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Architect at Franklin Templeton
Real User
We use queue managers/concentrators for message flow going upstream and downstream on applications with enterprise licenses
Pros and Cons
  • "We use queue managers/concentrators for message flow going upstream and downstream on applications with enterprise licenses."
  • "SonicMQ CAA (continuous availability architecture) functionality on auto failover and data persistence should be made available without a shared drive, as it exists in multi-instance queue managers."

What is our primary use case?

We use queue managers/concentrators for message flow going upstream and downstream on applications with enterprise licenses.

How has it helped my organization?

Adding concentrators was great improvement, but it lacks the SonicMQ CAA (continuous availability architecture). 

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are queue managers and CCDT, which is the common purpose of most client applications.

What needs improvement?

SonicMQ CAA (continuous availability architecture) functionality on auto failover and data persistence should be made available without a shared drive, as it exists in multi-instance queue managers.

Buyer's Guide
IBM MQ
May 2025
Learn what your peers think about IBM MQ. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly. 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:

PeerSpot user
it_user632700 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at Colruyt Group
Vendor
Allows close coupling between different domains.

What is most valuable?

It doesn't lose transactions, it's fast, and it runs on every platform.

How has it helped my organization?

The benefits are the same as the most valuable features. Close coupling between different domains, which reduces your total cost of ownership by not inter-tweaking everything.

What needs improvement?

For me, there are no areas with room for improvement. We are happy like it is. I don't think we have any special additional needs. I think it does what it's supposed to do and it caters to the requirements we have at this moment.

We would actually like some dashboard improvements, because we've set up some manual dashboarding. We use other tools to monitor MQ. But, if that would be a part of MQ, then we're looking at a TCO reduction again. So it would be interesting if we could get rid of these additional tools.

For me, the management is lacking. It's doable, but it's not graphical. Almost everything you need to do in command line mode. It's pretty technical.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There is no downtime. It is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have no problems with scalability. It scales all the way around.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have used technical support. For MQ, it's very good, compared to other products.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn’t have a previous solution. There was a new requirement to handle asynchronous transactions, and MQ seemed to be the best solution at that moment.

How was the initial setup?

I was involved in the setup of the distributive systems. It was straightforward.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did't look at other vendors, because, at that moment, IBM was our preferred partner, and still is, so we first looked at the IBM solution.

What other advice do I have?

Just do it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
IBM MQ
May 2025
Learn what your peers think about IBM MQ. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user631746 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
It's reliable, stable, and scalable.

What is most valuable?

The number one thing is it's pretty reliable with data integration. It gets done what we need to do; transport messages from source to destination.

How has it helped my organization?

It is the core component of what we do. We're using it to distribute messages from one platform to different multiple platforms.

What needs improvement?

We're moving to the next version. I really don't have anything I want improved. There are unknown bugs that we run across where we don't know where they are from, and the next fix pack will fix it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is pretty good, really. We have not had any downtime.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is good.

How are customer service and technical support?

My colleagues have used technical support. I would say it's good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I wasn't part of the decision to switch.

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in the initial setup.

What other advice do I have?

Use it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
it_user487374 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user487374VP Product Management at PeerSpot
Real User

What helped you decide to move to the next version?

it_user523134 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Services Lead - Mainframe and Enterprise Batch at Rogers Communications
Vendor
It provides transaction speed and is efficient from a CPU utilization perspective.

What is most valuable?

For Rogers, MQ is the cornerstone for the billing system for cable. It's accessed through the help desk and through the online stores. It's a very valuable piece of software that interfaces with the customers; there are well over 8 million customers.

How has it helped my organization?

Using MQ, because of the speed of getting the transactions, adds the value back to the customers. When you are dealing with a customer in the store, you don't want to be sitting and waiting for transactions to come back on the customer information, the CIF file. Having MQ with the instant response adds value back to the customer's experience.

What needs improvement?

Price is one thing that could be improved.

Probably because I don't know how it interfaces with the cloud, I would like to see more of that functionality; get more of the cloud experience and more of the mobile experience back into MQ from the customers. That's something I don't have right now.

I think MQ could go farther in terms of the customer experience.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is awesome. MQ is up all the time. We never have an MQ issue. The interfaces that feed into MQ are quite stable and the APIs associated with it are quite proficient. MQ is a very efficient piece of software from a CPU utilization perspective, which I'm interested in. It's very productive and it's quite tuned in terms of performance.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's quite easy to scale out and to build other regions using MQ. We've developed a peak performance testing area with MQ and we're planning on putting it in the sandbox area to gain more experience before we roll out versions of it. It's quite easy and adaptable to implement into other regions.

How is customer service and technical support?

I have not used technical support.

What other advice do I have?

It's a very stable product. It's been out in the industry for years. Many industries use it, so it fits into any commodity that you have. It's a very solid product. Give it a try, look at it and understand what it's used for.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reputation, post-support, reliability, and improvements on the product.

They’re not really using MQ to connect across cloud, mobile, or devices as part of the internet of things.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
it_user523140 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Vendor
It's a core part of a middleware platform, integrating with our CRM billing application and our online transaction application.

What is most valuable?

It's one of our core parts of a middleware platform for integrating our CRM billing application and our online transaction application as well. That's the key usage for day-to-day activities.

How has it helped my organization?

Integration is a key benefit; it integrates easily. Management is easy. Queue management is one of the key features of it; how easy it is to get set up, get started, get running, look at your queues, look at your workloads, etc., and see what's going on.

We’re not using MQ to better connect across cloud, mobile and devices, or part of the internet of things. It's something that we're looking at for IoNT. We're looking at doing mobile parking, our parking meters. It's something that we're looking at, but we're just doing the road mapping. We haven't deployed that yet.

Currently, it's our connection between our web front end and our back end billing, but that's the next step.

What needs improvement?

Everything that we need so far works, so I think I'd have to look at the road map, what we planned for internet of things and see if it meets that, which it should. At that point, we'll have a better understanding of what we need going forward.

My support guys, because they use it on a day-to-day basis, might want to see improvements from a management perspective, the management interface. That's one of the complaints I've heard: modernize to a more mobile platform. It's not modern enough for what they wanted to do with it, from what I've heard. That's one area I would say improvement could be done, but again, that might be a small component. Beyond that, nothing.

The main reasons why I haven’t rated it higher is the management interface, which has been a topic of discussion among some of the users, and some issues we’ve had with MQ for z/OS; that's probably because we were on an older version. I haven't looked at the newer version. Those are the two main reasons.

As far as the price point, I don't deal with that; that's somebody else's problem. From a deployment perspective, I didn't have an issue. It's a set up and go for me, from an architect's perspective. These are the requirements, these are the design, you go.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is pretty good. We haven't had issues from a stability perspective. It seemed to always be running. Everyone seems to say, "Hey, it's an MQ issue." Once you look at it, though, the bottleneck is always somewhere else.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is great as well. You can create your queue managers or you can add a node if you need to and just grow your platform.

How are customer service and technical support?

I personally haven't used technical support, so I can’t comment on that. Once it's deployed, the support team manages everything into it.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I was not involved in the decision to invest in MQ.

How was the initial setup?

I was in the initial setup; I was involved in the design of the environment for MQ and the rollout of that platform.

It was midway between straightforward and being complex. Our environment is quite complex. We have to integrate the different systems; we have MQ on z/OS, we have MQ distributed. It's right across the platform. The setup of MQ was not complex, but the integration with our environment had some complexity. Overall, with the MQ platform, I don’t think we could have done it any easier.

What other advice do I have?

It's a great tool. It's a great integration middleware tool. Once you have your requirements set, MQ should meet it, but review: Make sure that you understand what you need, what you're setting up, and how you're going to deploy it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is how easy it is to get the information from that vendor. Usually, when we get a project, it needs to be deployed yesterday; very tight timelines. If a vendor can come to the forefront, come with all the information, show that their product will meet our needs and it's above any other product on the market, or even on par, but you get a little bit of extra service or support, that's what we look for.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
it_user523122 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Mainframe System Engineering at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
It cuts out a lot of programming that has to be done for transforming data into the format that we need it to be.

What is most valuable?

It's fairly easy to set up and configure. It's very effective as far as what we need to do with the type of processing that we're trying to get done, message-based processing. It is easily replicate-able. We have tons of servers that actually handle different queues; it's very helpful with that.

How has it helped my organization?

In conjunction with some other products we use, such as IIB, it does a lot of the transformation. It cuts out a lot of programming that has to be done for transforming data from our carrier customers into the format that we need it to be. That's really one of the big benefits.

What needs improvement?

There is room for improvement with the price. It's actually not really one of the high-priced items, but everything's relative.

I'm not really sure that there's a lot that we could really think of that we would need above and beyond where we are today, and the way we use it.

What would be nice is some kind of a built-in monitor. That would be something that'd be really helpful; some kind of a performance-type monitor. I know there is one, but it should be built-in. It should be automatic.

Or, a particular queue manager; that would be really helpful, I think.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's extremely stable. We very seldom have any issue with it. We have it clustered between z/OS and zLinux. We've never had any serious problem with it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is easily scalable; very scalable. We can scale both internally in a virtual machine – the size of a queue or a number of queues – and it's also across multiple virtual machines. We use it both ways to scale up.

On z/OS, queue managers are very easy for us to generate and build new ones if we need to or multiple queues on the same queue managers; it’s a very effective tool.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have occasionally used technical support for MQ, if we really run into an issue. That has worked out pretty well. As a matter of fact, most of the time, for any kind of an issue, we've usually had it resolved within a day. That's the way we want it.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The decision to invest in MQ was made prior to my starting at the company I'm at. I can't take claim for that. I was at another site, and we weren't using MQ at that other site.

How was the initial setup?

I'm a director and me and my team were involved in the initial set up of MQ. It was very straight forward. We had people that were familiar with it. Some of the people that I worked with, or that worked for me, really had a good background, so it went very quickly, and it was very straight forward.

What other advice do I have?

One of the things that we've been asked about is using open-source message queuing alternatives. One of the things we've always fallen back on is that we like the IBM support; we like the release. We don't want to have to worry as much about the levels of software; IBM already takes care of that. It integrates with the other products that we're using. All of those things kind of play together, especially in our case; we're a very big WebSphere Application Server, and as I’ve mentioned, a very big IIB server as well. It's really important that they all work and play together.

I’ve had really very little trouble with it. It's very effective. I don't think on either side, z/OS or zLinux, we've really had any trouble with it to speak of. Sometimes when we do some of the clustering things, we've run into questions or we run into things.

In general, it's been very, very solid.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that they're established; that we're not going to be concerned with, "They're here today, and gone tomorrow."

Probably one of the bigger criteria, nowadays, is the ability to support the software. We know we're going to run into trouble. We know we're going to have problems. We know we're going to have questions. We want to make sure that we have a vendor that can support us at that point.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
reviewer1644639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at a maritime company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Offers very good performance as well as scalability and stability
Pros and Cons
  • "Offers good performance as well as scalability and stability."
  • "Should have more integration in the monitoring tools."

What is our primary use case?

I'm a technical specialist and we are customers of IBM. 

What is most valuable?

This solution offers good performance as well as scalability and stability. It offers a template that's beneficial for any company.

What needs improvement?

I'd very much like to see more integration in the monitoring tools.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for nine years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is good. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution offers very good scalability. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. It's all about planning because we have multiple application teams involved. Deployment takes somewhere between half an hour to an hour, but for the coordination to check and perform from the application side, takes almost a full day because we have critical, multiple applications. It needs to be coordinated and we need to be sure they are able to connect perfectly with our environment or with the MQ.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We pay an annual license fee. 

What other advice do I have?

I recommend this product and rate it a nine out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
reviewer1319070 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Team Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Clustering is good, but the setup is difficult
Pros and Cons
  • "The clusterization which results in persistence is the most valuable feature."
  • "The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."

What is our primary use case?

We use it to send a notification to our customers.

What is most valuable?

The clusterization which results in persistence is the most valuable feature. I only use a very small number of its features.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using IBM MQ for about three years. For about one year I wrote adapters for IBM Broker and for two years or more I wrote services that used IBM MQ. This was a Java application by JMS.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is okay.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is not an issue of IBM MQ. There is no replication of messages and that is very bad for systems. Only persistence can solve this issue.

How are customer service and technical support?

IBM technical support is good.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult and working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's a very expensive product.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I like RabbitMQ more than IBM MQ.

What other advice do I have?

If you have a lot of money then I would, of course, recommend IBM MQ.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free IBM MQ Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: May 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free IBM MQ Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.