There is a growing theme of enterprise applications not only moving to the Cloud but also becoming part of a Big Data environment.

Furthermore there is also a fever brewing around PaaS (Platform as a Service) being the hot topic for 2012, and this is all about standardizing key middleware software into the Cloud.

This field will overlap with the growing focus on Big Data as analytics vendors who specialize in data-centres redefine their products accordingly.

Another vendor profile is Solace Systems, based in Ottawa. Their exciting potential can be best explained by demonstrating how they’re related to the hot buzz topics of the moment.

Middleware-as-a-Service

As a core Cloud technology Solace is active in these kinds of areas. As a PaaS component they’ll replace certain pieces of off-the-shelf PaaS bundles when the limitations of these components is reached, in areas like performance.

Solace has codified these functions into very high throughput hardware units that can also achieve in one unit what takes dozens of commodity server hardware.

The PaaS layer is predominately focused on middleware and application platform software, meaning the systems that are focused on data integration between different applications. In short ‘exchange points’ like those in telecomms and therefore it’s entirely logical to apply the same type of engineering mindset.

Solace’s turnkey appliance consolidates your messaging, WAN distribution and web streaming into one platform, which can be baked into Cloud services from your local provider. As described in this white paper Solace offers ‘SaaS infrastructure‘ , the plumbing for Cloud-based and internal applications to communicate via service architecture. An existing equivalent is the Amazon Queing service.

In short “Middleware-as-a-Service” so to speak, capable of “carrier grade” performance.

Nortel 2.0

Both based in Ottawa and funded by Terry Matthews, Solace is also another great example of how important these developments are, a la “Nortel 2.0“.

The Federal Government of Canada is currently in a review to figure out how to compact 300 data-centres to 20, and they’re also scratching their heads over how to jump-start more technology innovation in the Canada to avoid lagging the world in this regard.

Like most things in life it’s an under-your-nose kinda thing, where large-scale Government adoption of these kinds of local startups would catalyze a world-class industry of global scale in this field.

For example watch this quick video to see how you can deploy faster enterprise applications and consumer services in a fraction of the datacenter space, and at lower cost, and imagine if the Federal Government of Canada was the major use case study example, achieving a 300 > 20 reduction as a result.

Would that unpin another $ billion dollar Canadian IT firm? Damn right!

So c’mon Canada – Roll up the data-centre to Win!

Read the original blog entry...