IBM Corp.'s MQSeries becomes a three-time winner this year with version 5.0 pulling off the hat trick.

This comes as no surprise, judging from our testing. New competitors have crept into the field, but none has managed to duplicate the combination of MQSeries' highly reliable asynchronous communications layer, mixed network environment support, API tuned to application integration and wide cross-platform support.

With this version, however, IBM ups the ante. The new Fast Messages enhancement lets MQSeries compete with other strictly message-passing alternatives on a message-per-second performance basis. MQSeries is even further integrated with IBM's transaction server products, but new doors have been opened with Java clients and APIs.

Honorable mentions go to Microsoft Corp.'s Message Queue Server 1.0 (MSMQ) and TIBCO Software's TIB/Rendezvous Release 4.2. MSMQ stands out for its exceptional ease of maintenance and the quick strides it has made in making messaging middleware ubiquitous. TIB/Rendezvous is notable for its effortless enablement of network multicasting.

MQSeries 5.0, starts at $3,000,
IBM Corp.,
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www.software.ibm.com/ts/mqseries