Microsoft has joined the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group at the request of banking clients looking to develop an open industry standard for enterprise messaging.
AMQP is an emerging open standard for enterprise messaging and is designed to free institutions from the costs and constraints imposed by proprietary middleware and interoperate with many of the current messaging and Web services specifications.
The formation of the Working Group in June 2006 followed a multi-year development effort at JPMorgan Chase aimed at creating an alternative to expensive proprietary messaging middleware such as IBM's MQSeries.
Adrian Kunzle, head of engineering and architecture at JPMorgan comments: "We welcome Microsoft's commitment as another step toward AMQP becoming the preferred connectivity for business messaging on the Internet."
Members of the AMQP Working Group are Cisco, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Boerse Systems, Envoy Technologies, Goldman Sachs. iMatix Corporation, IONA Technologies, JPMorgan, Novell, Rabbit Technologies, Red Hat, Twist Process Innovations, WSO2 and 29West.