JPMorgan Chase is promoting uptake of a new open source alternative to proprietary message queuing technology for the investment banking industry.
JPMorgan is one a coalition of banks working on the new standard, dubbed AMQ, which aims to deliver interoperability between applications written in C, C++ and Java.
Speaking at a conference earlier this week, JPMorgan VP John Davies said several millions of dollars had already been spent on AMQ R&D.
The project has also drawn interest from Red Hat, Novell and Sun Microsystems, who could play a key role by dropping the standard directly into their operating systems. In this way Linux and Unix boxes could be shipped pre-configured for punishing high volume publish and subscribe messaging.
If the movement gains ground it could pose a serious threat to enterprise service bus vendors who supply expensive proprietary messaging middleware to banks. Davies says IBM and Sonic Software have both been monitoring the project closely.
A wire-level protocol of AMQ is expected to be released in the next few months.