IBM MQ Reviews

It can do messaging throughout multiple platforms. That's the major benefit for MQ. At the same time, we use it quite extensively to do messages between the iSeries and the mainframe.

The amount of transactions: You don't have to send a file down. You just send the messages; whatever the transaction is. It's going to be much more effective and more trackable.

It's pretty good right now the way it is.

I don't know whether it is available with the new features, but in the older versions, I remember, to test a queue, you actually had to call an API to send messages back and forth. If that would be a one-command scenario like on the iSeries, instead of me calling the API, sending a message and receiving it, I would like to have something like that. I don't know if MQ’s new features support something like this.

Stability’s pretty good. I haven't had any issues. Although, in clustering, you have to know exactly what you're doing. Otherwise, your cluster will be out of whack a little bit. Otherwise, it's stable. It's very stable.

You can scale it anywhere.

I have not really used technical support in the last year.

When I did, I've had experiences with channels not starting up, either due to connectivity issues which turned out to be either network-related. The messages are really clearly defined and errors are logged, so we referenced that and based on that, we took action.

When we do contact technical support, they're excellent; 5/5.

Because I had worked with it before, initial setup wasn't that bad. If I look at myself at the beginning, when we wanted to set it up, I actually went and took a course before setting it up. Especially on the iSeries side and all the communications, you have to get familiar with all the terms and terminology that are being used on the application. Once you know that, then setting it up is not a big deal.

It's very easy to set up, it's very stable and it's trackable. MQ is a really good tool to be able to send messages back and forth between multiple platforms. If they're looking for a solution for sending files across, they can actually use MQ to send the messages across.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because there's always room for improvement.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is being strong and supporting it, and being there for a number of years, so I don't have to worry about an unsupported product.

We use it mainly on iSeries and mainframe, so I’m not really involved in using MQ to connect across cloud, mobile, and devices as part of the intranet of things.

Stability and reliability are the most valuable features. It's very reliable and very stable. You can do a fast recovery in case of any failure. It's a very consistent and stable system.

The whole integration channel between PowerVM and third-party applications goes through MQ. This is why MQ plays the role of middleware, of integration, and it helps us to quickly integrate all applications around PowerVM.

One possible area with room for improvement is some integration with the alert system to alert us in case of any failure of any message to be transmitted from one source to another; maybe that could help. It doesn't do that right now.

We will see how MQ will help us when we go to cloud, one day.

It’s very stable.

We have never faced any problem with upgrading or scalability between MQ series and the IBM the PowerVM. It's good.

Once you install MQ, you don't need a lot of support. Of course, we have support with an IBM partner in our country, but up until now, we have never faced a major issue that could impact our business.

Implementation was very straightforward.

Our environment is 60% IBM. We did not shop to search for another solution.

In general, though, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are support, response time, credibility, to be near to us, and that they are not working from the cloud.

In a financial institution, for very critical applications, when you invest, you have to invest one time. You don't have time to redo the work over and over. When you build your setup, your infrastructure, to do your service and your financial service for mission-critical applications, you have to choose the best-of-breed application that supports you. This is why we choose IBM without any hesitation.

We have never faced any problem. It works fine.

We are a bank, and regulations restrict us from using the cloud, at this point. We're using MQ only on our data center.

I inherited it when I took over administration of a platform. It is pretty core in our business. I haven't really dealt with configuration that much. It is used to push transactions throughout z/OS, IBM i, Windows, and Linux. It seems to be pretty reliable. It's one of the few things we have that just runs, almost to a point where you forget to go back and do some upgrades. We're running a couple versions that are a little old, and you just forget that; like, "Oh yeah, it's running." It's pretty solid.

It gives us flexibility to drive a solution on any platform but have a reliable communication network.

I didn't know how to get into it. I had to Google how to get into it. Once I got into it, it made sense. It was a green-screen implementation, but it made sense.

I don't know enough about it to really say, "This is where it's missing something."

You can always say price is an area with room for improvement.

It's solid. It's one of the few things that just runs, and runs, and runs.

We've upgraded multiple systems and it's kind of come along. As far as the transaction basis that it's responsible for, it's done a really good job. There might be some lagging Windows versions; that's really been more about operating systems lagging behind because of other applications, not MQ. You might get some spots there, where performance might not be what we would've expected, but that's really not an MQ issue.

We have hardly ever used technical support for it. The last time we did, we found out that we were running an unsupported release. That kind of shows how long it just runs. Sometimes you forget to upgrade a couple of the components.

When I have used technical support, I thought it was very good. They even reached out and helped us a little bit in that situation – when we weren't even supported – to take a look at some of the basic stuff, just to make sure we didn't miss anything. Eventually, we got through the situation. We figured out what it was. It turned out it wasn't MQ at all. It was just a configuration change. I think tech support has been pretty good.

I'm an IBM i guy. I always think IBM support is excellent. I haven't dealt with z/OS in a long time, but they were good there, too. The product support, I would imagine, has been pretty good, too.

It's a worthwhile product. If it's priced accordingly and does everything for you, go for it. It's a good product.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because I haven't had enough experience with it to say, "This is where it's lacking something." As I’ve mentioned, it seems to be really solid and just works.

The most important criteria for you when selecting a vendor is probably the durability of the vendor. You can get into these relationships that look good, with all good intentions from them, but they're not around. With IBM, obviously, we've invested heavily in the company for a long time. We have a good relationship with them. I think durability, and then going with that is innovation. Those are probably the two biggest characteristics.

I don't know that much about our mobile and cloud initiatives. I think we have some. They're probably beyond the infancy stage but certainly not mature at any point. I'm not sure how this technology is driving any of that. I'm not sure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have not used technical support.

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.

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.