<<A coalition of financial institutions is working to develop an
open-source alternative to proprietary message queuing technology,
hoping to make Web services and service-oriented architectures fit for
duty on Wall Street.

The new technology, known as AMQ, is an open-source message queuing
system that provides the same functionality as IBM's WebSphere MQ
(formerly known as MQSeries), has implementations on C and C++, and
will support C# and Java.

John Davies, vice president of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co.,
which is participating in the development project, said several
million dollars have been spent on AMQ R&D. IBM and fellow proprietary
messaging company Sonic Software Corp. are closely following the
project, Davies said.

"We now need something that's not proprietary. Banks don't like
proprietary things," Davies told eWEEK during an interview at the Web
Services on Wall Street Show & Conference here last week.

Not only has AMQ drawn the participation of several banks, but also
companies such as Red Hat Inc., Novell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
are considering building AMQ into the kernels of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, SuSE Linux and Solaris, respectively, Davies said.>>

You can read about this potentially significant new protocol at:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1761537,00.asp

Gervas