Corba adherents who insist asynchronous messaging has no role to play in Object Management Group specifications beyond their use as add-on services to the Corba architecture are out to lunch, according to officials at MOMA, the Message Oriented Middleware Association. Corba is a layer, not a universe, says MOMA, one of a sometimes-confusing collection of industry consortia and trade groups trying to promote messaging technologies and establish some common implementation techniques that will enable products from different companies to work together. It thinks the usual industry trend towards convergence means Corba will eventually incorporate the full range of messaging services; that is going to happen. How, exactly, and how rapidly, is a normal mystery. Several MOMA members, including DEC, IBM, NCR, Novell, Southwestern Bell, Suite Software and Peerlogic are participating in submissions to an OMG request for proposals (RFP) for messaging specifications, the review process for which has been extended to September. The RFP does not seek to address messaging within IIOP, the key Internet Inter-ORB Protocol specified by Corba. All parties are tight-lipped about the likely outcome of the RFP, though MOMA insists the industry is already voting for messaging in a big way by supporting or incorporating messaging into new and existing products: forget Corba, we must do messaging is its mantra. It thinks people who believe Corba IIOP is the only thing that exists must wake up and reckons that OMG has too many smart people, marketeers and companies with no market share trying to direct events, moreover that it is in danger of becoming a large bureaucracy. Some OMG groups don’t even know what the others are doing, it claims. In addition to MOMA, other groups working to promote messaging include the Electronic Messaging Association – its recent conference reportedly suffered from the affects of ‘trade show fatigue’ – and the Business Quality Messaging initiative, probably the most influential at this point as it’s driven by Intel Corp with the support of IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp. IBM and Microsoft are expected to dominate the market for messaging infrastructure technology with their respective MQSeries and Falcon products. Another group said to wield considerable influence is the Objective Technology Group. MOMA’s planning to hold its first conference next year and hopes to attract 500 delegates. It expects there to be considerable consolidation in the messaging market, mostly focused around integrating messaging products with each other and with other distributed computing technologies.
