that is likely based around mobile computing. Almost assuredly Zynga will have an online poker app, but there is also speculation of adding betting to new kinds of games. Imagine betting your Farmville friends that you can grow more profitable crops than they can. These firms have their own assets to bring to the table, specifically experience running large scale gaming infrastructure, and a casual gaming user base that is ripe to cross over to low stakes gambling.

Under the Covers: Building for Rock-Solid Scale and Agility

Each type of competitor comes to this market with business model strengths and weaknesses, but one thing they will all need is rock solid infrastructure that can handle rapid scale and provide extreme flexibility to adapt as the market changes. Online gaming platforms have a lot in common with financial exchanges, and the same technologies generally apply. Both are very large scale event-driven systems where market participants meet and performance matters. Both have advanced security and fraud detection requirements. Both need highly evolved auditing and logging facilities to handle financial transactions, payment disputes and assurances of fair play. Both need highly elastic infrastructures that can handle extreme peaks without being wasteful the rest of the time. There are plenty of differences, to be sure, but they are far more alike than not.

Solace and Online Gaming

This similarity is what led Solace to the online gaming market several years ago. We had established a pedigree in financial trading and used that to crossover into initial gaming accounts. Today, we’re acquiring new gaming clients because we’ve proven our products directly in the market. Hardware middleware fits the requirements perfectly: extreme reliability, virtually unlimited scale, and simple operations – all at a fraction of the cost of other commercial (or open source) options. Messaging appliances make sense for all the same reasons that online gaming companies use hardware load balancers for their app servers. They’re faster, higher capacity, more reliable and much lower cost.

From our perspective, we view ourselves as similar to what 4G LTE cell tower manufacturers are to the smart phone revolution. All three major groups of competitors described above will need rock solid, high capacity infrastructure and we will be there to help them succeed in the US as we have done with many of the leaders in Europe and Asia. It is likely that all three will grab a share of this lucrative market, the question is who will lead the way? It will be fun to watch it all unfold.

The post The Mad Scramble to be First in US Online Gambling appeared first on Solace Systems.

But as I have talked to some of our customers implementing M2M systems, and read more research on the subject, it seems use of the term M2M heavily favors not the applications in play, but the nature of the devices involved and how they communicate. M2M is really a broadening of the old definition of telemetry or telematics where some non-traditional computing device (like a sensor, a car, a vending machine, a SCADA system) connects (often via a wireless network) to a compute farm and sends in some kind of status information. That’s the source of my confusion – clearly the second M in M2M is almost always a server in a datacenter, but to qualify as M2M the other end has to be some kind of remote sensor or other non-server. When applications running on two servers talk to get work done, that’s just computing. If the work the two applications are doing is replacing some prior human process, you could call it automation, but it’s not what the market refers to M2M. Clear as mud right?

I found a great map of the M2M space at Beecham Research that lays out dozens of examples of M2M in different markets (click here to see the interactive version on their site). This helped me get clear on M2M, perhaps it will help others.

The post Is it Really M2M, or Just Automation? appeared first on Solace Systems.

Keeping the Lights On

In truth, corporate IT budgets work a lot like your household budget. By the time you pay for your mortgage, cell phone, cable and utility bills, and lessons for your son or daughter to learn an instrument against their will, you have just a fraction left to splurge on that new car, fun vacation, remodel, or nice dinners out. It’s the same in IT, keeping existing systems running chews up most of your budget, leaving little for innovation. In 2011, IDC estimated that an average of 70% of IT budgets are spent keeping current systems running, with only 30% available for new projects. Just like your own budget, the only way to increase the innovation budget (discretionary income) is to reduce what you’re paying for your fixed expenses.

We’ve recently put together this short video that illustrates how Solace can reduce the cost of your middleware layer to free up money you can use to tackle more of the projects on your wish list. The video explains how Solace infrastructure can save you as much as 80% compared to the same capacity implemented as software middleware running on servers.

It’s worth the 4 minutes if you want the details, but here’s the summary of Solace appliances vs the commercial software you likely run today:

Lowering Maintenance Costs

So how does that impact your overall budget? First let’s break down the 70% that IDC estimates is spent maintaining and meeting the needs of existing systems. If 10% of that 70% goes toward middleware (software, hardware, operations, support, etc.) that means you’re spending 7% of your total IT budget on messaging. 80% of that 7% is 5.6% of your total IT budget, now freed up to fund innovation and new projects. That increases the amount of money available for new projects from 30% to 35.6% — an increase of 18.6%.

Not too shabby. Depending on the size of your company, that’s probably millions of dollars more to improve your company’s competitiveness in the marketplace. But we’re not done yet.

Doing More with the Innovation Budget

Chances are your new projects will also need messaging to distribute data between applications. The same economics apply for saving money on new project spend, meaning less of that budget is spend on middleware.

In the software messaging scenario, again using the IDC figures, assuming 30% of your total IT budget is allocated to new projects, and again assuming 10% of that goes toward messaging, that means 3% of your total IT budget is allocated to messaging in support of new projects, leaving 27% for true innovation.

In the Solace scenario, 35.6% of the budget is available for new projects, and we’ll assume the same 80% savings on the 10% that would have been spent on middleware. That means just 0.7% needs to be spent on new project middleware, boosting the money available for other innovation to 34.9% of your total IT budget, up from 27% with software.

Adding up the Savings

So a serious side effect of using Solace to boost throughput, simplify operations and reduce your datacenter footprint is increasing the amount of budget you have to spend on application innovation by (in this example) 29.2%. And once you’ve made the switch, you see those savings year after year. Going back to your personal budget, think about what 29.2% more discretionary income would do for your next vacation or vehicle purchase?

Of course not every company saves 80% with Solace – for some it may be only 60% and for others it can be 90% or more. In working with our customers we’ve developed some tools and techniques that can help you estimate the results you can expect to achieve given your own systems and situation. Your Solace account team would be happy to help with that. In any case, saving money on middleware is clearly a great way to stretch your IT budget and reach more of your innovation goals in 2013 and beyond.

The post An Easy Way to Increase IT Innovation by 29% appeared first on Solace Systems.

Today is one of those days for Solace. Deloitte has published their “Technology Fast 50™” list, recognizing the fastest growing technology companies in Canada, and we’re proud to report that Solace placed 11^th on the list, and first in Ottawa with a five year growth rate of 1,512%. This is the third straight year Solace has made the list, having placed 14^th in 2010 with a five year growth rate of 2,296% and 25^th in 2011 with five year revenue growth of 937%.

We’ve come a long way in the last five years. There are about two dozen companies that sell some form of messaging middleware. In 2007 we had a lot of big ideas, a few financial services customers and confidence that our rapidly improving product was going to be transformational, but based solely on business results we would have ranked near the bottom of that list. Today we have a proven product and a rapidly growing stable of blue chip reference customers in a variety of industries, and according to market analysts we have passed all of our peer competitors and now rank 3^rd in the market (measured by annual revenues) behind only IBM and TIBCO.

Being recognized for our rapid growth is a good opportunity to pause, take a breath and appreciate all that we’ve accomplished. I’d sincerely like to thank all of our customers for being open to innovation with new projects, and reducing costs or complexity when incumbent product renewals were at issue. Your trust in us made this recognition possible, and keeping that trust is what will keep us on this list for years to come.

Tomorrow it will be business as usual, but today we celebrate.

The post How a High Growth Technology Company is like a Popular Restaurant appeared first on Solace Systems.

Solace and Big Data

That requirement is at the core of Solace’s founding vision. More than 10 years ago, we saw that three long term trends  would lead to the need to move and manage an increasingly massive volume of data:

• Globalization of business, driven by the internet
• Rapid expansion of computing endpoints, driven by mobile and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections
• Exponential growth of data volumes driven by business process automation, complex event processing and decision making tools.

We chose to tackle the problem with lightning fast hardware technology instead of the “more clever software” approach that had been the hallmark of the incremental advances made in the middleware market over the last 30 years. We’d seen this same approach successfully eliminate high-volume computing choke-points for decades, most notably in internet switches and routers, and more recently in load balancers and security devices. Middleware is the foundation of every distributed application architecture, and we felt it needed the same treatment.

We delivered our first hardware product in 2005, and since then we’ve given a broad swath of companies the extreme capacity and rock-solid reliability they need to tackle the size and scale of big data applications which, by the way, will be tomorrow’s mainstream applications.

The post Scaling Data Movement when Planning for Big Data appeared first on Solace Systems.

Surely hampering access to the world’s largest and most affluent market would slow down the pace of online gambling right?

Wrong. Check out this chart from Statista:

You can see that the rate of growth did slow in 2007 and 2012 (projections in the 2012 case), but is hardly even noticeable in context of the long term trend. This is such an unstoppable freight train that the full might and power of the US government to block online gaming barely measures as a blip.

Now comes evidence that the US is gearing up to allow online gambling in the US after all. They have figured out what every country figured out a long time ago: people are going to gamble, online gambling makes it easy, and you might as well have the profits taxed in your country instead of a foreign country. You may also have seen recent news of non-traditional gambling entities like  Zynga and Big Fish Games eyeing this market to get in on the growth. Expect the opening of the US market to spark a free-for-all of new market participants, gaming services and technology investment that will push growth rates even higher over the next few years.

At Solace, we have already been the beneficiaries of the massive growth in online gaming internationally — it is currently one of our fastest growing market segments. Several of the world’s largest online casinos and sports betting websites (like bet365) have chosen Solace for distribution of real time odds and in game event management. Many of these sites have traffic volumes to rival the largest stock exchanges and they need reliable and scalable infrastructure that protects them from the kinds of traffic spikes (poker tournaments, World Cup, Superbowl, etc.) that can stress software infrastructures resulting in sluggish performance or even outages. The companies best prepared to deliver a consistently high-quality user experience through high rates of customer acquisition and game play growth are the ones that will emerge as the winners in this market.

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