It’s popular for politicians and pundits to talk about building “bridges to tomorrow, ” which generally means growing today’s infrastructure and programs into a bigger better future. There is no “flip of the switch” utopia that ever replaces what we have today in a single transition.

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.

Larry Neumann
