IBM MQ Reviews

Obviously, the biggest thing is that we’ll never lose a message. We use it for a lot of real-time information between our systems for integration, where we cannot lose data during that point in time, because then we lose track of inventory, our manufacturing systems, sales orders and things like that.

It's reliable. It's a solid foundation. It’s always up and running. MQ doesn't crash on us. It gives us the stability of the platform to be able to do all of the integration between our applications.

The user interface might be an area with room for improvement, but we use MQ Explorer and that helps solve a lot of our problems there.

On my test systems, I have over 150 queues; maybe a better way to manage those and to see them visually instead of just one long list.

We started using MQ back in 1996.

It’s up 24/7.

We haven't had any scalability issues. We keep adding more applications to it all the time.

We use technical support only when there are problems, which is very rare. It's always been good when I've had to call them; responsive, efficient.

I was partially involved in the decision process to invest in MQ. We were not previously using something else. We were actually early adopters, really and truly. We started using MQ back in 1996. We've been using it ever since then.

Initial setup was straightforward.

At that time, there were no other vendors on our shortlist.

The most important criteria for you when selecting a vendor to work with is obviously that it is a stable company; a vendor that will be around for a while. Those kinds of things.

Take a look at it. It's well worth the effort to play with it and to understand it.

The integration it provides makes a lot of stuff easier. There are a lot of ways to integrate things but it works on a lot of different platforms and with a lot different technologies.

We've been able to get some disparate applications that weren't originally written to be integrated, but we've been able to make that happen.

I use the character-based interface for things but a lot of my peers like the GUI. Maybe there's a GUI available that I'm not aware of but that would be something that would facilitate it for some other people. Any kind of GUI; it could be on a phone or a browser or whatever. As far as I know, that is currently lacking, but maybe I just don't know. I primarily use the character-based interface for management when I work with it.

Because you can only put so much information on a text screen, sometimes you have to kind of shift views to look at things. That's something that, I imagine, if there was a GUI interface, you could do that a lot more easily. That would be an enhancement, I guess.

To some extent, it just runs in the background and you kind of forget about it. You don't really think about what else you could do with it. It’s just kind of running there.

It's rock solid.

I don't think we've tested the really high-end but it handles everything we can throw at it.

We have used technical support very occasionally. It's gone well when we've called, but we really haven't had too many opportunities.

Give it a try. It's not hard to do a proof of concept, get something going and build on that. You'll find that it's pretty easy to work with and it does a lot for you.

The only reason I haven’t given it a perfect rating is probably because I don't know everything it can do. I probably could take better advantage of it, but I might not be doing that right now.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is reliability. I've got to trust that the product will do what they say, that they'll be able to support it, and that they'll be around in 5 or 10 years when I'm still using it. I kind of lump that into reliability. When I invest in something, I want it to be there and still working later on.

We are not using MQ to connect across cloud, mobile and devices as part of the internet of things. We don't do that on this project. The barrier to success is that nobody's interested. It's that blunt.

The multiple queuing features, so that everything that we use for talking to our reservation system, the main system we use it for; whatever systems that are sitting on Linux or other environments such as AIX, and then talking to iSeries, which is our “mother ship”, the reservation system. The most valuable features are being able to handle those multiple queues and being able to scale properly.

Before we used MQ, basically it was more of a batch job, sending and receiving messages; kind of like an upload, download type of thing. Now, it's real time, where we can effectively handle millions of transactions an hour, once we implemented MQ.

My only thing for improvement would be the way that we've got it configured. I don't know if it's capabilities and using those capabilities. I feel that we installed it a little bit, say, out of the box. There's a different way we could set up some queue management, that we could do better. It's partly us, but probably using some outside resources to look at our transaction volume and flow. We set it up probably eight years ago and we haven't really changed it since. Our business has changed.

I would just like it to be more resilient. In that area, if there is something that happens, it would alert us better or reset itself automatically, which is the greatest thing, where it tells you, "Hey, there's a problem, but by the way, I've already taken care of it. Just so you know. " That's where I see we've had to do more application monitoring around that to do the actual queue management; understanding that something is wrong. It could help us do that. I lose sleep at night, because of, if we have issues.

It is extremely stable.

Scalability is fantastic, basically because of the Power Systems. It scales along with whatever environment it's sitting on.

We've had problem tickets and things that we've called in to analyze issues. The good part is that it never really was an MQ issue. It was some other issue that came out, but we would get them involved and they would be able to diagnose. It helped us a lot.

Their response was quick; very quick response and very detailed response. Basically, they usually do captures, send in the data and do the analysis. Usually, within 24 hours, we got the information back we needed.

They were really just doing batch file uploads, downloads; probably a couple different things versus MQ. It was a big implementation from IBM. They partnered with us, also to help us. We also started slow and then used it in other areas as well.

I highly recommend it, but I also highly recommend getting services with the actual product to make sure it's implemented correctly.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is truly being a partner; taking a little bit of the ownership; not just reading from the book of suggestions – because we can read that same book – but really understanding all of our environments, how we do business, make recommendations and implement them. That is important: not just making recommendations; doing it.

I think the most valuable feature is the scale that it can run at. It runs millions of transactions in our environment on a daily basis, scales and works well.

I don't know if it improved my organization but it basically drives communications between a lot of our subsystems and processes. It's kind of the backbone of a lot of our services.

I think some of the management tools could be improved. We've got a variety of different management tools, that we have in place. Having them be more a core part of a product, rather than being add-ons from either other solutions or open source, would be good.

Stability is very good.

Technical support is good. For the most part, we get what we need. We did have AVP for a number of years, which was another level of support. We're reconsidering that maybe we should be going back to that level just for the more timeliness and quality of support.

There are a lot of open-source alternatives coming out now, today. Sometimes MQ can be perceived in the organization as being expensive. Price is an issue.

Where we've deployed other open-source solutions, we're not at the same scale so it's difficult to say at this point whether they do as good of a job as MQ. Obviously, we're very conservative in taking some of our core systems and moving them to unproven technologies.

There aren’t any features that they have that I wish MQ had as well. They actually tend to be a little lighter weight than MQ, in a bad way.

Make sure that whatever solution you have is going to scale to meet your needs and that you have the tooling infrastructure available to you, as well.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is, obviously, quality. Reliability of the product is number one but it needs to be cost effective, as well.

We haven't really moved into the cloud with MQ at this point.

• Guaranteed message delivery
• Easy to use
• Works for both distributed and host applications

It allows us to do real-time claims processing through a non-host platform into the host platform.

A better user interface; right now, it's technician dependent, so it's a tech support role. It would be nice if we could provide better interfaces to see the queues, the channels and how they're used, and the queue depths.

We've been using it for 25-30 years.

It is solid. We have no stability problems with MQ.

It's solid, and it scales.

I personally have not used technical support. As a corporation, we have, and it is solid.

If you have the right technologist, it's a good tool.

It works. It scales. It does what we need it to do. It's stable. It's a technology that, again, is platform agnostic.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is: Is it a partner or is it someone that's just looking to get paid?

We are not using MQ to connect across cloud, mobile, and devices as part of the internet of things, so much. It's more for internal.

The barrier to success is that I haven't had a business need to use MQ. We use DataPower instead.

We use it in a number of our applications for message queuing. As a broker dealer, it gives us the ability to queue things up and to send them out at a different time; and it works really well. We go to different reports, and get options and other features from other areas, so we need to queue up the MQ piece of it, have it wait, and then release it when we're ready to release it. That's a great feature.

It gives us flexibility when it comes to offering different projects or different types of solutions to customers. Instead of somebody having to sit back and wait for something, we give them the option now to be able to say, "Hey, we can give you these 10 things, and you can get all 10 back," without having them get six now, and come back later to get something else. They can get everything at one time and it looks like one portfolio of stuff versus it being six or seven different things at one time. MQ gives us that feature.

It's probably more like everything else. We're running into this world where everything – MQ, mainframe – is looked at as legacy. I know that it's not, but if it could be a little more GUI-based; if it could be a little bit easier to manage.

I hire people who work for me who are in their 70s all the way to people who are in their 20s. For people in their 20s, when they're working on the mainframe, when they're working on those kinds of MQ solutions, they don't really get it. Sometimes they want to run to something else or use something else. If it was a little bit more user friendly, or more gen-x friendly maybe, that would be the best benefit. The tools work. All the tools on the mainframe, all the tools that are considered legacy or dinosaur tools, they do a great job. They stay up; they run. They're very reliable. They're very scalable.

The amount of work that these things do is just amazing. You don't have to reboot them every time there's a problem. You don't have to have 20 people look at 20 different things. It's usually two or three people, "This is what the problem is", and you fix it and you move on. It's a very good toolset. But having somebody younger be able to work on it would be really, really helpful.

We've used it for many, many years. We use it on the client, a regular Windows platform. We also use it really, really heavily on the mainframe side, and it's very stable. We've had very few problems with it. When we do have problems with it, it's usually the application, not the actual MQ solution.

I haven't had any scalability problems. Most of the things, if there is a problem with scalability, it's because we haven't turned it on or we haven't done it ourselves. When we actually promote the features that are there, when we have the time to dig down and turn those things on and release those things, we don't have any problem scalability-wise.

We've had times where we've had to actually open up PMRs and things like that. But for MQ, it's very, very rare. We use CICS; we use WebSphere itself; we use DB2; so, we use a ton of other IBM features. With MQ there are very, very, very few problems.
When we do use tech support, they're very responsive 99% of the time. There might be one or two times where maybe something new will come out and they might have to come out with an actual fix or something, and develop it. It might take a little time to do that but usually, it's very responsive; very good thing.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was a DB2 engineer, a systems programmer, for many years. Then I moved into management, into the middleware area, which had CICS, MQ, and other products. Then I actually moved up into a director and now, I'm director of mainframe services. I wasn't involved in the actual initial setup.

Some of the things have been around for 20 years or so, but I've been involved in probably five or six upgrades, other deployments and other feature turn-ons that MQs contributed to. I was heavily involved with that, but not as far as bringing it up and installing it from the beginning, no.

It was already there when I came to the company some 13 years ago; already in place. But I've managed it for probably 8-9 years.

I know open source is a big thing these days. I know a lot of people are talking about going out and buying open-source things or trying open-source things. I say, “Stick to products that have been around, that have been proven, and that you have the support of a vendor behind you who's willing to look at these things and develop around you.” IBM isn't a perfect company. It's got a lot to deal with, when you talk about other startups and other people trying to do the same things that it's been doing for a number of years, but in the long run, it's a good company, and I would say "stick with it".

For MQ and products that have been proven, people need to take the leap and use some of these things in the cloud, use it with Linux, and use some of the new features that IBM has. I work on a mainframe. It's a powerful machine. It does millions and millions of transactions every second, and it just doesn't miss a beat. If it has enough CPU, enough power behind it, it will just crank out, and it just does it day and night. I'd say stick with the true, hard-driven, really dedicated solution.

I have worked in the industry for many years. I worked on the mainframe side when I first started. I went into the distributed side years after that. I'm talking 20 years, and then another 13 or 14 years after that, and I went back into the mainframe world. I've dealt with a lot of products, a lot of different solutions, and there have probably been three or four that do what they're supposed to do and not have a lot of problems. MQ's probably one of the quieter ones.

Sometimes you put something the wrong platform. Sometimes it's not configured right, and you hit some bumps in the road in that way. I did it with WebSphere; I did it with DB2; I've done it with CICS; I've done it with SAS; I've done it with a lot of solutions; Windows, networking, storage. I've managed all those different areas and MQ's a very quiet product. It does what it's supposed to do.

When it hiccups and has a problem, it's usually because someone did something wrong or wrote something wrong, and now it's more of a victim, and it needs to get corrected. Once that gets corrected, it does what it's supposed to do. I don't want to give anything a perfect rating because nothing is perfect, but it's a really great product. It doesn't do a lot of stuff, but it does what it's supposed to do, and that's the main thing.

In general, when I’m looking to select a vendor to work with, I need a vendor who really understands my customers and my needs. I know it's hard sometimes to build a solution that fits everyone's needs, but when I buy something I want someone to be able to couple with me and help me through this process. Every problem that I have, every little road bump that I run into, I want someone there to hold my hand. Engineers are good; administrators are great. These guys will come up with solutions but when there's a problem, I want somebody there to help me; to take responsibility.

Scalability and guaranteed delivery are the most valuable features. It's pretty straightforward to scale out. We use MQ to back our enterprise service bus. Guaranteed delivery is very important for most of the data that we send. Having a product that enables that is very valuable to us.

My organization has used MQ for a long time. It is a very scalable, common platform that we can use for sending messages. We use MQ in terms of messaging, MQTT, and MQ FTE for file transfers. It's versatile; it's very functional; and it provides us with a common messaging platform. It eases our integration.

With the introduction of MQ FTE, we've been moving away from other file transfer options, and standardizing the actual large file transfers with MQ FTE versus the previous product that we had. We've standardized on MQ FTE, in terms of shutting down basic transfers like FTP and other basic ways of transferring large files. Adding the MQ FTE functionality, on top of the MQ backbone, has been nice.

The product itself is not difficult to use. I guess you could always ask for a little bit better GUI admin console. All in all, it's not hard to use.

In a large organization like ours, sometimes we have a large MQ installation base; lots of connection points. If there was a more graphical representation, in terms of looking at the overall landscape of where we have MQ implemented, that you could drill in and out; that would be nice. A picture’s worth a thousand words, a lot of the time; if it was more graphical in terms of displaying the overall topology and layout of the MQ infrastructure we have; just from a high-level, admin-type view; just an easier way of looking at things.

It's very stable. It's been around forever. They have functions and features that are useful. Core-wise, it's a very stable product.

I'd probably recommend going with MQ. Don’t waste time with some of the other products out there. We constantly re-evaluate our portfolio and solutions; test things; and do comparative work. We've had other vendors come in, and we've run tests with them or even done limited deployments. Sometimes we buy a package and it comes with either Oracle's OSB, webMethods, or another integration platform, if you will, with their own version of their bus and messaging. Those mostly stay point-contained solutions, and that's for a reason. For the cost and everything you factor in, MQ is a pretty good product.

It's a great product. The only bad thing I could ever say about MQ is sometimes finding the right talent to administer it. It's a bit of a specialized skill set. Sometimes you can have challenges finding somebody that's really a competent admin. Other than that, it's a great product.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with depends on the product. The company's financial stability, their ability to scale to an organization of our size, is very important. Depending on the project, when you're reaching into new territory, sometimes it is looking at and evaluating who does have the best or most innovative approach to solving a problem.

We use MQTT, which is an open standard but works with MQ for the smaller messaging, for a lot of our messaging across the enterprise service bus that connects our digital or customer-facing activities back to our older, more legacy-based systems. It gives us a good interface.

We don't really have any barrier to success; we're pretty successful with it.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it's guaranteed delivery; it's conversational. A lot of our transactions are basically transactions back and forth between either rewards members, reservations and even between our databases. MQ gives us guaranteed delivery.

We're an IBM mainframe user. It folds into our hardware very well. Our support is covered that way. It's kind of an end-to-end type solution. It works well with the distributed partners. We use WebSphere, so we can go ahead, plug things in and they work.

They might be able to improve the monitoring features. When you're looking at distributed platforms, you're looking at different breakpoints to it. MQ has a good support structure, but it would be nice if they could kind of fold MQ into other tools to make it more resilient for other tools, other relationships, and other non-IBM platforms.

That's probably the strongest piece: being able to support the other customers. Eventually, if we can support them end-to-end and tell them where their problems are, we can bring them into our fold and make it an IBM fold.

Stability is unrivaled. We've got no problems with it. It's like the mainframes. When you're looking at five nines for availability, it's there all the time. MQ is there all the time. If we have a problem, it's not part of the conversation. It's more of a case of a database on the other end that we're using as a repository is having a problem. You can go out there, store the messages, and guarantee delivery if there are any interruptions. It just works for us.

It's plug and play. If you need more, you can figure it out on the fly; you can add end points to it. The fact that you can add connections makes it very easy for us, because a lot of times we'll run into an issue where we get spikes in connectivity. We can go ahead and define something on the fly. We can go ahead and throw in the extra conversation, and queues aren't a problem at either end. The fact that we can reduce queues by adding extra channels is a great plus for us.

We have only rarely used technical support, because you don't really need it. When we have used it, it's been very good. The SLAs and everything that we've got for tech support is being met. We've also been using it long enough that we've got some very solid support, as far as, we know who to talk to and when to talk to. It's been great for us.

I was not really involved in the initial setup. I was probably around for it, but I had an applications background. I went from the systems side to the applications side, and back to the systems side. It was kind of the interim period. I'm not really responsible for the MQ right now. I'm more of a user of MQ and a supporting group. As a mainframe user, we basically have that relationship with them.

It's actually not a decision to use MQ, but maybe to expand MQ in some cases. It also is one of those places where you can't really go wrong by saying, “We're going to use MQ,” because it's proven.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is probably stability. Relationships are important, but we're looking at up time. The better the up time is, the stronger we are, the better our product is, the better we are in front of customers. It used to be, when you were basically just facing other employees in the company, that's one experience. Now that you're facing the user with the dot-com boom, the world out there, everybody's on the end of a phone, our transaction counts have gone up exponentially. To have that relationship, and to have MQ being able to service what they service and support that expansion has been fantastic.

Consider the pros and cons. For us, it’s reliability; it’s stability; it’s reputation. Do not get hung up on the fact that it is one of those "legacy"-type connectivities. A lot of people might not want to look at MQ, look at IBM or look at something because “that's the old way of doing things.” It's the current way of doing things. It's a leading-edge way of doing things, and the fact that it's there 100% of the time.

I'm not sure anybody’s perfect. They're very good at what they do. If they can play well with others, that's the real part of it right now. We're using WebSphere; we're using the mainframe; we're using the distributed side. As long as they can play with everybody, they're going to be a strong player. We'll be a strong proponent for them.