IBM MQ Reviews

One of the most valuable features is the standardization in terms of messaging; if you have MQ, you probably can talk to anybody. That's one thing: its compatibility. The other one is its stability.

It has improved my organization in many ways. As I’ve mentioned, it's sort of the standard in the market. If you use MQ, you probably can talk to anybody in the market. We also use IBM Integration Bus and they integrate well.

I would like to see them continue to improve the security features to make sure messages are both posted and delivered properly.

For the most part, it is stable. Sometimes, we have issues, but they are internal issues.

On the mainframe, it scales quite well. We're happy because it uses the mainframe's best qualities.

Technical support is average. In terms of efficiency and response time, it's average, comparable to any other vendor. It isn’t better than anybody else that we know.

It's a good product. Don't complicate things. Try to stick to the, let's say, out-of-the-box solutions. Don't be too creative. MQ is about sending messages; it doesn’t incorporate any logic at all.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria is that it has to be a strategic vendor for my company to begin with. We have had a mainframe for a long time, so that's quite natural.

The most valuable feature is its stability because we're in the financial services; message persistence and reliability, speed, performance. Those are probably the key attributes that we appreciate.

It's incredibly flexible. It's not software that people get into a religion over; where it’s mainframe or distributed. MQ runs; you don't have to worry about what platform it's on. I find that to be very, very useful. It recovers extremely well in disaster recovery, which is very near and dear to our hearts. High availability options are outstanding.

Support is excellent. The team in Hursley are outstanding, very responsive. They listen to suggestions, and they deep dive into problems.

The very mainframe-centric zIIP offload is very critical to me. I appreciate any and all work IBM can do to offload work onto a zIIP engine to reduce my operating costs. I always tell every vendor that answer. It doesn't make a difference if it's IBM or any other vendor. Exploitation of zIIPs is absolutely critical. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing for me right now. That really impacts my price on my total cost of ownership.

Also, and I think IBM's addressing this in the newer versions of MQ, I would like to see improved MQ data sharing. Again, I'm a mainframe guy. MQ in its original flavor didn't lend itself particularly well to data sharing. There was too big of a chance for data loss. With the new version, where they're using more pointers to the data than data itself, I think that's very promising.

I'm a little concerned about scalability. We're still on the older version of MQ. On the mainframe, we're on the older version. I'm not sure where we are in distributed. Page set expansion is a problem for us. We deal a lot with U.S. equity markets. When we're dealing with a lot of message traffic, a lot of market fluctuation, if we reach a page set expansion and MQ basically goes into a halt to expand the pages, that slows us down immeasurably. I know there are larger versions that have larger buffers, larger page sets; we just have to get there.

We're not using MQ to better connect to mobile. The type of business we are doesn't really lend itself to mobile. On the other hand, it is deeply entrenched in our cloud strategy. In terms of the internet of things, I'm going to steal a comment a heard: It really is becoming part of our nervous system. It makes pretty much everything go. We do billions of messages every day. We'd be in a lot of trouble without MQ.

Right now, I'm not seeing any barrier to success. I don’t have anything on that.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are that it has to match a business need. Stability, for me, is incredibly important. Ease of use, installation, and maintenance; I don't want to purchase anything from any vendor where they have to send a team in to install it and get it running. If they have to send in their engineers to install it because they don't think my engineers can do it, I don't want the software. I guess those are big ones.

It's an incredibly reliable, stable product for us. I think there are things our firm can do better. I think we're going to get better at them. Right now, I don't see that as being IBM's challenge, I see it as ours.

As far as specific advice, I would make sure you stay current with the maintenance cycles and the patching. This is one of the things we're looking to improve on. We inevitably seem to get caught being a version behind or a few patch levels behind. Because it is such a rapidly evolving technology, you have to stay on top of the patch levels.

The most valuable features are content security and content delivery, from a whole network protocol perspective.

It's adapting itself to get into every single component throughout the entire world being Java enabled.

We are able to transport data across any platform in a secure fashion, be it internal or external.

From the send and forget perspective, MQ allows you to – on your own – manage your data, collect your data, and manage your data perspective.

The barrier to success is basically the engine behind the collection of the data.

I also think the administration could be a little more straightforward. Right now, we have to develop our own truly distributed administration system. There's a GUI that's really not manageable; not that easy to use.

It's very stable.

It’s very scalable.

Technical support is responsive; it comes out of Hursley, which is their main support and development location. There is a direct line to their development; it's very good.

We were previously using all kinds of solutions, including SCP, SFTP, FTP and proprietary APIs. MQ allowed standardization to port data.

We decided to use WebSphere MQ because we needed data transport from all kinds of systems.

Responsiveness is the most important criteria for me when selecting or working with a vendor.

Initial setup was straightforward and flexible.

We did not really consider any options other than MQ.

My advice is to lay out your infrastructure in a fashion you can support.

The most valuable feature is primarily seeing the messages as soon as I log in; being able to see in real time that information.

It allows us to observe the status of our applications in real time; basically, very quick.

I would say it makes the organization more efficient, more reliable; and whenever there is an error, I guess resilient is the word I'd use.

It would be nice to see it outside of the z/OS environment, I think. If there was any other type of standalone client application, that's something that I would be interested in.

It's within z/OS, so it's green screen. It's not user friendly, but I can understand that. I've had the training to be able to look at it. It definitely could be improved, but within z/OS, you know you're not going to get any type of color graphical interface. I don't know what else you could do with it.

It's pretty stable. I don't work with the support of it much, so I'm a general user.

We do have issues from time to time, but because our environment is so complex, it's hard to say whether it's MQ's fault or the messages coming in and out of MQ. I deal a lot with performance and capacity. When there are capacity concerns, when there is too much taking up the system’s CPU, it's difficult to see where the issue lies, but I would say it's been solid for what I use it for.

As far as advice, I would just say familiarize yourself with MQ as much as you can. The Redbooks are great. The implementation of that software solution is something that anyone should be knowledgeable about.

We have a list of approved vendors so I guess the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor is just a reliable relationship. That's all approved by a different team. We have a hand in maintaining some of the relationships but not much in the creation of them.

Its ability to transfer large volumes of data reliably.

I have seen in many organizations it has helped in designing great architectural solutions by helping transfer messages between different systems.

5 Years

No

No

No

Did not use.

Did not use.

N/A

N/A

Through Vendor Team. Excellent.

Very good.

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It is an excellent solution.

Our use case for MQ is for unlimited processing. I'm a solutions architect. 

This is a good and stable product, It assists with our applications and has great message processing with zero loss of messages.

Customer support response times could be improved. 

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Customer service is good although they ask for a lot of information that is time-consuming and slows down the process. I'd like to see some improvements in that area. 

The initial setup is very easy. Deployment took a few hours and required a three-person team to implement. 

I recommend this solution and rate it eight out of 10.