A company with a decades-long history in Kanata North is continuing its local hiring spree, beefing up its R&D team to meet growing international demand for its event streaming technology.
Software designer Solace is currently recruiting dozens of employees, ramping up its product development as more sectors turn to realtime, cloud-based applications and analytics to help operate their businesses.
Founded 20 years ago, Solace is a well-known name in the financial services sector, originally providing hardware to banks and stock traders to streamline financial data distribution across their networks.
As the world turned towards virtual platforms, the company followed suit, creating a more affordable and cloud ready software version of its hardware technology.
With its broader product portfolio, Solace is now breaking ground in new markets, helping big-name clients with its event streaming and management platform.
“What we became very good at is now being adopted globally across all sectors,” says Shawn McAllister, chief technology officer at Solace. “Our market opportunity is massive, so this is the time when you step on the gas.”
Flexibility in tech
The company recently took its event-mesh capability – a platform that communicates any digital occurance in a business to all necessary parties – one step further, moving the technology to the cloud as a software-as-a-service option.
Providing hardware, software and SaaS products that can connect and work in unison has allowed the company to target bigger, multinational clients that need a complex, realtime integration of their company’s systems.
Solace’s technology is currently being used by the Hong Kong International Airport, moving large amounts of flight and passenger data on a daily basis. The team is also working closely with French automaker Groupe Renault, and several other companies in the connected vehicle space.
“Our team’s ability to evolve our technology is really how we’ve moved into new markets,” McAllister says. “At the core, we’ve always been focused on real-time information exchange; we just changed how we delivered that service.”
Moving quickly as the technology sector evolves has helped Solace remain ahead of the curve, an occurrence McAllister attributes to the talented team of developers and their tech-savvy backgrounds.
Like McAllister – who worked at Newbridge Networks and then Alcatel before joining Solace around 15 years ago – many of the company’s employees hail from the networking industry and more recently, many with a SaaS background.
Gaining experience at companies such as Cisco, Nortel and Mitel helped shape the way the team approaches connectivity, allowing them to think differently about how a company should manage its realtime data movement.
“A lot of us joined Solace with in-depth knowledge of hardware systems, networks and how to properly stream information across various systems,” he says. “Understanding the internet and these dynamic routing protocols really helped differentiate Solace’s initial hardware system, and continues to set us apart in our software. Add to that our SaaS experience and it’s a valued combination that is difficult to replicate.”
Looking to the future
As the company continues to grow its Kanata North team, McAllister says he is excited about bringing on new talent and fine-tuning Solace’s approach to event streaming.
With a multitude of job opportunities available in cloud software development, user interface design and low-level realtime software, Solace is eager to incorporate innovative minds to their team to continue to push the company into new markets.
“There’s so much more that we want to develop into our platform and offer to our customers, we just need to build it,” says McAllister. “The market is moving quickly, and that’s causing us to be bullish in our hiring.”
And as the company prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary in the Kanata North tech park – a community in which McAllister has spent his career working – the team at Solace remain excited about the future and what it could mean for the company.
“We love being part of the Ottawa community, and it would be great to see even more big local success stories,” he adds. “We would love to be the next Shopify!”