IBM MQ Reviews

The solution has many use cases from the middleware like IBM WebSphere, Message Broker, and payments.

All the features are valuable.

When comparing the solution to the new age of streaming in messaging technology it is so large, that there are complexities dealing with multi-cloud, multi-deployment, or high availability models. The use cases and APIs can also use some simplification.

I would like to see a dashboard that shows the application's performance.

I have been using the solution for ten to fifteen years.

The solution is rock-solid and stable. 

The solution is scalable in a vertical sense however when considering the available modern cloud technology, horizontal scalability is not a viable solution. It is not worth the additional resources, time, and cost required.

Customer support is good but there is room for improvement in their process. Their support is 24 hours so if you are dealing with support in the U.S. and it is passed over to a support person in the UK for example the person in the UK will not be provided with a detailed log of what has transpired. A lot of time is wasted waiting for them to catch up by reviewing the information each time the case is passed to a support person in a different country.

Neutral

If it is a standalone implementation, it is straightforward. If the implementation is the higher availability mode, XM mode, it becomes a complicated process because it comes with a shared disk resource where one instance goes down, and another instance comes up. This means it can not always be an Active mode, you require an Active-Passive mode all the time. This can increase the setup cost and complexity.

Implementation was done in-house and it took a couple of hours.

Within the first two years, you will see the initial cost returned. 

The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale. The licensing fee is high.

I rate the solution nine out of ten.

We currently use the solution with 30 to 40 applications across the organization. It requires four to five people to maintain the solution including engineers, application support, an architect, and integration engineers.

For all the cases where IBM MQ is no longer required, we are migrating to a different solution (Kafka). 

The solution requires a lot of work to implement and maintain. I would suggest looking at other more modern solutions depending on what your organization requires.

We have various strips statements, and we use IBM MQ to pass those strips statements to different systems within our organization.

Encryption and the fact that we have not had any data loss issues so far have been very valuable features. IBM MQ is well encrypted so that we are well within our compliance and regulatory requirements, so that is a plus point as well.

I would like to see their cloud feasibility with other vendors. I know that they are very much tied to their own cloud right now, but I don't know how they are supporting AWS and Azure.

With IBM products, there's less marketing. If they do more demos and more seminars on their products, it will be very useful. On a given day. I get seminar invites for many vendors and products, but for IBM, I may get an invite once or twice a year.

Documentation is easily available to people who know about IBM products. However, if you're not familiar with the products and because there are no popups about seminars and product news, you will not be able to easily find the documentation. So, I think that there's a gap in IBM's marketing, which needs to be improved.

It's been a pretty reliable and well structured solution so far.

It's very good and scalable. Currently, we use it within the EMEA and APAC regions, and we have a few regions in the Middle East as well. We haven't had any issues so far in terms of scalability because we started with APAC. Usually, we start with only London and then slowly start extending to Europe and APAC regions. So, it's scalable because we started with one region, and now, we already have four or five regions.

We have a middleware team of 45 to 50 people in APAC and EMEA who use IBM MQ, but the usage is not limited to the team. We have users across all our venous functions everywhere because this is for backend transmissions connectivity. We use Message Queue everywhere.

At the moment, there are no plans to increase usage, but I think we'll soon be looking to do so. By the first quarter of 2022, we will be moving most applications to the cloud. We know that IBM MQ is very well supported in the cloud and that it will be easier. Right now, our infrastructure is very much on-premise dependent, and we have some legacy dependencies there. So to get to the cloud for us is a big journey, and once we are at that stage, then we'll be able to look into increasing usage.

We setup IBM MQ about four or five years back. I think the setup now would be much easier than the one we did then.

IBM MQ was the first product that I got introduced to when I started my journey with IBM. This is my 14th year in this industry, and I see that this application is still very much useful and applicable. So I always recommend IBM MQ, and this is one of the most popular IBM products.

I would rate it at seven on a scale from one to ten.

We use the solution as a messenger software, in order to send messages to various applications.

The main issue we are having with the solution is due to the connection dropouts which have been going on for a long time now. Sometimes randomly the connection gets disconnected and we try to send a message, we get a failure. We then need to manually take an action on the message, which is happening quite a lot in production. We have been working together with the MQ team trying to increase the connection and some channel upgrades. We are taking steps in the right direction but the issue is not completely fixed.

Additionally, there is not any statistical messaging information being captured. We are not able to pull up any reports to determine when a message was sent. For example, how many messages during the day or during five minutes.

I have been using the solution for 13 years.

The solution is very stable. We have not had issues, except for the connection dropouts which could be related to the machine we are using.

The solution is scalable. It is flexible because, for us, we used the solutions adapter to provide the connection parameters to send a message. This has been quite easy.

We have previously used and still do, Rabbit MQ, which is open-source. It is getting quite popular because it is also stable and it has a good UI. This UI allows us to check the messages with some statistical data.

This solution requires a license and we have purchased an enterprise license.

I would recommend this solution. However, there are some emerging competitors on the market that provide a competitive alternative.

I rate IBM MQ a seven out of ten.

We are currently working on the use case. I work as an IBM system admin and part of MQ is hosted on the IBM server. We have a lot of other servers and appliances for IBM MQ that costs us a lot of money so we are currently looking for less expensive alternatives. Kafka is one of the choices on the table. We are looking to migrate to services on Google which is why Kafka was proposed for us to implement. 

We use it to integrate the backend and front end solutions and applications. 

The most valuable feature is the stability. It's perfect in this way. 

We are looking for another solution that is less expensive.

There is room for improvement. The live and portal monitoring needs improvement. 

I have been using IBM MQ for four years. 

It's very stable. 

It's scalable. 

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten.

The initial setup was average. Not so complex and not so straightforward. 

The deployment itself, not including testing, took a couple of hours. 

It's expandable but it will add costs that should be taken into consideration. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

In the next release, I would like for there to be easier monitoring. The UI should be easier for non-technical users to set up appliances and servers. 

I usually recommend IBM MQ for financial, government, and large enterprise companies. It is beneficial for handling high volumes of messages.

Using IBM MQ ensures the guaranteed delivery of messages, which is significant for my clients. It is also known for its security.

The most valuable features of IBM MQ are its guarantee of delivery, ability to handle high volume while maintaining high availability, and robust security measures such as SSL, TLS, and RBAC.

There are no improvements needed at this time.

I have been familiar with IBM MQ for roughly 20 years. It's been essential for many sectors during this time.

I rate the stability of IBM MQ as ten out of ten.

I give the scalability of IBM MQ a rating of eight out of ten.

The technical support from IBM is good.

Positive

Before IBM MQ, I was not using similar products. For comparison, I have used Kafka.

The initial setup is generally straightforward.

Part of our work is to assist customers during the installation and configuration of IBM MQ.

For an enterprise solution, the pricing of IBM MQ is very reasonable.

I have also used Kafka before.

IBM MQ has been in the market for over 20 years; it is an essential solution for most banking, financial, and government sectors.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it for file transfer and batch processing. We upload electronic documents to the Chilean government.

We use version M2002 Model B and our clients use version 7.5.

We use it for our factory where we have a system that uploads electronic documents for the entire country.

The high availability and session recovery are the most valuable features because we need the solution live all day.

The product gives us security.

I have been using it for six years.

We are happy with the solution. It is stable and doesn't require much maintenance. Two people maintain this solution: an architect and engineer.

We have two appliances, and that is enough for now.

There are a million end users.

The technical support is good. They respond in a timely fashion when we have problems.

We switched to IBM MQ when we consolidated our software and hardware integrations.

The initial setup was easy because IBM did the installation and integration of MQ with our appliance.

The deployment took a month.

The vendor did the MQ installation. We had a good experience with the IBM consultants.

We don't keep track of return on investment because we offer a public service.

The price is high. 

I did not choose this solution. The company has had it for over 20 years.

If you want high availability with little maintenance, choose this solution.

We don't use containers yet.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10) because it is not perfect.

The most valuable features are the transactional semantics around messaging, and some of the reliability that they have built-in, from disaster recovery and deliver-once, and at most months, schemes for messages.

One of the things we do is, we send SWIFT messages and SWIFT is built on the MQ protocols. So, that's kind of its core features.

I really need more of the API management. It's perhaps the biggest thing. I don't really care that much for the analytic side but in terms of monitoring, we have everything tied in the way we need. However, that involved a lot of work on our side, but more importantly, it is really some of the APIs that allow me to do administration and provisioning the whole time.

The migration from different versions can be very different and difficult. We build a lot of our code around it. For example, we wrap it with the APIs and we embed a lot of things into our environment. We have close to 400,000 lines of code just around that and it has to be a reviewed with every upgrade.

We have a rather large implementation. Perhaps, the largest one on the planet and from a stability perspective, it's very stable, i.e., when it's used appropriately.

We usually always get to the right people, because of the criticality of some of our problems. So, it works very well.

The setup was straightforward and we wrapped it in a very complex way.

You should read the manual.

The way we use this solution, there is nothing else that even comes close to it.

What's important is that we can team up and work together because we tend to drive the products really hard. So, that relationship with the vendor, at the technical side, is really important to us while selecting a vendor.

I am an integration developer at a bank, and we use IBM tools to develop our solutions. We use IIB (version 10), IBM App Connect (version 11), IBM MQ (version 9.1), IBM web servers, and IBM ODM. We use IBM MQ for exchanging messages between applications.

It is useful for exchanging information between applications. 

It could always be more stable and secure.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

I didn't use anything before IBM MQ.

It was straightforward. It took less than a minute.

We didn't use any integrator. We have a team of about five people who work with this solution. We have developers, a team lead, and a project manager.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate it an eight out of 10.