IBM® WebSphere® MQ facilitates application integration by passing messages between applications and Web services. It is used on more than 35 hardware platforms and for point-to-point messaging from Java™, C, C++ and COBOL applications.

Most large organizations today have an inheritance of IT systems from various manufacturers, which often makes it difficult to share communications and data across systems. Many of these organizations also need to communicate and share data electronically with suppliers and customers–who might have other disparate systems. It would be handy to have a message handling tool that could receive from one type of system and send to another type.

Where data held on different databases on different systems must be kept synchronized, little is available in the way of protocols to coordinate updates and deletions and so on. Mixed environments are difficult to keep aligned; complex programming is often required to integrate them. Message queues, and the software that manages them, such as IBM WebSphere MQ for z/OS®, enable program-to-program communication.