Synadia is a company building the next generation of digital communications to unify cloud, edge, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Pulse 2.0 interviewed Synadia CEO Derek Collison to learn more about the company.
Derek Collison’s Background
What is Derek Collison’s background? Collison said:
“I’m a veteran in architecting and developing secure, large-scale distributed systems and cloud computing solutions. I believe in doing the hard work to make complex distributed systems operate simply.”
Formation Of Synadia
What was the original vision for the company and how has that evolved? Collison shared:
“We founded Synadia with a vision of simplifying modern distributed systems. Our premise was that distributed systems should function seamlessly across all geographical regions, work out of the box with all cloud providers, and operate at the edge. We began by rethinking connectivity. We ditched the complexity and lock-in of current cloud networking technologies in favor of a straightforward, intelligent connectivity layer that allows applications to connect securely from any location.”
“Our original vision and commitment remain the same today—to create an open-source technology platform that provides low-latency, real-time, and secure access to services and data in any geography, with any cloud provider, in any edge environment.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Collison’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Collison reflected:
“While not a specific memory, the highlight of my day is always talking to our global community of users, customers, and partners about how they are innovating with Synadia and NATS.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Collison explained:
“We like to meet our customers where they are, so we offer the Synadia Platform as a self-hosted and a “bring your own cloud” option managed by us. We have also developed the Synadia Cloud, a self-service SaaS product designed for developers to quickly start their NATS journey without having to provision any software or infrastructure. Synadia Cloud provides global access across all major cloud vendors on a monthly subscription basis.”
Solving Industry Challenges
What industry challenges are your customers facing, and how does Synadia and NATS solve these challenges? Collison pointed out:
“Architecting solutions for the ‘Edge era’ fundamentally differs from the standard practice for the public cloud. You are first forced to pick a specific cloud provider and then a region or geographic zone. This creates immediate issues around cloud ‘lock-in’ and severe limitations on workload mobility. This is why I like to say, ‘The cloud is the new mainframe.’ So as your data and services become more centralized, you suddenly find yourself highly dependent on one provider with escalating costs that are out of your control.”
“Synadia fundamentally changes that model. We enable developers to focus on their application vs. specific cloud infrastructure or geographical constraints. So, when you build an application or service with NATS you don’t have to think about cloud regions, zones, load balancers, firewalls, service meshes, etc. There is only one region to deploy to and it’s global. Because of this, we enable customers to create truly nomadic and secure applications and services to be delivered securely across any cloud, region, or edge environment.”
Evolution Of Synadia’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Collison noted:
“Synadia has continued to evolve our technology in response to our customers’ emerging data and application requirements. NATS started as a simple and extremely low-latency messaging product but has evolved into a single unified platform providing incremental services such as data streaming, key-value, and object store. This has allowed customers to dramatically reduce the infrastructure required to build global services and increase the agility of their developer teams.”
“NATS has also always had a vibrant open-source community of developers and early on we realized that we could accelerate how they engaged with the technology to prototype and deploy in production. So, we invested in developing the Synadia Cloud, a global NATS supercluster where with a single url that a developer could connect and deploy production applications via a secure global service. We have also extended the core NATS open-source platform with Synadia IP to address an enterprise’s operations, security, and management requirements. This includes a comprehensive UI for observing and monitoring your data in real-time, which is available both in the Synadia Platform and Synadia Cloud. Lots more to come on this front in 2024 as well.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Collison cited:
“There are so many great community adoption milestones related to the NATS open-source project: 30,000 GitHub stars, 300 million server downloads, and 1,000 contributors are just a few of them.”
“On the commercial front, having the opportunity to partner with amazing global brands across Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, and Industrial Manufacturing, and become a critical part of their production digital platforms has been extremely satisfying.”
Funding
When asking Collison about the company’s funding, he revealed:
“Synadia has raised approximately $51 million and is currently a series B company.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Collison assessed:
“Synadia’s products are designed to operate at the edge. The edge computing market is extremely large, and its growth will continue accelerating. Increasingly, data needs to be processed closer to where it is created, whether due to a digital transformation initiative, a cloud cost reduction exercise, or the need to run AI models closer to customers or partners. Fundamentally, we see the edge as the cornerstone of how companies will differentiate themselves globally.”
“We participate in the micro-services, data streaming, key-value, object store, and messaging markets, with a combined total addressable market (TAM) of hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Collison affirmed:
“Simplicity. Our technology is built to serve as the single unifying connective tissue that can operate as a customer’s central nervous system and seamlessly extend to the edge. We simplify connectivity and digital innovation by removing dependencies on multiple complex technologies (e.g. service meshes, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) with a simple and modern open-source platform that enables secure deployment of services across any cloud, region, or edge endpoint.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals?
“At Synadia, our mission has always been to deliver compelling technology and become a trusted partner to our customers. As we go forward, we will continue to invest in our capabilities, with the primary goals of making Synadia more valuable to our customers and exceeding their expectations of what is possible.”
“One example is our work on the recently announced NATS Execution Engine (NEX) project, which extends our capabilities to run services and serverless functions supporting application binaries, containers, and WASM functions natively without any additional software infrastructure.”
