InformationWeek

September 29, 1997

Messaging Spec Announced

Required features include queuing, guaranteed delivery

oftware vendors last week demonstrated products based on Business Quality Messaging, a set of conceptual standards defined by makers and users of middleware that permits messaging between applications.

The vendors and users behind BQM, meeting at the Electronic Messaging Association summit in San Jose, Calif., approved a specification outlining the features products must support to be considered BQM-compliant. Required features include guaranteed message delivery, message queuing, and encryption. But the conceptual spec, created by IBM and Microsoft, does not defin e standard, open protocols that BQM-compliant products must support, and vendors may implement the features as they see fit.

The spec was designed to guarantee a level of quality for businesses, such as Pfizer Inc., that rely on messaging for critical applications. The New York pharmaceutical company uses messaging to submit information about its drugs to the Food and Drug Administration and is looking forward to BQM-compliant products, says Steve Mahaney, associate director of electronic messaging services.

"When you said 'messaging' at Pfizer six months ago, you meant E-mail," Mahaney said in an address at the conference. "Now what you hear is senior IT managers speaking of being able to push information coming out of applications outside the company."

BQM-compliant products demonstrated last week included an application built with Roma, a tool being developed by Candle Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. Roma, due early next year, will let developers write a program that will run over multiple messag ing middleware products.

Other vendors demonstrating products included Hewlett-Packard, which plans to support BQM in the next version of AdminFlow for Windows NT; middleware vendor BEA Systems Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif.; and fax software vendor RedBox Technologies Inc. in Los Altos, Calif.

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