IBM MQ Reviews

Our use cases include ATM transactions where a customer, for example, inquires about balances. Transactions go from an ATM at a branch, using a Java application to take the information, and it connects into our mainframe, gets the balances, and goes back. 

We also use it for when customers go online using the internet itself for things like pre-approved home loans. We take the customers' information from the front-end and pop it into MQ to look up the customer's data in the bank itself — all of the databases — and then come back to the customer. 

It is also used in our mobile banking. MQ is connected to SAP in the background. MQ is in between, passing information to SAP and SAP will give the reply back on the mobile banking app, like when a customer asks for a one-time password.

We initially went with a single server or two servers. We used a lot of the mainframe and we used it on the one server. Then we realized that we were down to a single point of failure. What we did was we enabled something called queue sharing where you have multiple landing platforms, which lets you execute multiple applications in the background. And we're now able to use our HA failover quite extensively. It previously required one server to be down and there would be an effect on customer business. Now it requires at least three servers to be down before we start feeling the workload. And even then, we're hardly ever down because we have now spread the load using the queue shared clusters.

In terms of the solution helping to reduce the cost of integration, we're using what is called the MQ Appliance. Because the appliance connects multiple solutions in our bank to this platform, we don't need to procure more licenses or more servers or more infrastructure. So at the moment, we're using a very cost-effective model, compared to two to three years ago, which is when we started to consolidate servers. We had about 400 servers but we've reduced their number by moving them to the appliance. We've consolidated all of those server licenses and server infrastructures.

For example, we took a server that was front-end, using Java, and connected to the mainframe. We have that entire server's application queue, entry queue, and all the objects moved onto the appliance. And there is no cost to it. It's just a box. There's no operating system on it. We have MQ on it and MQ then connects things to the rest of the bank, so we save on the infrastructure, on server licenses, and MQ licenses. We've created a setup like that a few times already in our bank.

This process of integration has saved us a lot of time. Previously our projects would take at least three to four weeks. Now, once we have firewalls and security in place, and once we have an acceptable solution design in front of us, they take three to four days. From the time we design the solution until things are connected to the appliance, it takes a week. It's only fast because most of it is scripted. It's almost like a container.

What we find most valuable is the fact that we can decouple it from the application. If one side is down, but someone in the bank is serving a customer and needs to connect to an account, he can put in the information and wait. When the remote system comes up and connects, we can push messages with the push function. So what is quite useful is the asynchronous function which means we don't lose everything in the bank. Although we use a lot of things synchronously, asynch is the best thing so that no banking information is ever lost, even when the network goes down and comes up.

We can also expand it across many servers with the cluster, using load balancing and failover. We use that extensively as well. The load balancing works absolutely wonderfully.

Overall, it makes us very flexible in the architecture we can use at the moment. When someone comes to us and says, "I need ABC," we can put together the correct solution for him with all our flexibility.

We use Red Hat from a server point of view. With our Linux box, MQ is on the box itself. We use that quite extensively as well. Inside of that, we find the shared HA function quite useful. It allows us to do HA really quickly, compared to how things were before.

At the moment we're very limited in the way we can interface with the cloud. 

I have been using it for 20 years now. I've been at the bank for 17 years and I used it before that as well.

The stability of the solution is very good. I would give it a nine out of 10. The main features are its reliability and availability and, as a messaging platform, it's very good in those areas.

The scalability is the one area where IBM has fallen behind. As much as it is used, there is a limit to the number of people who are skilled in MQ. That is definitely an issue. Places have kept their MQ-skilled people and other places have really struggled to get MQ skills. It's not a widely-known skillset.

In terms of the number of business areas using it in our bank, there are about 15. A lot of the major ones use it, such as credit, operations/finance, home loans, and ATMs. 

The bank has been very good in getting good technical resources to help us. There is a specific couple of people in IBM who know our architecture itself. We have what is called a value-add program where, when we have a problem or a service request, it will go through IBM but it will automatically land in the box of one of the experts who knows our architecture very well. We reach the same two people each time. We don't have to explain things to them.

We did not have a previous solution. Early on, we didn't have many options to choose from. A procurement person came along and told us that this is the best solution for us.

The setup was very complex in the beginning: how we had to put it in, how we had to tune it, and how we had to fix it. There were so many parameters. It wasn't just a simple drop-in, deploy, and go. In addition, because certain applications work in a certain manner, it required a lot of tuning.

My team, on average, has 10 years of experience on MQ so at this stage we've come to the point where we can tune it fairly quickly. So while the initial setup wasn't simple and quick, it has become very quick.

The initial setup took us several weeks, if not a few months. We had to get IBM to help with things in the beginning. We had system issues then, but it has been stable since then.

The IBM consultants we worked with were very good.

MQ's features are very extensive compared to SQS on Amazon or messaging from Microsoft. Those solutions have basic features in there. They say, "This is what 90 percent of the use cases will use," whereas MQ is very robust in the way it's set up, in the way it works, and in the way it can be tuned. You have a lot of connections where you can connect thousands of users to the bank and thousands out of the bank as well.

It is definitely way ahead of all the other messaging platforms. It's like the "BMW" or "Mercedes" of messaging. The others will still do the work, but they're fairly average in what they do. They're very basic compared to what we do. Because we are a major bank, we have many different platforms and many languages, so we use it very extensively.

You must be careful in that it must fit what you want it to do. A few years ago, we had a silo approach where everybody had their own IBM MQ and their own application support with their own teams. That got out of control. In the last few years we realized that you need to be careful about the deployment model you're using. And you need to make sure it's used for the proper use cases.

That's really the biggest lesson I've learned from using IBM MQ: You need to be very sure about what you want it to do.

I would advise that you talk to someone who knows about the solution and who is not biased. Set up a call with someone like me to look at the solution before you decide to go down this path and, similarly, before you decide to throw it out. Talk to someone who has at least seven years of experience with it and who can give you an unbiased opinion about how it works, and then make up your mind. People have come to us and we have said, "Based on what you are doing, we don't think MQ is the best solution for you. You should be looking at other solutions." And other times, we'll tell them that this is the perfect solution. 

The way MQ works is very good from a messaging point of view. There is very little that needs improving. MQ is very flexible and very tunable. We use it to transport hundreds of thousands of messages every day with absolutely no problems.

At the moment the solution is on-premise. But in the last two years, the bank has decided that it needs to go with the public cloud. So in the last two years, most of our development has gone towards decoupling MQ because a lot of the vendor applications were on the box where MQ was. We're working on the solution and decoupling everything so we can push toward the cloud itself. The solution's built-in connectors are more applicable to when we talk about cloud solutions. 

As for containerization, eventually we will go for it but, at the moment, we don't use it. It's difficult to work on a mainframe because of the way it's set up. But it's definitely something the guys will be using when we look at the Unix servers and other boxes.

For deployment and maintenance we have a team of eight people. We have three people on the mainframe and another three to four people for the appliance. They work with each other as well. On the Unix solution, which includes Linux, AIX, etc., we have another team of four, but all these teams overlap. The average upgrade won't take less than two people, but on the Unix box, upgrades are straightforward and someone can do it on his own.

For MQ, the most valuable feature is our ability to connect our distributed systems back to the mainframe, and pull our legacy data out of the mainframe and bring it down into a modern Java front end.

It's easy to install and it's bulletproof. We never have an issue with it. The upgrades are easy and IBM support is fantastic.

Honestly, the features they just recently released are what I wanted to see. Like I mentioned elsewhere, the appliance device was fantastic. It's MQ in a box, and you just plug it right into the network. I'd like to see improvements around that area, so we can take our z/OS systems into our distributed environments even easier.

We are very happy with the stability.

We are very happy with the scalability. It's easy to scale, easy to cluster, it's highly available, and we love the fact that IBM is now making appliance devices out of MQ, so you can buy them and just rack them right into your data center.

We are very happy with IBM support. Also, their professional services; if you need consulting, they're fantastic.

We used this product to solve our initial development solution about 15 years ago. We were coming on with Java, and we needed to connect our distributed front-end Java to our back-end legacy business intelligence code that's all written in COBOL on the mainframe. MQ was just the perfect way to connect.

I was involved in the setup. It's straightforward, but I had done this before.

We looked at a couple others, such as RabbitMQ and Sonic. They just didn't have IBM’s weight behind them. I love it.

When looking for a vendor, I look at their reputation, reliability, and a recommendation from the industry like a Gartner report. The Magic Quadrant is huge for us. We look at quadrant leaders all the time when we're taking solutions.

Don't hesitate. Call IBM and get them in there tomorrow.

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.

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.

We are all using the file transfer or MQ FTP feature. We are also it for distributed queuing and clustering.

Currently, we are not using many advanced features. We are only using point-to-point MQ. I have previously used features like context-based authentication, SSL authentication, and high availability. These are good and pretty cool features. They make your business reliable.

For critical business needs, everyone uses only IBM MQ. It is the first choice because of its reliability. There is a one-send-and-one-delivery feature. It also has a no-message-loss feature, and because of that, only IBM MQ is used in banking or financial sectors.

It would be an advantage if they can include streaming in IBM MQ, similar to Kafka. Kafka is used mainly for streaming purposes. This feature is clearly lacking in IBM MQ. If they add this feature to IBM MQ, it will have an edge over other products.

I have been working with IBM MQ for the last 14 years.

IBM MQ is a very stable product. You also get very good support from IBM, but we rarely have to go back to IBM for support.

It has good scalability. We are using point-to-point or distributed MQ, so we are not that much worried about scalability. If we need scalability, we can use MQ clustering for a high workload. We can configure it for resiliency and high availability by using the multi-instance queue managers. If one of the nodes goes down, it will automatically failover to the other node. It also provides some advanced high availability features on top of the multi-instance queue manager.

You get very good support from IBM. If you are facing any issues that are tricky or there is any code issue where FDC files are being generated and you're not sure what is happening, you can open a case with them. They will help you with that. They are very efficient.

The initial setup is very simple. The installation doesn't take more than 15 or 20 minutes.

I have installed it myself. I'm also doing maintenance, patching, upgrades, and migrations. We have a team of 11 administrators who are working on IBM MQ. They use it on a daily basis.

The upgrade process is simple. I refer to IBM Information Center. As a part of the preparation, I go through all the steps that they have given. I correlate the information with the infrastructure that we have. According to the current infrastructure, we document the requirements, and after that, we do the upgrade. We couldn't do in-place migration or upgrade, so we had to do parallelization. We took a new server, installed the new version, created a new queue manager, and migrated all the services.

It is a licensed product. As compared to an open-source solution, such as RabbitMQ, it is obviously costly. If you're using IBM Message Broker, which is a licensed product, IBM MQ is included in the same license. You don't have to pay separately for IBM MQ. The license cost of IBM MQ is lesser than IBM Message Broker.

I have been asked to do a PoC for one of our use cases, and we used RabbitMQ for that. They wanted to assess RabbitMQ in comparison to IBM MQ.

Obviously, IBM MQ has more advantages when compared with RabbitMQ. The main reason for doing this PoC was that RabbitMQ is an open-source product. Cost-wise, it looks effective, but from a technical point of view as well as from the point of view of scalability and features, IBM MQ is very enriched.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but it also depends on your needs and business case. I have been using IBM MQ for the last 14 years. I am very much used to it, and I like it. I have used other products too, such as RabbitMQ and Kafka, but not that much. 

I would rate IBM MQ an eight out of ten.

It's the EAI for connecting all our services like transport systems, replenishment systems, and order entry systems to our supply chain warehouse systems.

The most valuable feature is that it's a very strong integration platform and it is quite a monolithic solution. It's got everything.

At the moment we're trying to be a little bit more nimble in terms of how we deliver things for the business. We need to look at using some of the cloud-first as we have invested quite heavily in Azure. So we want to move away from all our legacy data centers and at the right time, we will move into the cloud as much as possible.

It's hard to put in a nutshell, but it's sort of developed as more of an on-premise solution. It hasn't moved much away from that. But we want to use the auto-scaling and scalability of some of the cloud services. It has developed a fair bit in terms of even the database of the board and stuff like that. Over the next three to five years, we want to move totally into the Azure.

I have been using IBM MQ for fifteen years in total. 

It's very stable.

It's the old way, old school scaler, where you need to add calls and you need to add memory, you need to add compute power, and you need to add storage capacity. You need to have bigger CPUs and more and more cores.

That's the old way of doing it. So you need to think about hardware. You need to think about memory, you need to think about storage capacity, you need to think about different switches, network switches, and whatnot. Scalability hasn't been a problem. It's just the sort of older generation of doing scaling so we want to be able to scale in the cloud.

The process for the scaling could be a little bit simplified.

IBM handles technical support. They are good. 

We did a selection and instead of going with some of the others, like TIBCO and whatnot, we went with IBM MQ.

We've set it up in several ways. I had it for a year. Each original implementation was with Accenture and we've had several crews come in to manage the services. There are different SIs that come in like Tech Mahindra and HCL. Over 15 years we've had a lot of independents come in and support. 

We're just building on top of the existing platform now. But we've made a strategic decision to move away from this on-premise infrastructure, the data centers if possible.

We've got 4,000 employees, it's quite a sizeable business that we take on vendors to come in. We're not an IT shop. Different managed services from different vendors.

We don't consider users for the platform. It's more about what transactions. So I think it ranges from two and a half million to 10 million messages a day.

My advice would be to rethink the cloud strategy. Make sure to have certain components that you can put into the cloud. Think about cloud-first properly so that it scales automatically. It knows how to work with some of the container services that are out there so that it scales better. It has some cloud components that are good but you still have quite a strong on-prem infrastructure to support it.

It's quite a complete solution. They have modules and stuff that they acquire and may add on as features and modules, additional modules, which is a very complete solution. It's been expensive to keep going the way we're going. And the turnaround is a bit slow, slower than we want. The business is changing quite rapidly, being in retail so we need to pivot quite quickly. And so that's why we're looking at seriously moving towards the cloud where we can simplify some of our processes and actually even our maintenance in it and the way we operate.

I would rate IBM MQ a seven out of ten.

We have a core banking application. If any system or application wants to talk to the core banking application, the request and the response will go through the MQ servers. The requests and responses are in the form of XML.

We have a VMware environment with Windows and Linux. 

We have clients spread all over Africa and they have to process different types of requests, such as credit requests and debit requests. We use the Queue Manager to handle these requests. Our MQ server will accept the request and send it on to our core banking application.

If you imagine the order from left to right, the application is on the left, then the enqueue server is in the middle, and the core banking is on the right. In between the queue server and the banking application, we have APIs and systems in place to understand the XML files.

The most valuable feature is the Queue Manager, which lies in the middle between our application and our core banking server.

Managing this solution is not difficult.

IBM MQ is very stable, which is important for our core banking application.

The memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory. We have 24 gigabytes of RAM and almost every day, we had to free up processes so that it can run.

Some of our messages were not being transmitted so we had to manually look at the MQ server to cut and paste them. That is supposed to be fully automated. The problem is normally a routing issue but it is compounded if there are connectivity troubles. For example, if 3,000 messages are supposed to be sent but 1,000 were not then you have to do it manually.

The solution is not very lightweight and if it could be decentralized, then put into three or four containers, it may be an improvement in this regard.

I have been using IBM MQ since 2015.

The MQ service has never gone down and has never failed us. It is only offline when the VM is offline.

This is a scalable solution. We scale by adding another VM to our cluster.

We have eight engineers who are using MQ, but in terms of end-users, or people who are consuming the services, there are thousands or millions. It is an enterprise-level organization and each application has a user base, so the scale depends on the application.

I have never had support for this solution.

As far as I understand, we did not use another solution prior to IBM MQ. Our old strategy did not use this type of technology.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I have done it both on Linux and on Windows. With Windows, it is just a case of hitting the "next" button. I would say that within ten minutes, you should be finished with the installation.

Prior to the installation, you have to make sure that you have Java installed.

I deployed this solution for the company.

The number of people required for maintenance depends on the environment. We used to have one person manage each application that was connected to the MQ server, which meant that we had four people maintaining it.

It is difficult to assess the ROI for this type of solution.

IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU.

I am familiar with a couple of similar solutions, including Red Hat AMQ. In fact, I am trying to migrate to Red Hat. It is very easy to install and get it running. All you have to do is get your API and you're done. Stability-wise, however, with Red Hat AMQ, I have seen cases where some of the messages were lost. IBM MQ is definitely more stable.

For the most part, this solution serves our purpose. It is not difficult to manage and the only challenges we have really had were to deal with some of the messages manually.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider costs first. It is expensive and you have to ask what value you are going to get from it. You need to consider factors like how many messages you are sending per day. If your budget is sufficient then IBM MQ is your choice, otherwise, you should look into a cheaper option. Also, if stability is the most important thing to you then IBM MQ is the choice that you want to make.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use MQ for guaranteed delivery and once only delivery of important business to business transactions.

We use persistence messaging to ensure messages are not lost in case machine is restarted.

We have implemented business to business transactions over MQ messaging. The guaranteed and once only delivery ensures business integrity.

Reliability of message transmissions and ability to replay messages in case message ends up in backout queues.

It needs a User Interface which is better than the aging MQ Explorer. The existing solution MQ Explorer is outdated.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is good.

We have always used MQ.

The setup was straightforward for simple usage. Load balancing is more complex.

I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it.

We did not evaluate any alternative solutions.

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