I was reading various articles today and I stumbled upon this article: AMQP: The new king of middleware messaging at SD Times. When I first read it, I started laughing so hard because I thought it was a joke. Then I realized it was not some sort of time-warped joke but rather just straight FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).
I have been doing middleware messaging for businesses since 1989, yup, 24 years. This article is AT LEAST 2 decades too late to be relevant. The author, Angus Telfer, clearly has limited or no knowledge of the middleware messaging market for businesses and I do not know why he would write the article except for FUD or advertising.
Now for the full disclosure … I am a co-chair of the OASIS AMQP 1.0 Technical Committee, and the CTO of a company that uses AMQP in its main product
So, Angus Telfer is doing some self promotion. Here are some other gems:
The standardization of AMQP marks a turning point in the industry, a turning point from the past, consisting of a small number of enterprise-capable proprietary systems plus numerous, specific-purpose “roll your own” protocols, to the future, consisting of a standard messaging protocol used to interconnect products and services from a large number of vendors.
This is the sentence that made me laugh. This would be like me saying that I have launched a new social networking web site and claim that the small players have nothing on me but totally ignoring the 800 pound gorilla (Facebook). Yes, I am calling WebSphere MQ the 800 pound gorilla in the business middleware messaging market place. So, let’s talk about the 800 pound gorilla:
- Gartner says that WebSphere MQ has roughly 72% of the middleware messaging software market
- IBM has stated that over 15,000 customers worldwide are using WebSphere MQ
- A couple of years ago, a senior IBM MQ person told me that 95% of the fortune 500 companies use WebSphere MQ.
- IBM claims that WebSphere MQ now supports 80 different environments
- What are the other 2 big proprietary middleware messaging products? Oracle AQ and MSMQ
Active support by JPMorgan, Bank of America, Deutsche Börse, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, the US Department of Homeland Security, and other large end users guarantees it’s a standard that will be seen in the enterprise at the very least.
The standardization of AMQP signals the death knell for proprietary messaging systems. Large end users have signaled by their participation in the AMQP standards group-and their use of products developed with the protocol-that they are tired of being held hostage to proprietary messaging systems.
Yes, I have heard rumors that several of those companies are tired of paying fees to IBM for WebSphere MQ, so this is their revolution.
There are currently no competing standards that offer similar capabilities, enjoy similar support, and are application/broker independent.
Really!! Now that’s seriously funny. Angus Telfer doesn’t think that the 800 pound gorilla (WebSphere MQ) has more features, greater 3rd party vendor support and larger customer base? I have been helping Financial Services companies interconnect business applications (internally and externally) using WebSphere MQ since the 90’s and I have no clue what planet Angus Telfer is on.
So, where does that leave us? If you need a good laugh then have a read of this article. It is FUD just don’t get too bothered by it.
Am I a WebSphere MQ only guy – no. I follow both ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ closely. Both ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ appear to be the market leaders in the open source middleware messaging market and RabbitMQ seems to be gaining momentum.
I’m surprised that a technology magazine like SD Times would publish such FUD. As always with the internet, take what you read on the internet with a grain of salt.
Regards,
Roger Lacroix
Capitalware Inc.
