IBM MQ Review

The message queue and the integration with any development platform/language, i.e., NET and Java, are the most valuable features.

We are the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission where our mandate is to register and regulate companies and intellectual property (patents, designs, trademarks, and copyrights).

In South Africa, a company that wants to do business with the government or a privately owned company is required to also register for taxes through the South African Revenue Services (SARS).

We have integrated our registration process with SARS to seamlessly register both the company and the taxes upon registration of a company with CIPC using the near real time concept.

We created an interface between two state-owned companies. We replaced the FTP/SFTP process that was cumbersome and often difficult to synchronize the two databases between CIPC & SARS.

Now that we utilize IBM WebSphere MQ, we are never down. Even if the MQ server crashes, messages are queued and can be recovered.

This extends the use of this product to allow seamless integration with all of our stakeholders for data exchange purposes.

I don’t know of any room for improvement.

I have been using WebSphere since 2013.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

We've never encountered any critical issues that required technical expertise except when the server crashed. We had to get an IBM WebSphere MQ accredited service provider to reconfigure the application. We never experienced any other pressing issues after that.

We used FTP/SFTP before. We switched to IBM WebSphere MQ because we needed a robust, scalable message processing mechanism with the ability to integrate with different technologies.

The setup was straightforward. Network connectivity is easy as long as you understand your solution design requirements.

I had to take over the project with limited knowledge about the product. I can safely say today that I support the solution with minimum assistance from the software vendor. I was not trained, nor did I have skills transferred to me to enable me to support the product

Since this was not the initial direction CIPC was embarking on, we had the minimal license requirement. The cost was less than the value we would be getting out of this product. There's an annual license with support and it is reasonable cost wise.

We did not evaluate other options. This was recommended to us by SARS. This currently is their standard of integrating with SARS.

IBM WebSphere MQ is robust, scalable, and reliable. You just have to clearly articulate your requirements and understand your needs so that you can realize the benefits of using the product. Our lesson learned is to always plan wide and implement narrow. This is the "phase approach."