Solace: The Company, Solace Platform (PubSub+) and the Event Mesh

Solace is a Canadian software company that makes event brokers: the infrastructure that moves messages and events between applications, devices, clouds and, more recently, AI agents, as they happen. Its product family, sold today as the Solace Platform and called PubSub+ until May 2025, is built around the Solace Event Broker. The broker runs as a managed cloud service, as software on your own servers or Kubernetes, or as a hardware appliance, and brokers in different places can be linked into what Solace calls an event mesh.

Why that matters to a manufacturer. A plant produces a constant stream of business events: an order released, a batch completed, a quality hold raised, a machine stopped. ERP, MES, quality, maintenance and data platforms all want some of them. Wiring each system to every other one produces the brittle web of point-to-point interfaces most enterprises already know. A broker decouples them: a system publishes an event once, and every system that subscribed receives it. Solace’s particular claim is doing that across many sites, data centres and clouds, over several protocols, with guaranteed delivery. Many SAP-centred manufacturers already run Solace technology without knowing it, because SAP’s advanced event mesh service is built on it.

This page covers Solace the company, its history, where its products sit relative to a plant and an enterprise, its editions and release lifecycle, and the facts a buyer should know. The thirteen system pages below go into each product, capability and comparison in depth.

Solace, the company in one paragraph

Solace was founded in 2001 in Ottawa (Kanata), Canada, by Craig Betts, as Solace Systems (Wikipedia). It is privately held, has been controlled by Bridge Growth Partners since 2016, and has been led by CEO Denis King since May 2020 (Ottawa Business Journal). It now describes itself as “the real-time data and agentic AI platform for enterprises” (Solace). Its home market is capital markets: Solace states that “6 out of the 10 biggest investment banks” use it, and that RBC Capital Markets handles about 118 billion messages a day on it (solace.com). Outside finance it names customers in aviation, retail, logistics, telecoms and manufacturing, including Bosch, Danone, Heineken and Stellantis (manufacturing). It positions itself as an independent, purpose-built vendor, “not a subsidiary or side project” of a larger company (company page), which matters more since IBM bought Confluent in 2026.

Solace history: from hardware messaging to the Solace Platform

The story runs from a hardware start-up serving trading floors to a software and cloud platform that now markets itself for AI agents.

2001. Solace Systems is founded in Ottawa to put messaging into hardware, the way network equipment makers had put IP routing into silicon. Between 2001 and 2016 it raises more than $60 million of venture capital (Wikipedia). Denis King, today’s CEO, joins in 2003 as a senior systems engineer.

Around 2010. RBC Capital Markets moves off its incumbent messaging vendors onto Solace appliances. It now runs more than 50 of them, with 25,000 to 30,000 application connections, according to Solace (RBC case). This is the kind of low-latency, high-volume trading workload that defined the company’s first decade. In 2011 the US Federal Aviation Administration begins using Solace for SWIM, its System Wide Information Management programme (FAA release).

April 2016. Bridge Growth Partners takes a majority stake in a deal reported at more than $100 million, with Neuberger Berman Private Equity co-investing (Bloomberg). Les Rechan becomes CEO in 2017.

24 May 2018. The company drops “Systems” and becomes Solace, and launches Solace PubSub+: one broker for publish/subscribe, request/reply, queueing and streaming, with a free edition limited by connections and to 10,000 messages per second, then described as “production-ready” (launch release). This is the pivot from hardware to software that runs anywhere. In May 2020 Denis King, by then COO, becomes CEO.

2022 to 2024. SAP releases SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh in Q3 2022, built on Solace technology (SAP Learning). Partitioned queues reach general availability in broker 10.4.0 in 2023. In April 2024 IDC names Solace a Leader in its first MarketScape for event brokering software (release), and in October 2024 Gartner includes it among 20 vendors in its Market Guide for Event Brokers. In December 2024 Solace launches Micro-Integrations, small connectors to SaaS, databases and other brokers.

2025. On 14 May 2025 every product drops “PubSub+” and the family becomes the Solace Platform (announcement). In June the broker moves to a model of long-term support (LTS) releases plus biweekly rolling releases. On 2 December 2025, at AWS re:Invent, Solace Agent Mesh Enterprise reaches general availability, a commercial version of the open-source agent framework Solace published in January (release).

2026. In February Solace partners with Kong on combined API and event management. On 5 May 2026 Bridge Growth announces a US$790 million (C$1.1 billion) single-asset continuation vehicle for Solace, co-led by Apogem Capital, Golub Capital, HSBC Asset Management and Schroders Capital, with the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan rolling its stake. Bridge Growth and its affiliates keep more than 15% of the equity and continue to manage the business (Solace). Broker 10.26.0 LTS ships on 23 June. On 18 September Agent Mesh is rebuilt in Go as a single runtime, and the original Python repository is then deprecated and archived (what’s new; GitHub).

The pattern is worth naming. Each era widened who inside a company deals with Solace. The appliance era belonged to trading-floor infrastructure teams. The PubSub+ era brought in integration architects, cloud teams and, through SAP, ERP architects. The Solace Platform era is aimed at data and AI teams as well. For a manufacturer, the practical consequence is that the vendor’s newest marketing (agents, real-time context) sits on top of a mature broker. Evaluate the two separately: the broker has twenty years of production history, and the agent layer has about one.

The Solace portfolio on the ISA-95 stack

Solace’s documentation groups the platform in three layers (docs): the core is the Event Broker in three form factors (Cloud, Software and Appliance); application services are Micro-Integrations, Agent Mesh and developer tools; platform services are Event Portal, Insights and distributed tracing. The diagram places them against the ISA-95 levels a plant engineer already uses.

Read the diagram from the bottom up. Solace has no product that talks to a PLC or a drive. Plant data reaches it from SCADA, from an industrial DataOps tool such as HighByte, or from a plant MQTT broker, which is why Solace lists Inductive Automation and HighByte as technology partners (partners). From level 3 upwards Solace does its real work: a broker at each site, one or more in the data centre, and managed services in the cloud, linked by dynamic message routing so that a subscription in the cloud pulls only the events it asked for out of a plant. The event mesh page explains how that routing works, and the manufacturing page sets out the ISA-95 placement in detail. For the plant-side pattern Solace sits above, see our guide to the unified namespace.

PubSub+ to Solace: the name map

The rename of 14 May 2025 changed names, not technology. People still search the old names, and GitHub repositories, Docker images and Kubernetes resources still use pubsubplus, so a plant holding older documents needs the map (Solace docs).

Former name	Current name (since May 2025)
Solace PubSub+ Platform	Solace Platform
Solace PubSub+ Event Broker (Software, Appliance)	Solace Event Broker (Software, Appliance)
PubSub+ Standard Edition / Enterprise Edition	Solace Event Broker Standard Edition / Enterprise Edition
PubSub+ 3560 / 3530 appliances	Solace 3560 / Solace 3530
PubSub+ Cloud, PubSub+ Event Broker Service	Solace Cloud, Solace Event Broker Service
PubSub+ Mission Control, Broker Manager	Mission Control, Broker Manager
PubSub+ Event Portal	Solace Event Portal
PubSub+ Insights	Solace Insights
PubSub+ Connectors, Connector Manager	Solace Micro-Integrations, Solace Micro-Integration Manager
PubSub+ Capacity Unit	Platform Capacity Unit
PubSub+ Messaging API for C, .NET, Java, Python, Go, JavaScript	Solace Messaging API for the same languages
Solace Message Router, VMR (before 2018)	Solace Event Broker Software

Solace editions, form factors and release lifecycle

The broker is one product sold three ways, and the self-managed software comes in two editions. The figures below are Solace’s own, as of October 2026 (editions docs; pricing). The editions and pricing page goes further.

Option	What it is	Key limits and terms	Fits
Standard Edition (software)	Free self-managed broker	1,000 connections, 10,000 msg/s ingress, 1 Message VPN, no DR. Docs: “Production Deployable: No”	Labs, development, evaluation
Enterprise Edition (software)	Commercial self-managed broker	200,000 connections, unthrottled, 5 Message VPNs, DR replication. Price not public	Production on your own VMs or Kubernetes
Enterprise evaluation	Standard plus a 90-day key	Configuration lost at expiry unless upgraded	Proving Enterprise features
Solace Cloud	Managed broker services on AWS, Azure, GCP and others	Service classes from ENT-250 to ENT-100K, plus a 200K tier since August 2026. HA by default. 30-day trial	Teams that want no broker operations
Appliance	Solace 3560 and 3530 hardware	Highest published throughput and lowest latency figures	Ultra-low latency, air-gapped or regulated data centres

The Standard Edition question is the one buyers get wrong. In 2018 Solace marketed the free edition as production-ready. Today’s documentation table says it is not production deployable, and the software page says it has “no production support” and is “designed for evaluation”. A plant that stood up a free broker years ago for a pilot, and quietly let it become production, should check its position. The Standard vs Enterprise page shows both sources side by side.

The release lifecycle: LTS plus rolling

Since June 2025 the broker ships in two streams. Long-term support (LTS) releases appear about once a year and receive maintenance updates every two weeks for two years. Rolling releases arrive every two weeks with new features (support dates).

Release	Type	Released	End of support
10.4.1	LTS	20 June 2023	15 June 2026 (ended)
10.8.1	LTS	14 June 2024	15 June 2027
10.25.0	LTS, first under the new model	25 June 2025	30 June 2027
10.26.0	LTS, current as of October 2026	23 June 2026	23 June 2028
10.27.0	LTS, planned	June 2027	June 2029

What it means for a plant. Self-managed brokers at a site should sit on an LTS release, with an upgrade window planned before each end-of-support date, in the same way the plant plans SCADA server patching. Rolling releases suit development and managed cloud services, where Solace or the cloud team runs the upgrades. A broker two LTS releases behind is a broker running without fixes. The releases and LTS page covers upgrade practice.

Solace company facts

Volatile facts are as of October 2026. Scale figures are Solace’s own or its owner’s, so each is attributed.

Topic	Detail	Source
Founded	2001, Ottawa (Kanata), Canada, by Craig Betts, as Solace Systems	Wikipedia
Headquarters	Ottawa (Kanata), Canada; “17+” offices	company page
Ownership	Private. Bridge Growth Partners in control since 2016; May 2026 continuation vehicle of US$790 million	Solace
Leadership	Denis King (President and CEO), Jason Burke (CFO), Joshua Carroll (CTO), Ali Pourshahid (CPO), Shawn McAllister (Chief AI Strategy Officer)	leadership
Employees	“480+” on the company page; about 550 according to Bridge Growth’s CEO (April 2026)	company page, Bloomberg reprint
Customers	About 400, according to Bridge Growth’s CEO; recurring revenue 96% of the total	Bloomberg reprint
Revenue	Not disclosed
Patents	“25”	company page
Certifications	SOC 2 Type 2; ISO/IEC 27001:2022; CSA STAR Level 1. No FedRAMP claim found	security
Analyst coverage	IDC MarketScape Leader (2024); Gartner Market Guide representative vendor (2024); ISG Exemplary Provider (2025). Gartner publishes no Magic Quadrant for event brokers	IDC, Gartner
Open source	Five GitHub organisations; most repositories Apache-2.0	SolaceProducts

Two rows deserve a second look from a buyer. The certifications cover Solace’s own operations and its cloud service, which matters to a supplier security review; they are not an OT product security certification such as IEC 62443. And the ownership row is a financing fact, not a roadmap: the continuation vehicle extends Bridge Growth’s management of the business, and a plant should treat vendor ownership the way it treats any vendor risk, through contract terms and an exit plan.

The thirteen Solace system pages

Most asked

The four questions that bring most readers to Solace, answered directly:

• Solace editions and pricing: what is free, what is not, the cloud packages and support tiers, and why there is no public price
• Solace vs Kafka: event messaging against event streaming, where each fits, and running both
• Solace MQTT: what works, the documented QoS and retained-message limits, and when to put a plant broker in front
• Solace Agent Mesh: agentic AI on an event mesh, from the Python framework to the Go rewrite

What Solace means for a plant and an enterprise architecture

Adopting an event broker is easy to start and hard to run well for ten years. In our view, these are the consequences a manufacturer should weigh, whether it is choosing Solace, inheriting it through SAP, or deciding a lighter broker is enough.

It is an enterprise backbone, not a plant broker. Solace’s strengths are multi-site routing, guaranteed delivery into queues, many protocols and governance. A single plant building its first unified namespace for SCADA, MES and dashboards rarely needs all of that, and a plant MQTT broker that the controls team can run may fit better. Solace becomes interesting when there are many plants, WAN links that must buffer, IT consumers expecting JMS, AMQP or REST, or events that must land in ERP without loss. Our guide to MQTT in manufacturing covers the plant side of that line.

Topic design is the real project. Solace routes on hierarchical topics with wildcards, which maps naturally onto an ISA-95 hierarchy of enterprise, site, area, line and cell. That is an advantage only if someone designs the topic tree before the first publisher goes live. Illustrative scenario: three plants each pick their own topic conventions during pilots, and a year later the enterprise team finds it cannot subscribe to “all filler stoppages” without three different rules. Fixing it means changing every publisher. A topic standard written on day one costs a workshop.

Someone has to own it. A mesh crosses the boundary between OT and IT, and in many companies neither side believes it is theirs. Brokers need patching on the LTS schedule, capacity needs watching, Message VPNs and access lists need an owner, and failover needs testing. A broker with no owner becomes the integration nobody can change. Name the owning team, usually enterprise integration with an OT counterpart, before the first plant connects. Our IT/OT integration work starts with exactly that boundary.

SAP shops may already own it. If the business runs SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, it is running Solace technology under an SAP contract. That changes the build-or-buy question: the enterprise side of the mesh may already exist, and the decision is how plants join it. The SAP advanced event mesh page explains the relationship.

Kafka is rarely either-or. Kafka is built to keep events for a long time and replay them into analytics. Solace is built to deliver them, now, to whoever subscribed, across sites. Many enterprises end up with both, and Solace sells three ways to bridge them. The real decision is which system owns which flow, and the Solace vs Kafka page sets it out.

Treat the agent layer as early. Agent Mesh fits Solace’s design well, since agents need fresh events and asynchronous hand-offs. But its architecture changed in September 2026, its first public manufacturing reference dates from June 2026, and production agent deployments on plant floors are early for every vendor. Pilot it against a bounded problem, such as routing maintenance alerts into a CMMS, before building on it.

Plan for the data, not the broker. A broker moves events; it does not decide which events are worth publishing or what they mean. The quality of what flows through the mesh still depends on the plant data work underneath: tag naming, context, units and timestamps.

Limits and open questions

A fair overview names what is unresolved or limited, as of October 2026:

• The free Standard Edition is marked “not production deployable” in the documentation, despite the 2018 launch language. Check the licence text before relying on it.
• MQTT has documented deviations. QoS 2 is downgraded to QoS 1, QoS 1 shared subscriptions are downgraded to QoS 0, and retained messages are a Controlled Availability feature (MQTT docs).
• Sparkplug B is unproven officially. A community post reported a passing Eclipse Sparkplug TCK run against broker 10.5 in 2023, but Solace is not on Eclipse’s compatible list (Eclipse). The Sparkplug B page has the detail.
• Agent Mesh was rewritten in Go in September 2026, and the Python open-source repository is archived. Whether the Go runtime will be open source is not stated publicly.
• No public prices for the Enterprise Edition, Solace Cloud or Agent Mesh Enterprise.
• In-broker Kafka bridging is documented for software brokers only; appliance and cloud support is not stated in the pages we found.