Why? Because for starters, our computers know where we are thanks to their IP addresses. The new version of FireFox that was announced earlier this week supports location-aware browsing.  And of course our phones know where we are — I’ve spent the past few months working with Google Latitude, Yahoo!FireEagle, Whrll, Brightkite, Poynt, and numerous other location-based applications available on the iPhone and Blackberry. I’m convinced that our daily comings and goings are sure to be continuously and anonymously tracked, and with our consent, put in a personalized and social context. And with the next generation of cars bundling in wireless telematics, it’s not just our computers and our phones that will be continuously tracked.

We’re already seeing stories like “Kidnapped Woman Saved By Misplaced BlackBerry” and this hilarious adventure involving “Lego, a dive bar, and some fast urban walking“. Location is fast becoming the latest datatype in the growing trend toward the real-time Web. Location streams are the new click streams. They’re a goldmine of information to be captured, crunched, analyzed, and turned into advertising and retail profit.

The word on the show floor was that there were 40% fewer vendors this year, and about the same level of reduction in attendees. Sure, there were still the crazy guys in fishing hats trying to collect one of each giveaway and plenty of people trying to come up with creative ways to slip you a resume, but overall, show volume was light. The good news is that the ratio of quality conversations (for Solace) was much higher than last year. This is almost certainly because Solace is much better known than last year. We spent less time answering the “Who is Solace?” question and more time talking about issues with the prospects.

The buzz was still with all things low-latency. I was talking to Larry Tabb, and his opinion is: “The thing about low latency is, you either spend to keep up, or you are out of the market. That’s why low latency has remained hot and is the one area still growing”. That’s certainly true. We also find that the cost reduction value proposition resonates well. Many companies are revisiting their software cost sinkholes and looking for more productive options that bring down their burn rate.

I don’t think SIFMA will ever again be what it was earlier in this decade, though. Trade shows have outlived their usefulness in my opinion. People used to go to these events to learn about the industry, but now, you can learn much more in a couple hours in Google. The next most useful aspect is networking with peers, which has evolved to bumping into people you know and finding out where they work now, not useful scratch my back kind of discussions. So what are trade shows now? Relics of an earlier time.

This has not been a great week for cultural icons who are remembered fondly but whose better days were well in the past.

The story is the same in many other industries as well, as the availability and flow of real-time information has become the status quo, and such an integral part of all kinds of business processes.

Shouldn’t infrastructure managers know what’s happening in their own networks? Of course! But in order to boost the performance of their server/software architectures, many have had to turn off statistics gathering leaving them with no trail of breadcrumbs that can help lead them back to the problems’ root cause. This leads to major delays in getting networks back up and running—as well as angry bosses and customers.

One of the many advantages of a hardware-based architecture is that you can gather detailed stats, much more detailed than are available in software, without impacting latency or volume.

Solace’s products have always had a web-based and command line management interface, and at the request of our customers, we have also teamed up with SL Corporation – the makers of RTView. RTView is a consolidated network management tool that gives an easy-to-digest real-time dashboard of current and past network states and even takes steps to prevent potential problems when alerts are triggered.

It’s another great tool to help infrastructure managers relax knowing they can quickly identify and repair any issues that arise, and even better, avoid trading interruptions altogether.

Similarly, we know that most companies can’t snap their fingers and flip production applications from whatever they run today to a new infrastructure overnight. Countless dollars and man-hours have been spent building, buying and deploying a myriad of technologies to solve the many challenges associated with application infrastructure, and frankly a lot of it is doing fine as is. Because of this, many companies need a way to drop Solace hardware into their architectures in such a way that they can capitalize on it where it makes the most sense today and gradually extend into other areas over time. We need to help them build bridges between tomorrow’s infrastructure and yesterday’s in such a way that their business benefits today.

Every IT team has priorities, and “upgrading all existing systems” is rarely one of them. It can take years to migrate a majority of systems to a single common infrastructure, and frankly there will probably always be many kinds of middleware in most firms.
The goal is to allow seamless co-existence between these environments so basic information sharing can occur as needed.

That’s why earlier today we announced a partnership with Adaptris, a provider of an adapter framework and many off the shelf adapters—software that bridges the gaps between applications, databases, messaging systems and data formats. The adapter framework makes it easy to integrate legacy messaging systems, commercial applications or home-grown applications into message flows on the shared Solace backbone.

We recognize that this isn’t a panacea. There will always be highly specialized requirements that will still require custom integration or unique approaches. But we believe the 80/20 rule holds here and 80% of connectivity requirements will be successfully addressed by the Solace/Adaptris collaboration.

That’s not to underplay its capabilities though – when it comes to message caching its performance, scalability and robustness are second to none. It can cache half a million messages a second, can be distributed for extreme performance and scalability, and it lets you decide how to handle exceptional situations such as when data is updated while a cache request is in progress.

Our solution is not, however, a full-featured in-memory application server like what you’d get from GigaSpaces or Oracle Coherence. Think of it like TiVo for your message stream—it records shows as they are broadcast (caches messages as they’re sent), and then lets you watch (retrieve) them later. Only really fast. TiVo is a special purpose Linux box that has been optimized to excel at, and seriously simplify, one function: recording and playing back TV shows. You can’t back up your PC’s files to it, you can’t edit the shows you’ve recorded, you can’t (easily) move the files from your TiVo to other computers, etc.

Many of our customers will already have a product like Gigaspaces or Coherence and in those cases, we will continue to integrate with these 3rd party products. But for customers that want a fully integrated, one-vendor solution, the Solace cache may well be the ticket.

History Has Left Us with a Potpourri of Messaging

From the earliest days of distributed computing, the idea that steps in a workflow use a task queue of some kind to pass off information has been a central tenant of information design. Over time, major buckets have emerged, each on their own timelines, and each with a different technology that became the de facto standard.

• Message queuing — Dominated by MQ Series (er… WebSphere MQ), but there have been many imitators along the way: DEC Message Queue, Oracle AQ, Microsoft MSMQ, etc.
• Publish subscribe — Pioneered by Tibco with Rendezvous and its precursors, but also used in SmartSockets, 29West, RTI and others.
• Ultra-low latency — Primarily the same names as publish subscribe, but in a different configuration
• JMS — JMS was the first attempt at an open messaging standard with interoperability defined only at the API level.
• AMQP — A working group that’s defining a standard wire protocol for publish subscribe and message queuing. This is the reverse of JMS as it would focus on multi-vendor interop, but does not (currently) plan to enforce a single API.
• Wide area network — For low volumes, you can use any guaranteed or queue-based messaging to reliably get information across a WAN. For higher volume, most users have custom architectures that batch messages into larger groups and send as either messages or FTP files for greater efficiency.
• Other messaging — You will find a few other messaging types, such as computer to human messaging protocols like XMPP, which was initially developed for use with internet chat programs but has been extended to include additional functionality.

The Messaging World Has Fundamentally Changed

Most enterprises have ended up with a mishmash of all of these types of messaging–often five, ten or even more solutions from a handful of different vendors.  This isn’t usually the result of poor decision making, but of the fact that at the time each one was deployed, it was the fastest, easiest or most reliable way to meet a given requirement. But hardware fundamentally changes what’s possible in middleware.

Today’s limits are either limitations of the interplay between operating systems and software, or the limits of supporting multiple general purpose hardware servers. For any one of these kinds of messaging, hardware leaves these limits in the dust and blows the doors off what’s been possible with software-based solutions:

• Publish subscribe fanout of more than 10 million messages a second (basically saturating a 10 GigE link)
• Fully failsafe message queuing at 130,000 messages per second
• Ultra-low latency messaging with 25 microseconds of latency and very low jitter
• WAN streaming that exhibits orders of magnitude more throughput than software over the same network

Each one of these represents out-of-the-box performance that surpasses what world-class architects would not be able to get out of software. But what if you could consolidate all of these parallel products into one footprint as well?

All Messaging Under One Roof

The real power of the Unified Messaging Platform is not that it can run circles around software in each of these areas, but that it lets you comfortably use the same equipment for your front, middle and back office capabilities without worrying about one application impacting the performance or stability of another. You don’t build a new IP network for each application, do you? Similarly, it’s time to stop building, scaling and designing redundancy for so many discrete middleware systems.

If you could (over time) replace your MQ and JMS infrastructure, as well as your market data delivery and specialty algo trading infrastructure, in favor of a single network layer that could do all of these better, faster and easier, why wouldn’t you? The ROI is a no brainer. The business gets worry-free headroom and the ability to scale to tens of millions of messages per second. The business gets competitive edge in operational improvements and faster trading.

It’s a game-changing value prop and it was unthinkable just a few years ago. If you ask the really talented architects and infrastructure designers on the street today, they are more likely to call it inevitable than unthinkable.

If you’re coming to SIFMA, please stop by and see us. We’ve been hard at work on some new technologies, and will be announcing some new partnerships as well.

You can find us in booth #1745 on the Rhinelander (main) show floor.

With couriers it’s two strikes and you’re out. Now it was up to me to go pick it up, or eventually they would return the package to sender. It turned out that my package was at their office in Fremont CA, a 40 minute drive from my home. I had to blow off an hour and a half of my working day to learn that, thankfully, it was not a trendy top for my wife or daughter, but was my renewed passport, which is why it required a signature.

If only there was a way that a package could be addressed to me instead of my address, and I could commit to a location and time window the day before it is delivered. Perhaps I would be at my office instead of home, or maybe at a hotel in Chicago on a business trip and in need of my renewed passport to continue on to Frankfurt.

The early testing of exactly that capability is what we announced today with Softbank Telecom. Softbank is working with with the City of Kobe to model major changes for the package delivery business in Japan. It really is an antiquated, inflexible system that requires the sender to know where the recipient is likely to be before a package can be statically addressed and sent. If recipients were registered with the carrier, they could easily be notified when a package is coming, and declare a location for the four hour time window the courier supplies. That would eliminate the courrier’s waste associated with redeliveries and the recipient’s costs associated with delays of important deliveries (contracts, parts, etc).

Another objective for the project was to abstract the sender, the package contents and the receiver from the process for privacy reasons. When a package is sent, details about the recipient and package contents are stored in a central repository, and a barcode is generated that is unique to the recipient. The person picking up the package does not need to know about the contents or the location of the recipient, only that the package will next go to the local collection point for that courier. Similarly when it is sorted to get on a plane, the sorter only needs to know what plane, and so on down the line. A customs agent or other authorized person may have entitlements to look up the package contents and the recipient information, but the rest of the process is need-to-know only. Privacy is a hot issue in Japan as it is in the US.

This is such a logical next step for logistics that it is hard to believe that the rest of the world won’t soon follow this model. Not that I don’t love Fremont, but I would much rather have had my passport delivered to my office where I was than write notes to the delivery person and eventually waste time and fuel driving across the bay. Once again, Japan shows us how to innovate with carrier-based services.

But don’t talk to the IT folks supporting trading about an “economic slowdown” – the global economic crisis is driving the rapid acceleration of market data rates. The April 2009 market data stats from FIF showed new record peaks for eight of the top exchange feeds, some of them up as much as 44%! That continues to put pressure on already overworked market data infrastructures.

Despite the misperception that leading capital markets firms are mired in budget cuts and freezes, these companies have no choice but to spend to stay competitive in their infrastructure. Without timely market data they are dead in the water and might as well turn the lights out.

Staff cuts and outsourcing are for real, and paychecks aren’t what they used to be, but this report from Aite confirms that capital markets IT budgets aren’t down as much as people think. Late last year the analyst firm Aite predicted that Wall Street IT spending wouldn’t drop more than 5% in 2009, and halfway through the year they’ve only tweaked that prediction to 6%.

This business reality is what is driving the move from software- to hardware-based messaging in earnest. Capital markets firms have been moving away from the antiquated model of building their infrastructure internally for years, but the availability of easily-deployable feed handlers and messaging appliances that outperform COTS and homegrown software by orders of magnitude is making it a competitive necessity. An investment bank building their own custom hardware would be way out of scope even for the world’s largest firms, and even in the best of times.

We’re pleased to count technology leaders like Barclays Capital among the list of financial firms that are leading this transition.

• 24/7 reliability to assure service availability
• Low-latency behavior to provide customers with competitive trade execution times
• Lots of headroom for growth in service volumes and customers
• Small data center footprint and minimal incremental operations cost as customer counts increase

Increasingly, customers do not have just a low latency problem, or a queuing problem, or an efficient WAN delivery problem, they have an information delivery problem that is a combination of all three. The prospect of procuring three kinds of software that needs to be made redundant and scaled across separate racks of servers feels so 20 years ago when a single hardware content router can consolidate all of these into one footprint and one API.

Once again Japan is leading the way in innovative, next generation services.