I've been running messaging systems for most of my career, for over 17 years. The most valuable feature is the ability of the appliances to cope in a way that I haven't seen other vendors do. You always get into types of message-loss states that can't be explained with some other products that are out there. You raise tickets with the vendors and they'll give you an explanation. But in the 10 years that we've been in production with Solace, we've never had something that cannot be explained. I've got tickets open with the likes of IBM that have never been resolved, for years. The Solace product's stability is absolutely essential. There is also the ability to have so many things laid in, where we're doing guaranteed messaging and direct messaging laid into the same appliance. There is also the interoperability. We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages. We support a wrapper on top of the vendor's API and we enforce certain specifications for connecting to our messaging environment. That way, we've been able to have that common way of sending and sharing data across all the groups. That has been very important for us. In terms of ease of management, from a configuration perspective you can have all your appliances within one central console. You can see your whole estate from there. And you can configure the appliances through API calls so you can be centrally polling and managing and monitoring them, and configure them as you need to. There are certain things where that's a little more tricky to do, but at a general level we have abstracted things like user-commissioning into other systems. So we just have a front-end where we change the commissioning and push it to the appliance in whatever region and it updates the commissioning. From a central management and configuration point of view, it's been extremely easy to interact, operate, and support. When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works. It has a caching product that sits on top of that, so depending on the region that you're trying to filter, caching level can make it a bit more difficult than the real-time streaming. But from a real-time stream, you can pretty much filter at any level or component and it's extremely flexible in that regard.
