Solace in Retail, Airlines and Logistics: Order, Inventory and Flight Events

Solace retail deployments, along with its airline, airport, port and trucking customers, solve one shared problem: thousands of remote locations whose state changes all day, and a centre that needs to know now rather than after tonight’s batch run. A store sells the last unit, a gate changes, a crane lifts a container, a truck is reassigned. This page walks through the order, inventory, price and flight-operations event flows in Solace’s published case studies, names the customers and their stated results, and sets out where these designs get hard.

It sits under Solace use cases by industry in the Solace cluster. The sibling page on financial services covers Solace’s origin market.

Why these industries share one integration problem

The edge is a location, not a device. In retail it is a store, in aviation a gate or an airport, in logistics a terminal or a truck. Each runs its own systems, each has a WAN link that will fail at some point, and each must exchange events with central systems and with partners.

Batch files are the incumbent. Most of the case studies below begin the same way: prices, stock, schedules or orders moved as files, overnight or every few hours. Real-time events replace them because the business now acts in minutes: same-day pickup, dynamic pricing, disruption recovery.

Partners multiply the problem. Airlines exchange data with airports and agencies, retailers with suppliers and marketplaces, carriers with shippers. A documented, governed catalogue of event streams matters as much as the broker.

Solace retail: stores, prices and orders

Solace’s published retail customers are mostly European grocers and DIY chains, as of October 2026.

• HORNBACH (September 2025): 173 DIY stores in nine countries. Solace states HORNBACH runs event brokers both in a multi-cloud environment and in physical stores, linked as an event mesh, sharing price updates, product information and sales data, and modernising its legacy point-of-sale system. Carsten Müller, HORNBACH’s vice-president of enterprise architecture, describes it as “a true poly cloud Enterprise Event Mesh”.
• Les Mousquetaires: more than 4,000 outlets across brands including Intermarché and Netto. Solace sits alongside Axway API management, Boomi and a managed file transfer tool, and Solace states more than 450 new flows reached production in two years, including real-time price updates to digital shelf tags and daily fruit and vegetable pricing.
• Schwarz Group, parent of Lidl and Kaufland: replaced legacy messaging middleware with Solace brokers on a container platform, moving from synchronous batch updates to event-driven data sharing across stores, supply chain and online.
• EDEKA: event-driven supply chain and merchandise management “from source to sale”, using Event Portal to make flows visible, with Thinkport as the integration partner.

Why topic design carries the weight here. A topic such as price/updated/store/0417 lets a store subscribe to its own prices with a wildcard and lets head office subscribe to all of them. A flat topic forces every store to receive every price and discard most. The topics and wildcards page covers the design rules, and guaranteed messaging covers the queues behind orders and payments.

Airlines and airports: flight operations as events

A turnaround is a chain of timed events. Arrival, deboarding, cleaning, catering, fuel, boarding and pushback each depend on the one before, and each team needs to hear about a delay the moment it happens. An illustrative example: an inbound flight is 25 minutes late. One flight/UA123/arrival/delayed event reaches gate planning, crew scheduling, catering, the baggage system and the passenger app at once, instead of each polling a schedule service.

• United Airlines: Ninos Gabriel, managing director of enterprise architecture, states that about six billion events flow through the broker daily and that outage recovery time fell by four hours. Brokers run across multiple zones and regions of public cloud for resilience.
• Bengaluru International Airport: Solace states the airport, which serves nearly 45 million passengers a year, connected more than 25 critical systems, including baggage handling, flight operations, passenger processing and cargo, replacing batch file coordination with events.
• FAA SWIM: the FAA’s System Wide Information Management network distributes flight plans, surveillance data, weather and airspace notices to airlines, the Department of Defense and others. Solace states it has powered SWIM since 2011. On 22 September 2026 the FAA extended the partnership with Enhanced SWIM Cloud Services, which lets data partners publish back into SWIM and replaces Word documentation with machine-readable AsyncAPI descriptions. The AsyncAPI and event catalogue page explains why that matters.

Logistics: ports, trucks and systems in transition

• PSA Singapore: Solace is part of the infrastructure for the Tuas port, which PSA expects to handle 65 million TEUs a year when complete. Solace describes its role as distributing data between applications and automated equipment, with buffering that acts as a “shock absorber”, guaranteeing in-order delivery through disconnections and rate mismatches.
• Bison Transport: a North American carrier with about 3,000 tractors and 10,000 trailers. Solace states Bison used it as a real-time backbone across on-premises and cloud during a multi-year transportation management system (TMS) replacement, keeping legacy and new systems in step.

The Bison pattern deserves attention from manufacturers. Replacing a TMS while trucks keep moving is the same problem as replacing an MES while the line keeps running. Publishing business events from both old and new systems lets consumers move one at a time. Our MES selection work starts from that kind of transition plan.

Published customers at a glance

Customer	Sector	Pattern Solace describes	Stated result
HORNBACH	Retail	Brokers in stores and multiple clouds, linked as a mesh	Price, product and sales data shared in real time
Les Mousquetaires	Retail	Events alongside API management and iPaaS	450+ flows in production in two years
Schwarz Group	Retail	Legacy middleware replaced, brokers on containers	Batch updates replaced by events
United Airlines	Aviation	Multi-region cloud brokers	About 6 billion events a day; recovery 4 hours faster
Bengaluru Airport	Aviation	25+ systems integrated	Batch files replaced by events
FAA SWIM	Aviation	National data distribution with AsyncAPI	In service since 2011; extended 2026
PSA Singapore	Ports	Buffering between equipment and applications	In-order delivery through disconnections
Bison Transport	Trucking	Hybrid backbone during TMS replacement	Old and new systems kept in step

All results are as published by Solace or the customer, as of October 2026.

Where it gets hard

• Hundreds of brokers are an operations job. A broker in every store or terminal must be deployed, upgraded and monitored remotely. Ask how upgrades are rolled out across the estate, and see Mission Control and hybrid and multi-cloud.
• Ordering and duplicates. Stock and order events must apply in order per item or per order, and consumers must handle a redelivered message without double-counting. That is design work, not a broker setting.
• Peaks are seasonal and brutal. Holiday trading and weather disruption multiply volumes. Size for the peak and test it, not the average day.
• Partners need governance. Exposing streams to suppliers or agencies needs a catalogue, versioned schemas and access approval, which is why the FAA moved to AsyncAPI.
• Case studies omit costs and failures. None of these stories publish licence cost, project length or what went wrong. Ask for a reference call.

These patterns map directly onto plants: a store broker is a plant broker, and a price update is a recipe or master data change. Multi-site edge to cloud applies them to manufacturing, and a modernization roadmap sets the order of work before a product is chosen.