The Problem With MOM Over the pas t year, a similar trend toward reliable business messaging middleware has emerged out of the muddle of message-oriented middleware (MOM). One of the perennial problems with MOM--beyond the fragmented market created by myriad small vendors--is its emphasis on the high-cost, highly customized end of the market. The majority of MOM users are corporate IT developers who use it to create expensive, homegrown, mission-critical applications, typically in the telecommunication or financial verticals.

To break out of this niche, current MOM market leader IBM (with its MQSeries) joined with future market leader Microsoft (with its recently released MSMQ--formerly code-named "Falcon") and several other MOM stakeholders (including Intel and Hewlett-Packard), to create the Business Quality Messaging Special Interest Group (BQM-SIG) at the spring Electronic Messaging Association conference (for more information see www.bqm.org). The BQM-SIG is one of the factors pushing the ubiquity of transactional messaging throughou t client/server applications by the year 2000. (Or is traditional messaging simply being pulled into existence by emerging business processes?)

Business-quality messaging will enable interoperable, off-the-shelf business applications to run reliably on corporate networks by incorporating transactional messaging capabilities. Currently, independent software vendors (ISVs) invest heavily in their own proprietary middleware infrastructure for their distributed business applications--with mixed results. One need only look at the distributed architecture problems experienced by vendors such as PeopleSoft to realize it's time for ISVs to buy rather than build such infrastructures.

BQM vendors must kick-start pervasive use of business quality messaging among ISVs by driving the creation of shrink-wrap-oriented (cheap), intranet-enabled (ubiquitous), simple (easy to adopt) middleware specifically targeted at ISVs. These product vendors must move quickly to build compelling momentum behind business quality messa ging.

In targeting ISVs, BQM vendors must educate the channel about BQM and its role in delivering robust distributed applications.

Business Quality Services The primary "business quality" services that differentiate BQM from other MOMs are: asynchronous, store-and-forward messaging technology; guaranteed once and only once semantics; and the ability to send messages as a transactional unit of work (in other words, the ability to roll back a group of messages if one fails). These services are a prerequisite to building reliable, loosely coupled, distributed applications. Such applications share the following four attributes.

First, they do not require simultaneous availability. With BQM's store-and-forwarding service, Application A can transmit a business event to Application B even if B is temporarily off-line. Second, transaction-processing rates can be very different, for which BQM's queues provide a built-in buffer. Third, loosely coupled applications do no t require identical message fo rmats. Because BQM is connectionless, an intermediate message translator can be added transparently.

Finally, many distributed applications do not require centralized transaction management. With BQM, each queue manager acts as a distributed transaction manager. This kind of loose coupling enables the creation of incrementally extensible applications that do not require global reconfiguration when a component is added. Such capabilities are absolutely essential for building applications that span the Internet or an extranet among business partners.