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What's the difference between a message and a transaction? Soon nothing, according to IBM, which next week plans to unveil middleware that treats the delivery of E-mail, faxes and other applications routed over the Internet as transactions.
The company will debut MQWare, an application that connects asynchronous sites to transaction processing systems, on April 8 at the Electronic Messaging Association show in Philadelphia.
MQWare is a scaled down version of IBM's MQ Series middleware, which is typically used for large-scale systems in organizations such as banks and security firms. It will compete head-on with Microsoft's forthcoming Falcon software, also intended for transaction-based messaging. Both MQWare and Falcon will run under Windows NT.
IBM's new offering will let organizations guarantee delivery of messages-both transaction-oriented and E-mail-via the Internet. Such guaranteed throughput of all message types to date has not been possible with traditional IP-based networks.
The release of MQWare next week will be coupled with an initiative to bring messaging middleware to the mainstream. As part of that effort, IBM is working with several vendors to link their applications to the MQWare messaging backbone.
Major elements of the offering have already been tested and will be embedded in such forthcoming products as Isocor's SmartRouter and RedBox Technologies Inc.'s Fax...