PeerSpot user
ICT Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
ExpertTop 5
Improved and influenced communication between different applications, then standardized that communication
Pros and Cons
  • "This solution has improved and influenced the communication between different applications, then standardized that communication."
  • "I don’t like legacy view of MQ."

What is our primary use case?

We develop applications for 20 companies in the insurance industry. We have about 20 different product systems that use the same MQ layout. 

We are also using it for testing and educational purposes.

Our customer base is in the closed market of Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

We just switched versions from 8.0.0.6 to 9.1.

How has it helped my organization?

Most European companies have MQ, though we just added it four years ago. MQ changes the way people think about their applications. E.g., they are more integrated. We see synergies with the tool, but there is a long path to changing people’s minds.

What is most valuable?

The MQ layout is quite easy.

It is very stable. We don't have many issues.

What needs improvement?

We have had an issue with the migration. Most of our applications are running on Java and WebSphere. We have a project to get rid of an old .NET application since we are experiencing a loss in connection during the migration to 9.1. The problem appears to be more on the .NET side than the MQ side though.

The technical user interface is outdated in terms of the language used. I think this is inherited from the mainframe. This is more of an engineering issue. It is running on a Windows platform, and I don't like having Windows being the backbone of our company.

I don’t like legacy view of MQ.

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IBM MQ
March 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?

Four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We don't have a problem with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not had any large scalability issues. The business that we have is not that big. In Switzerland, we have around 3,000 people working with all our systems. We don't have that many transactions. For our 20 customers, we have four servers in production with two on standby and two that are active. We need scalability mostly to run large printing jobs for MQ, where we need disk space. Overall, we don't have any scalability issues.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

This solution has improved and influenced the communication between different applications, then standardized that communication. Before, we had a lot of different interfaces, which were partly handwritten. Now, we have two or three manned technology with MQ that are automated. Therefore, we are focusing and reducing the amount of technology.

For some special parts, we also had something previously in place. We ran around 100 to 1000 PDFs in a batch mode.

How was the initial setup?

We have a standardized way in describing our servers, services and rights because we have our own infrastructure. We just generate the MQSC scripts, then push it to the right server.

What about the implementation team?

The time it takes to deliver a new integration varies. From our point of view, we are really fast, but we do not develop applications on our own. We are a type of project management and system provider company. This means that most applications are written by different companies. E.g., we have IBM as a software supplier.

Two people from our company maintain the solution along with a consulting company that we have. All this is done part-time.

What was our ROI?

Our costs haven't increased but they also have not improved.

What other advice do I have?

We are happy with it. I would give it an eight (out of 10). 

We are not using containers.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user632751 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees
Vendor
I like that the ability to add applications to it is simple.
Pros and Cons
  • "There are a lot of extensible options for security, i.e., various things you can do. It's pretty easy to navigate."
  • "Presenting and maybe having some different options for different user experiences based on the administrative duties that you have to do as an app manager or configure the server or security would be an improvement."

How has it helped my organization?

It allows more people to be able to support the application. They have training and we get folks to actually go in and bounce services and update services through IBM MQ because it is graphical. It's fairly intuitive on what's there. It enables us to have better and deeper support as an organization.

What is most valuable?

What I like about IBM MQ is that the ability to add applications to it is quite simple. There are a lot of extensible options for security, i.e., various things you can do. It's pretty easy to navigate. It's pretty easy to install and use from that perspective. Those are the things that I really like about it. It's our web hosting application of choice over using something like Tomcat or whatever because you can click through it, you can see things, and it's a lot easier from an administrative standpoint.

What needs improvement?

I think one of the things to improve on could be more administrative profiles which might simplify the experience. IBM MQ has a lot of settings. We're only using probably a fraction, maybe 10%, of the overall settings. Working for a large aerospace/defense firm, we have pretty tight security. There are a lot of settings that we do have but we're still only just scraping the surface of what's there. Being able to get to those sub-menus can be a bit challenging.

So there's the fact that there's a lot in IBM MQ presenting only the options that maybe somebody might do, such as a web application administrator might have to do. They don't need to see all the other bindings that are there, so it could be a little overwhelming trying to find it. So, I think if there's anything, that would probably be it.

Presenting and maybe having some different options for different user experiences based on the administrative duties that you have to do as an app manager or configure the server or security would be an improvement. For instance, in our information insurance organization, we have folks that go in and look at the security bindings that we have with our applications. Having those different roles mapped would be an asset, so you're not having to go through all the various sub-menus to find it would be something that would, I think, take it over the edge.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is really good, actually. We haven't had any issues with IBM MQ .

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven't had any issues adding applications to it and scaling up from it. So all in all, I think it's been fantastic.

How is customer service and technical support?

I would say that technical support is average. Obviously, we are going through their PMR system. They are such a large company. I think the availability of somebody on the phone or calling somebody when you need something fixed immediately is a bit challenging for the organization. I think that's an area that they can improve on.

If we have IBM MQ or one of the applications go down, our entire plant is down. Then sometimes, it's 2-3 hours or something before someone calls us back. It would be nice if we can call somebody and have somebody you can actually work with that is knowledgeable on the product right away. That's my only gripe.

For a lot of other things, like lower priority items, working through the PMR system's been fine. I think their system is good. I just think that they need to be a little bit more responsive to their severity one tickets.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. The more complicated part of it was the actual IBM CLM tools implemented within IBM MQ. IBM MQ itself was pretty simple.

I've heard that there have been challenges with upgrades, but we haven't gone through an upgrade cycle yet, at least in quite some time. We'll see how well that is but we haven't had that challenge yet.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We didn't evaluate any other products beforehand. It was just what IBM recommended.

Typically, what we'll do is, we'll go with the vendor recommendations because from a support perspective, if they're saying that because they support an application, we prefer to do go with that one because we know we can get the support as it goes on. That's really it.

Access to support is the most important criteria for me when assessing vendors. I think support is a key for us being in IT because we are supporting the application, so we need good support.

The second one is the ability to reach the developers on key issues and improvements that we would want to see in future versions of the application. Being able to influence the roadmap, I guess you could say. That would probably be the second thing we care about.

There are a lot of vendors that don't take that seriously. Like, you go in and you might have great features that would really broaden their product base, adoption of their tools. Some want to hear it; some don't. I think the ones that do hear that end up being more successful; they find ways to work that information back into their development stream.

That's probably the second most important criteria but, again, being in IT, I'm looking out for myself a little bit there. Support is number one.

What other advice do I have?

I don't think I'd give anyone any advice at all. It's pretty straightforward to go and implement. The only thing that I would say is that perhaps if you're - depending on what you need to do - like deploying some of the IBM CLM tools, you might look maybe for a lighter-weight solution because of those various menus.

I know there are other IBM products and there are various lighter-weight solutions that are provided as part of the IBM MQ family. Going with something that's not full IBM MQ but maybe one of the other IBM products that's much more suitable for your organizational needs would be a good choice.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
IBM MQ
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM MQ. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user632688 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Middleware Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Integrates one system to another system, and to .NET and Java applications.

What is most valuable?

Basically 100% message delivery and how easy it is to integrate the system to another system / .NET / Java applications are the most valuable features. It provides 100% guaranteed message delivery, so you won't lose any messages, even in the event of a MQ failure.

How has it helped my organization?

The benefit is that we are in an industry where we cannot lose any piece of data, so MQ gives that reliability. In terms of security, like I mentioned preciously, you won't loose any of the transactions at all, even if you have a failure. It's very important to us, especially the FIFO feature (first-in, first-out) and that kind of persistent messaging. We have a billing system where whatever messages drop first need to be consumed first. Thus, these features are really good. It helps us flowing all the MQ messages.

What needs improvement?

One of the bottlenecks for us is owing to the industry that we're in, we sometimes get the large payloads and the MQ queues that we can increase. But, the maximum payload size allowed is only 100 Mbps. So, I wish to see if it bumps up because sometimes we hit that ceiling and the message won't process. We have to find another way to mitigate one or two instances like that. It's critical, so I don't know if there are any future plans to increase that size to unlimited or at least where you can set it based on your business model, i.e., if your payload is higher, then you can set it higher.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's pretty stable. We did not experience any downtime. Probably, there's no other product out there like MQ for messaging. It's the most reliable solution. We had our MQ running in production for almost 800-900 days without any issues, i.e., for more than three years, we didn't even have to restart, and still everything runs so smoothly.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's fully scalable. You can add as many queue managers or queues in there, so it's pretty flexible in terms of scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have used the technical support around one or two times, but not that much. I did have some meetings scheduled with the architecture guys at a recent IBM conference. I am quite happy with the support that I have received.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were not using any other solution previously. From the beginning, we implemented it. We always look up to IBM software. We have so many IBM shops with products such as the IBM AIX Servers, WebSphere Servers, WebSphere Liberty, IBM Integration Bus, IBM InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management, IBM PA and IDMP. We have lots and lots of IBM products, including the WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Commerce, so we got a lot of things from IBM.

What other advice do I have?

It's a good solution and you should go for it!

When selecting a vendor, mainly the support part is very important, especially when something goes wrong in production; you don't want to leave the system down. This could cost the customer a lot of money, so having that level of support is important. Sometimes, we run into an issue where the support is not able to help, then we always reach out to our self-service representatives. After which, the ticket gets escalated and addressed pretty quickly, so that's the kind of attention required.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user632670 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager Enterprise Systems Administration at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
It delivers the stability and security within our applications that we desire as an organization.

What is most valuable?

It's certainly a product that you can rely on. It delivers the stability and security within our applications that we desire as an organization.

How has it helped my organization?

The time to deployment is quick and easy. Again, it is stable, auditable, and uses automation to deploy products and keep the systems up and running while the business is still functioning.

What needs improvement?

I think the cloud is our next solution. Because we’re in the healthcare industry, I want to make sure the security is really strong and capable of keeping our members' data secure.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's very scalable. It's very easy to build out with high availability, and you're also able to scale both vertically and horizontally very easily.

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We used all the big players and we chose IBM just because of the fact that we've used them before with other solutions. We know their capabilities. Their delivery solution team has helped guide our solutions across the board and has delivered high availability, high quality to our members.

We also used Oracle, and we also used the Tomcats and JBoss product lines.
The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is reliability; knowing that they're going to be there to support you when you need them; the ability to bring solutions to an issue in a quick manner that allows you to keep your business going.

What other advice do I have?

Every application could always use improvements, but it's a very stable application and delivery solution tool that we are able to implement quickly and add applications to it quickly; keep us going in an ever-changing environment.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user632748 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Leader at Visa
Real User
​Partnership with the vendor and stability of the product are most important when selecting a vendor.

What is most valuable?

Guaranteed delivery of the messages and then the ability to scale the messages the way we need it according to our application, performance, and scalability.

How has it helped my organization?

It helps us to make sure that every time you do a swipe on your credit card, the credit card transaction is guaranteed to transact.

What needs improvement?

Some of the new features that their competitors are coming out with. Things like AMQ are coming out with - transformation of messages with the security aspect of it and even scalability with AMQ, it's scaled at the microservices level and MQ is not quite there yet.

For how long have I used the solution?

We're currently evaluating AMQ to see if from a cost perspective it makes sense or not to switch from IBM MQ. We still have IBM MQ.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Very stable. Within the last year or so we hardly had any issues with the MQ or the queue itself going down.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability good, we can scale by the application needs and also scale by the need of the application but also the need of the infrastructure. At our peak, we're able to scale and make sure the transaction goes through.

How is customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Service is good. We've been able to meet all our SLAs in the agreement that we signed with them.

Technical Support:

We have an enterprise level agreement with IBM. If there's any issue with MQ, we have a direct line to them.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

AMQ is one of them, Kafka is the other, and of course IBM MQ has always been on the list.

We chose IBM a long time ago from all the criteria I mentioned and then at the time other players were not evolving yet. IBM MQ has been an enterprise solution for many companies and the stability's there. It made a lot of sense for us to use IBM MQ back then.

What other advice do I have?

Partnership with the vendor and stability of the product are most important when selecting a vendor. I mentioned AMQ earlier, and there's no guarantee that AMQ will be around next year.

Stability is key to the product and the performance of it, you can get high availability, high performance too, but we talk about tens of thousands TPS through the product so, from that perspective there's no other competitor on it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user631773 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Leader at EDF
Vendor
Its reliability and efficiency are valuable. It would be nice to have better reporting, such as elasticsearch

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features of this solution are its reliability, efficiency, and the capacity to bring value.

How has it helped my organization?

The benefits are the satisfaction of my users (my clients), the stability of the solution, and the availability it provides.

What needs improvement?

It would be nice for the next release to have better reporting. For example, elasticsearch or ELK. We don't have that with IBM. So we have implemented our own solution.

We have a major application based on DataPowers and WebSphere servers.

We had an main issue to visualize efficiently the utilization of our WebSphere applications (load, who is using, when, how). It’s critical in defining our “capacity planning”.

Actually, we’ve developed our own reporting solution based on Kibana/Elasticsearch. Kibana analyses ours logs in real time. We have done a portal with several graphs. It is really impressive. We are very happy with our solution.

IBM doesn’t provide, by default, a reporting item as efficient as Kibana. DMGR is not as powerful and flexible.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is quite good. It's strong and the performance is important.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is a bit difficult for us. Since this product is an IBM product, we have to work together with IBM to be more efficient at this point.

How is customer service and technical support?

We are not really happy with their support. They don't have the skills to very efficiently answer our questions, so our relationship with them is difficult.

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in the initial setup.

What other advice do I have?

When it's too difficult to have what we want with IBM, we develop our own, better solution and we try to integrate our own solution with IBM.

When selecting a vendor, we look for the confidence, the relationship. We have to share the same objectives and to agree in order to deliver the same value to the client.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user523173 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director IT Platform Engineering at Staples
Vendor
I think the most valuable feature is the scale that it can run at.

What is most valuable?

I think the most valuable feature is the scale that it can run at. It runs millions of transactions in our environment on a daily basis, scales and works well.

How has it helped my organization?

I don't know if it improved my organization but it basically drives communications between a lot of our subsystems and processes. It's kind of the backbone of a lot of our services.

What needs improvement?

I think some of the management tools could be improved. We've got a variety of different management tools, that we have in place. Having them be more a core part of a product, rather than being add-ons from either other solutions or open source, would be good.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is very good.

How is customer service and technical support?

Technical support is good. For the most part, we get what we need. We did have AVP for a number of years, which was another level of support. We're reconsidering that maybe we should be going back to that level just for the more timeliness and quality of support.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

There are a lot of open-source alternatives coming out now, today. Sometimes MQ can be perceived in the organization as being expensive. Price is an issue.

Where we've deployed other open-source solutions, we're not at the same scale so it's difficult to say at this point whether they do as good of a job as MQ. Obviously, we're very conservative in taking some of our core systems and moving them to unproven technologies.

There aren’t any features that they have that I wish MQ had as well. They actually tend to be a little lighter weight than MQ, in a bad way.

What other advice do I have?

Make sure that whatever solution you have is going to scale to meet your needs and that you have the tooling infrastructure available to you, as well.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is, obviously, quality. Reliability of the product is number one but it needs to be cost effective, as well.

We haven't really moved into the cloud with MQ at this point.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user523143 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
It provides content security and delivery from the network protocol perspective.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are content security and content delivery, from a whole network protocol perspective.

It's adapting itself to get into every single component throughout the entire world being Java enabled.

How has it helped my organization?

We are able to transport data across any platform in a secure fashion, be it internal or external.

From the send and forget perspective, MQ allows you to – on your own – manage your data, collect your data, and manage your data perspective.

What needs improvement?

The barrier to success is basically the engine behind the collection of the data.

I also think the administration could be a little more straightforward. Right now, we have to develop our own truly distributed administration system. There's a GUI that's really not manageable; not that easy to use.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It’s very scalable.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is responsive; it comes out of Hursley, which is their main support and development location. There is a direct line to their development; it's very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were previously using all kinds of solutions, including SCP, SFTP, FTP and proprietary APIs. MQ allowed standardization to port data.

We decided to use WebSphere MQ because we needed data transport from all kinds of systems.

Responsiveness is the most important criteria for me when selecting or working with a vendor.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was straightforward and flexible.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not really consider any options other than MQ.

What other advice do I have?

My advice is to lay out your infrastructure in a fashion you can support.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free IBM MQ Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free IBM MQ Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.