12.15.06

Will the proprietary world of MQ Series and TIBCO Rendezvous be assailed by open standards, as have so many other lucrative enterprise software niches? It is a decided possibility. I listened in to an interesting webinar yesterday with speakers from JP Morgan Chase and Iona Technologies, discussing the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, which is a standardization effort aimed at addressing the problem of incompatibilities of the various asynchronous messaging products widely used today (e.g. MQ Series, TIBCO, webMethods, as well as many JMS implementations). The effort seems to have an interesting group of supporters.
This is a big issue because messaging systems are used heavily for moving data around, and when they are required to connect to rival messaging systems they often become brittle and less reliable. In particular it can be very difficult to quarantee transactions that are moving through more than one system.

Rising interest in the concept of an ESB — or Enterprise Service Bus — should contribute some momentum to this effort. The vision of a reliable messaging infrastructure spanning global enterprises is a good one, but unlikely to be realized by standardization on a single vendor’s product, partially due to different units’ needs, and partially due to the continuing grind of mergers, acquisitions and divestitues. In today’s business world it is much easier to achieve a technology strategy based on industry standards than one based on particular products (ask anyone who spent 3 years on an SAP consolidation only to have their company acquire a large Oracle Applications shop . . . ).

With ESB, the asynchronous messaging layer is foundational, and must be a “black box” that is reliable and “just works” without too much thought. We achieve this in the GXS Trading Grid by a merciless standardization on one messaging infrastructure, but that is not usually possible within an enterprise (including, oddly enough, GXS itself — our internal IT folks do a great job wiring together systems, just like our customers’ IT guys…).

I really hope AMQP continues to move forward and is adopted, an accepted standard for rich interoperability between messaging systems would be fantastic. For now, if you’re interested, there is some early implementation work referened at the AMQP website, under products. I am particularly interested in the Apache Qpid project, but it is in “incubation” and has nothing to download yet, though details of the Java and C++ implementations are available.