By ADAM GIFFORD
In today's complex computer environments, a significant proportion of the IT spending goes on making all the bits talk to one another.
That complexity will only to increase as companies embrace e-business and the internet.
It is a task IBM's MQ Series middleware is designed to address.
Alan Everard, worldwide business manager for the MQ Series division based in Horsley, England, says the aim is to provide a seamless integration across organisations and down to suppliers and customers.
"When you look at the business issues driving this, it is taking the business to the web, not just having a catalogue on line but a seamless transaction environment," Mr Everard says.
"There is the need to put ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems into the current environment while ensuring flexibility in future.
"There is a real value in mergers and acquisitions, integrating different systems, and in CRM [customer relationship management] integration - lots of back-end systems contain different pieces of information about the customer, but you want a way to get a single customer view."
MQ Series runs on 35 platforms controlling the way applications and devices exchange messages.
While there is some competition from Microsoft's MSMQ and BEA, which picked up Digital's Message Queue product, the main competition is from companies writing their own interfaces.
That requires a big support process and an army of programmers to sustain in a fast-changing environment.
"People who do 'roll your own' recognise the benefits of MQ Series immediately," Mr Everard says.
The basic product, MQ Series Integrator, came out last year as a collaboration between IBM, which provided the MQ Series messaging, and NEON (New Era of Networks), which contributed the Neon Rules and Formatter components.
It acts as a message broker in complex environments, transforming data formats between applications. For example, if a firm is using an SAP application on one system feeding into a Baan application on another system, the data transformation will be done in the middleware.
It has built up libraries of templates and utilities for common environments, so users do not have to program them in.
"Going forward, we're opening up MQ Series even more by developing more partnerships. Baan is now developing all its applications on top of MQ Series," Mr Everard says.
IBM is also making extensive use of XML (extensible markup language), a standard which allows information about content to be incorporated into data.
On top of the message broker is MQ Series Workflow, which allows the middleware to manage long-running transactions.
"They can be a minute, a day, a week, so you can automate the business process."
Workflow allows the system to do an SQL query into another system or database in flight and add the result to the message.
The ability to use details such as a customer number as part of message means information can be published to classes.
"So instead of pushing out information on oil trades to everyone on the list, there may be a class of subscribers who only want to know if it goes over $20. So you cut down on message traffic."
Version two of MQ Series integrator will be released in the next couple of months for Windows NT, with Solaris and AIX versions in the second quarter and a version for the IBM OS/390 mainframe series later in the year.
Apart from extensive use of XML, a key feature is a new graphical user interface which allows users to drag and drop objects from a palette to construct message flows.
Some of the 250 developers at Horsley are also working on MQ Series Everywhere for pervasive devices such as Palm Pilots and mobile phones.
Prototypes running at about 50 kilobytes are already available.
Mr Everard says MQ Series allows companies to protect existing investments.
"A lot of companies over the years have built up some core business processes. Some pundits would say rip and replace. That's dumb when there's so much value in those processes. Why not extend and embrace it?"
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