IBM Corp has upgraded MQSeries, the message-queuing middleware that underpins much of the industry’s current application integration activity, adding features intended to make it easier to link web, ecommerce and basic business applications. Most importantly IBM says it is adding a publish and subscribe service to MQSeries, plus new administration tools as well as a re-vamped implementation for Windows NT. Adding a publish and subscribe mechanism will bring MQSeries into closer competition with publish-and-subscribe specialist Tibco Systems Inc and will challenge Microsoft Corp to enhance its own MSMQ message queuing with similar functionality. In addition, MQSeries 5.1 – and MQSeries for OS/390 version 2.1 – includes a dynamic workload distribution feature said to unify instances of MQSeries servers and provide automatic recovery in the event of failure. The NT version has new administration, graphical tools and programming interface. 5.1 will be available for NT, AIX, HP-UX, OS/2 and Solaris by mid-year. An AS/400 version is underway and MQSeries for OS/390 2.1 is available now. Prices start at $3,000. The New Era of Networks Inc message broker – a rules engine and message formatter – currently marketed by Neon and IBM as MQIntegrator is rebranded MQSeries Integrator. It’s available this quarter priced at $100,000-up. Meantime MQSeries Workflow for OS/390 3.1 enables users to prioritize the execution of certain business processes and comes with various clients and is said to provide the same degree of transactional integrity as CICS or IMS. It’s due this quarter priced by number of users and processor capacity. IDC expects that market for messaging oriented middleware infrastructure will grow at almost a 50% per year to $2.5bn in 2002 from roughly $360m in 1997. MOM middleware technologies provide a common method to carry data from one computing environment to another, which is the first requirement in any application integration task.
