Content area
IN April 1997, IBM Corp. will unveil MQWare, an application that connects asynchronous sites to transaction processing systems. MQWare is a scaled down version of IBM's MQ Series middleware. It will let organizations guarantee delivery of messages - both transaction-oriented and e-mail - via the Internet.
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 Router, according to one source at IBM. MQWare will use remote procedure calls to guarantee the completion of transactions, while adding the same performance levels to E-mail and fax backbones.
"MQWare will make sure a message gets there," said Mark Stieglitz, vice president of marketing at Los Altos, Calif.-based RedBox, which this week will unveil its Fax Router backbone software that will integrate facsimile servers with E-mail systems. RedBox, a 1-year-old start-up, plans to integrate the MQWare APIs into a future version of Fax Router. In doing so, organizations can virtually guarantee that faxes will be delivered over the Internet. "People need more reliability than the Internet and IP can provide," Stieglitz added.
Among other things, MQWare will let network and IS managers run transaction-based applications, such as order entry and inventory systems that are typically hosted on mainframes, on distributed PC-based networks. Furthermore, IBM is hoping to convince vendors to adopt the MQWare APIs as an industry standard for messaging middleware.
At EMA, IBM, Intel and Microsoft will announce the formation of a special interest group (SIG) called Business Quality Messaging (BQM). Other members of the group include Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Isocor, the MesaGroup, the consultancy Meta Group, Pfizer Inc. and RedBox.
"The BQM SIG signals the emergence of a standard API that will drive volume usage of transactional messaging," said Peter Burris, manager of open computing and strategies at the Meta Group, Stamford, Conn.
But not all analysts agree. The initiative doesn't solve the underlying problem of nonexisting standards for messaging and document management, according to Kathryn Flett, a market analyst at the Standish Group International Inc., Hyannis, Mass. "We view this as another consortium that serves no useful purpose other than to be a playground for the vendors. Underlying standards need to be enacted before BQM can be taken seriously," she said.
IBM will offer MQWare as the first reference implementation for consideration by the BQM SIG. "We're not saying that the MQ transport is the final model that the BQM will end up with, but as the first product implementation, it will certainly give BQM something to work with," said the IBM source.
"This could help us do business more reliably," said Steve Mahaney, associate director of enterprise messaging services at Pfizer, a New York pharmaceutical company. Pfizer is still determining how MQWare would be used. "We do know that integrating traditional messaging and transactional messaging is a good thing."
"We will see message queues evolving into a common network interface," said the Meta Group's Burris. In other words, such interfaces will be built into other applications. Despite the fact that Microsoft has its own messaging API in Falcon, Burris predicted that Microsoft will not oppose the BQM effort because it will reach outside of the Microsoft environments. Microsoft declined comment.
The Meta Group projects IBM's MQWare implementation as being far more cost-effective than its MQ Series forebear. The consultancy calculates MQWare's cost at less than $100 per user, compared with up to $1,000 per user for MQ Series on other platforms.
IBM has not disclosed pricing for MQWare.
Though some network managers may get excited about the possibility of linking their E-mail systems into corporate transactions, Jeff Meyer, director of information systems at the Alberta Stock Exchange, Calgary, does not see an advantage. "Our IBM MQ Series is used specifically for our stock trading systems, which by nature are very closed, high-performance systems. They are too critical to try to link in back-office stuff like E-mail," he said. Meyer runs a Lotus Notes server on Windows NT but says that it is not linked in any way to the MQ-based trading system, which is configured on IBM AIX and AS/400 systems.
John Fontana and Jeffrey Schwartz contributed to this story.
Copyright 1997 CMP Media Inc.
(Copyright 1997 CMP Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.)