Open-Source Messaging Standard Ready to Take Off
In cost-conscious environment, AMQP's 1.0 release may find wider adoption
March 2, 2009
In development since 2004, the advanced messaging queuing protocol, or AMQP, will gain greater visibility, and perhaps wider acceptance, with the beta release of its 1.0 version next month.
Supporters of the open-source messaging protocol, which is slated for a fully tested rollout in the third quarter, say that adoption by financial firms is inevitable, given their budgetary constraints, ever-increasing messaging volumes and the ongoing push for interoperability as the number of mergers swells.
AMQP can save money, "and if ever there was a time for firms to do that, this is it," said John O'Hara, senior architect and distinguished engineer at JP Morgan Chase & Co. O'Hara and a team at JP Morgan initially collaborated with open-source technology company iMatix Corp. on the protocol, but it is now overseen by an industry working group. "Our main goal with the development of AMQP is to commoditize and standardize enterprise messaging, offering safety, reliability and good interoperability," explained O'Hara.
"The AMQP specifications that are already out there are very capable and allow financial institutions to build very powerful messaging infrastructures in a way that significantly lowers costs," said Paul Fremantle, chief technology officer of WSO2, a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of open-source middleware and a part of the AMQP working group.
AMQP is designed to be an alternative to pricey, proprietary products such as IBM Corp.'s WebSphere MQ and Tibco Software's Rendezvous. Those offerings, which for years have had a lock on the middleware messaging market in financial services, are anything but interoperable, often requiring special bridges and gateways to be built from scratch--if not entirely new messaging systems. "At a time when everyone uses Wi-Fi for laptops and wants universal connectivity for everything, we expect our enterprise business applications to connect with ease as well," O'Hara said.
AMQP facilitates the transmission of, for example, a trade execution message verifying that a multi-million-dollar order has been successfully completed, or a confirmation that high-volume yield curve data has been received on multiple machines for review by traders. "You never expect to not be able to easily send an e-mail to someone," noted O'Hara. "What AMQP aims to supply is a form of e-mail for business applications."
The growing AMQP working group, founded in June 2006, is helping to advance the protocol's acceptance. Last month, Tervela, a New York-based company that offers hardware that accelerates the distribution of market data, joined the group, which includes representatives from Cisco Systems, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Borse, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat.
"AMQP is generating significant interest," said John Barr, research director at 451 Group in London. When Tibco last month launched its P-7500 hardware offering--intended to reduce messaging latency--the company said it is considering supporting AMQP as "a bridge between disparate messaging technologies," noted Barr.
According to O'Hara, AMQP offers several features that make it attractive for enterprise use: the ability to correctly identify the parties connected; high-level encryption and transaction support for large-scale messages; the capability to directly communicate with messaging systems used by other firms; and the flexibility to support the major delivery modes for enterprise communications--point-to-point messaging as well as the publish-subscribe model.
A frequent contributor to Web discussions on the topic, O'Hara has stated that AMQP can be used with different programming environments, operating systems and hardware devices, as well as network transports including TCP, SCTP and InfiniBand. AMQP is also designed to be interoperable with languages such as Java, C++, Python and Microsoft .Net and messaging and Web services specifications including JMS, Soap, Web Security and WS-Transactions, making it useful in a service-oriented architecture.
