I Use Product X, AMQP Is Irrelevant To Me

As I've gotten more involved with the greater AMQP community, and as I've talked more and more about it with people who already "get" messaging, I keep hearing the following comments:

I've made a significant investment in Product X [MQ Series (or whatever IBM's calling it these days), SonicMQ, Tibco EMS/Rendezvous, FioranoMQ] and I use it for as much as I can. I'm happy with it. I'm happy with vendor support, all my apps "just work." Why in the world should I care at all about this AMQP thing?

It's a legitimate sentiment. A lot of the AMQP hype has been driven by next-generation pure-play AMQP broker platforms trying to eat into those existing install bases. I still think it's relevant to you, the Happy Commercial MOM Broker Customer.

It's The Ecosystem, Stupid!
Remember back when I initially ranted about AMQP. One point I made there, quite aside from my "My commercial vendor is annoying me" ranting, was about the overall ecosystem. Here's where I make my AMQP pitch: AMQP Will Help You Leverage Your Existing Investment.

Let's assume that you're completely happy with your WebSonicFioEMQ platform and you've changed all your code to be able to use it. You're still not leveraging it to its maximum level, because no matter which one you chose (or if you chose them all), you can't always get third party products to integrate properly.

Consider one pretty Enterprise Software product: Sybase Replication Server. Last time I checked, it could pump out event messages on "interesting" events through three mechanisms: JMS, Rendezvous, and MQSeries. But I'm sure it's actually a lot more specific than that (I can't check directly as it's firewall protected, but could someone who has access fill us in in the comments), down to the version of individual JMS Brokers and versions of Rendezvous and MQSeries and all that that it supports.

Consider some more emerging products like Continuous Integration platforms. All the modern ones can send alerts using email and Jabber.

They're astute in choosing the most dominant messaging mechanisms in their target environment: commercial MOM systems in the case of Sybase Rep Server, and open communications standards in the case of Continuous Integration. And therein lies the rub:

• Unless your MOM platform is truly ubiquitous in your domain, every piece of software you want to integrate into it will result in custom effort;
• Your MOM platform isn't ubiquitous in every domain.

It doesn't matter what you're using for asynchronous communications: it's not ubiquitous enough.

AMQP Promises Ubiquity
Let's assume that the promise of AMQP really gets going. I wholeheartedly believe that the sheer engineering effort that application vendors can save through only supporting one protocol, and thus one client library package, without any interoperability concerns, will force it through.

Consider someone like Atlassian. You're an Atlassian customer, and you want your Confluence and Jira and Bamboo and FishEye instances to fire off messages to your existing MOM infrastructure when "interesting" things happen. So you lobby and say "Hey, can you support SonicMQ for message publication?" and they say "hey, that looks pretty interesting."

But the moment someone else catches wind of this, pretty soon they have a many-to-many compatibility story as every customer with a different infrastructure pops up and says "if you support X, you should also support my MOM infrastructure as well." Math is Hard, Atlassian Goes Shopping and says "write your own plugin, yo."

What if Atlassian could satisfy every single major MOM infrastructure with exactly one protocol? They'd do it. Interop testing by the broker developers (and not Atlassian) will take care of everything else.

AMQP Helps Your Commercial Investment
If you think this all seems like it makes sense (and if it doesn't, let me know precisely what about it doesn't in the comments), your immediate response should be to get on the phone to your salesperson and say:

• I want AMQP support in a (near-)future release of your MOM Broker;
• If you don't do it, I will roll out someone else in parallel and bridge them.

Trust me, this will get them thinking. Because I'll guarantee that within 6 months of AMQP 1.0 coming out, there will be open source bridges between every major commercial MOM infrastructure and AMQP. And the absolute last thing your sales person wants to hear is that you're thinking of adding something to reduce your existing lockin.

Once this is done, you get the best of both worlds:

• You can leverage the entire organizational and technical infrastructure you've already built up to do MOM properly without adding more "products" to manage; and
• You can integrate yet more applications and participate in a far richer ecosystem than Your Product could ever support on its own, helping drive that investment farther.

So get on the phone to your sales guy. Now.