IBM MQ Reviews

For me, the most important features are its interfaces with RACF and how we can set up the security to allow and disallow who can get to it, who can use it; and then what MQ gets to do on the mainframe and what it does not get to do, basically.

Our organization uses it a lot to interface applications that are outside the mainframe with applications on the mainframe, or to CICS, items like that.

It helps meet that threshold between what do the application people want to do – because they want to do everything now on GUIs and outside applications – and be able to have the security of the data living on the mainframe and how they get to it. It's the go-between between those two worlds.

There are probably dozens of ways we are using MQ to better connect across cloud, mobile, and devices, but it's mostly the fact that they are setting up stuff and then they use the MQ as the go-between between the distributed world and the mainframe. That's mostly what it's being used for.

Sometimes the applications people don't really understand MQ. For example, we had somebody set up a call through MQ and they ended up making dozens and dozens of calls when they only really only needed to do one. They don't understand how MQ really works, and how it pulls the data and then distributes it back to them, etc.

I think the application people understand that MQ can do it, but they don't really understand the mechanics behind it. They need to be better educated; how to use MQ, get the data that they need, and not cause conflicts.

At the level of the application development people, there needs to be more communication, more information that they have so they understand, because, in essence, what you're using MQ to do is to go to the mainframe and get things. They're so used to their Windows environment, and they don't really understand how MQ grabs that data, and what the mechanics are behind the scenes. And I think that the applications people need to better understand it. Or else something put into MQ so that it is more obvious to them. They don't know what to ask for. They just know, "We're going to go against this data" and they don't know the difference between the different types of security they can set up. The different access and the different classes. We use different classes in RACF; they have no clue what a class is.

There either needs to be better education on there, and or some tools built into MQ that helps them know what to ask for.

I have a very high impression of the stability of MQ; we haven't had any problems with it. MQ has been very stable. I think we've had it go down once since I've been here, but it was due to something somebody screwed up somewhere else, not MQ's fault.

So far, we haven't had any scalability problems either, but we're only about a year and a half into this.

I have not had to use technical support. I've had to use IBM technical support because of some issues, but I never had to talk to the MQ people. We have an MQ rep on site and he handles that stuff.

I was involved in the decision process of how we were going to use RACF, and what they were going to set up to do their calls, but they decided they were going to use MQ. I was actually called in as a RACF specialist to help get that interface going.

Before you implement it into RACF, really investigate the classes and how you're going to set those up, and make sure it's clear with the application development folks. Especially if you're trying to test QA and production separately, it's really important how those classes are set up, and how you set up the instructions for those guys.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are stability, technical support, obviously the more customers they have in a similar type of field; that's probably what's most important to us, generally.

So far, we've had good luck with it. It seems to be working and it seems to be very stable.

I use IBM HQ to communicate with subsystems within our plants e.g. the supply chain.

I've been using IBM HQ for eight years.

IBM HQ's stability is great - we send six million messages a day, and we're very satisfied with HQ's ability to handle that volume.

IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best.

IBM's technical support is great.

The initial setup was straightforward and took around half an hour.

We used an in-house team and a system integrator.

I would absolutely recommend IBM HQ to others as a very robust, reliable, responsive product. I would give IBM HQ a rating of nine out of ten.

The solution allows one to easily configure an IBM MQQueueManager. It's very easy and demonstrates comparatively better performance than that of other products. It is very good and makes it impossible to lose a message. These are very important advantages of the solution, but the greatest one is its robustness. 

It would be nice if we could use the cluster facilities because we are doing active/passive configuration use. Maybe we could implement them in cluster scenario and use the active/active nodes.

We have been using IBM MQ for around 20 years.

The onboarding processes and setup are very easy. 

We solely make use of IBM MQ and are an MQ customer. 

I rate IBM MQ as a nine out of ten. 

We use it for data integration.

It's very stable. 

It also has a backup queue concept and topics, features that I have not seen anywhere else. I like these features very much.

It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions.

I've been dealing with IBM MQ for the last six months.

It's scalable. It's not for every use case, but you can scale it.

We have about 50 users of IBM MQ.

The technical support is good.

The setup is between straightforward and complex. It's not as straightforward as Apache ActiveMQ.

We did the setup.

I like Kafka more. MQ is number-two compared to Kafka.

It's a good product but I think it's too costly. That's one disadvantage because there are already many open-source products, like RabbitMQ, Kafka, and ActiveMQ. If you really need a solid MQ solution then go with IBM MQ. If you don't need such a robust solution then you can go with any of the other solutions.

I would rate IBM MQ at seven out of 10. It has less throughput.

The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is that it is robust. Its dependability and reliability are its most valuable features.

It has allowed us to take applications that would not normally be able to communicate, to be able to talk to each other.

I would like to see more integration into the security back end.

It's very stable.

It’s very scalable.

Technical support is OK. Quicker escalation would make it better.

This was the first solution of this type and it was the one that was the best fit.

It's very stable and it's pretty straightforward. It just needs some more integration features to make better.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a solution is that it meets the needs.

The messaging and the security are the most valuable features. We can find everything in queue, because that's the basis of our business.

It is hard to say how it has improved the way my organization functions because it's been here since the beginning. I'm not sure I have an answer.

Right now, I can't think of anything that needs improving.

Stability is great. We have not had any issues recently. Version 7 was a tough one, but since then, they've improved it.

Scalability is great. We use it on Unix, Linux, z/OS, Windows, everything.

We use technical support, the PMR, all the time and it's great. It's usually really quick.

It was too long ago; it wasn't my decision to switch.

I was involved with the initial setup. It wasn't quite straightforward because the original versions used CICS and that was a little tricky sometimes. But, then they went and made the agent as part of the package of using the CICS.

Go for MQ. It will solve your problems for interconnectivity and just whatever you need to do; scalability wherever you need to go.

There are a lot of valuable features, such as high availability, and workload balancing. Those are the main two.

It allows different applications to communicate with each other.

I'd definitely like to see a more-stable high availability feature.

There is a feature that is in beta right now which synchronously writes messages to another server. That's something that we'd like to see, just for the stability.

It's been there for a while. We've had it for over 15 years.

Lately, it hasn't been that stable. We're using multi-instance queue managers and we're having a lot of issues with storage and that affects the availability of the queue manager.

Scalability is pretty good.

Support has been good so far. We submit a lot of PMRs and we usually get pretty good response.

I didn't make the decision to invest in this product. There was someone before me that decided.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Definitely read the manual before you do anything.

The asynchronous messaging and the assured delivery are the most valuable features because your data needs to make it through from one app to the other, and you don't want to lose it.

It's multi-platform, so we can go between mainframe, Unix, Windows, different platforms, and we can have applications send data using the messaging.

I really can't think of anything that needs improvement. For our company, it does what we need it to do.

The price is always an issue. Like anything you buy, you want the best deal. We are retailers, so we are always looking at costs. I am sure every company does. It would be nice if the message security and file transfer weren’t an extra cost. But I suppose if you want a deluxe of anything, you will need to pay.

We've had it for 20 years.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable.

We don't have to use support very often, but they are responsive.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Implement it. It's pretty easy and straightforward.

I don't do the vendor selection, but I get involved a little bit. When selecting a vendor, I would want ease of administration and installation.