Talarian Takes Aim At ETX, MQSeries With MQexpress--Messaging & Pub/Sub

LOS ALTOS, Calif.--Taking aim at Tibco's Enterprise Transaction Express (ETX) and IBM's MQSeries middleware, Talarian is debuting this week MQexpress, a combination of publish/subscribe and message queuing middleware--something that customers have been demanding for awhile, say Talarian officials.

The MQexpress package, version 1.0, includes Talarian's Smartsockets pub/sub middleware, which is in use at D.E. Shaw (TTW, August 10, 1998), the Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC) (TTW, April 27, 1998), the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (Trading Systems Technology, July 21, 1997) and the former Salomon Brothers.

ETX is Tibco's guaranteed message delivery middleware installed at major sites such as HSBC (TTW, March 29), Banca IMI (TTW, February 22), the former BZW Barclays in Hong Kong (TTW, July 29, 1996), DG Bank (TTW, November 3, 1997), the former Dresdner Kleinwort Benson (TTW, October 12), Goldman Sachs (Trading Systems Technology, March 18, 1996), Nomura in London (Dealing With Technology, May 1, 1995), Standard Chartered (DWT, April 4, 1997) and Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank (SCMB) (TTW, December 8, 1997).

"This will up the ante with them," says Tom Laffey, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) for the Los Altos, Calif.-based Talarian, referring to Tibco. Officials at Tibco did not respond to inquiries by press time, while IBM officials decline to comment.

While IBM with its MQSeries and pub/sub plans would seem a likely target, Big Blue is "complementary" to MQexpress and viewed as an indirect competitor, Laffey says. While not based on IBM's MQSeries technology, MQexpress will offer an adapter to MQSeries, Laffey says. In addition, MQexpress provides the Talarian MQ Interface (TMQI), an application programming interface (API) that works with multiple queuing products. With this set-up, messages can be shared between the MQSeries and MQexpress environments. There are also adapters planned for the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) software and the Tuxedo transaction-processing monitor of BEA Systems, Laffey says.

The IBM offering of MQSeries with pub/sub has "low performance and requires a huge amount of configuration", Laffey says, who adds that Talarian's approach is preferable because it's easier "than having pub/sub on top of queuing". IBM has been planning to merge MQSeries with pub/sub technology since last autumn (TTW, November 9, 1998).

In fact, Laffey says that MQexpress offers 100 times the comparable performance of an MQSeries installation for one-to-many data distribution.

Laffey argues that the performance of MQSeries is hampered by the complex of links among the queue managers of MQSeries. The architecture of MQSeries requires that its queue managers all be configured to each other such that the configuration is "half-duplex and bi-directional", Laffey says.

In contrast, Talarian takes a more centralized approach and puts its Smartsockets middleware at the centre of an installation, with the queue managers of MQexpress required to have only a single connection into a Smartsockets "cloud".

Available now, MQexpress will run in major Unix environments and with Microsoft Windows NT, 98 and 95. It supports the C, C++ and Java programming languages. Prices for MQexpress start at $9,500.