A New Era in Messaging as a Service

Analyst Viewpoint

The transition to cloud computing has introduced new challenges for organizations seeking to satisfy the next generation of business requirements for digital transformation. Doing this is not simple; the reality is that the many disparate cloud-related technologies and the methods used to interconnect them were designed neither to interoperate easily nor to function in real time and in a secured manner. As organizations move to the cloud and extend antiquated legacy systems in the enterprise, they often encounter the challenge of maintaining the continuity of business processes, among them domestic and global transactions as systems of record that connect customers and financials as well as devices and machines. Much the same challenge accompanies advances in computing and interconnectivity such as the Internet of Things – advances that yield new opportunities for monetization but also involve challenges in ensuring continuity of operations.

To address these demands, a new generation of enterprise messaging technology has emerged to support digital transformation and help connect machines and applications securely. This new generation of messaging is agile in interoperation across cloud protocols, and can guarantee and secure messages across platforms and the internet. This has allowed organizations to interconnect internally and across a variety of cloud computing environments – public ones such as Amazon’s AWS, the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure as well as private ones such as those provided by technology from Oracle, IBM, SAP and other platform as a service (PaaS) providers. Today’s enterprise messaging technologies can connect from the enterprise directly to cloud computing environments or can connect to another message broker or platform to minimize the computing cycles used in processing messages from point to point, much as network appliances have done in the past. In addition, advancements in virtualization enable these enterprise messaging brokers to operate across a variety of computing environments without additional hardware.

Previous generations of messaging technology such as IBM MQ and TIBCO EMS were difficult to maintain across hardware server environments and required farms of servers to meet demand and provide the low latency needed in message queue architectures. In addition, specialized enterprise architects were needed to manage their operation and interfaces with other systems.

Now, by embracing enterprise messaging that can interoperate across a wide variety of legacy and newer messaging protocols, architects and developers can focus on how to advance their new systems and applications and insulate themselves from the peculiarities of the underlying messaging. They now can use a unified messaging approach that can interoperate dynamically and securely in real time with very low latency, minimizing bottlenecking. And they are able to interoperate with other existing messaging systems such as Amazon SQS or RabbitMQ, allowing for more flexibility in the interconnectivity of messaging across heterogeneous environments.

But it is not always an easy process to adapt and deploy this next generation of enterprise messaging in a data center and computing environment. Digital innovations require increasingly faster approaches to meet deployment schedules. The subscription model of computing has continued to advance over the past decade such that organizations no longer need to specialize in technology; instead, they depend on a technology partner, subscribing to and paying for what they use. The computing methods consumed “as a service,” from software as a service (SaaS) to the layers of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) have become not only standard but in many cases the only way that organizations can access the latest technologies.

As the platform- and infrastructure-as-a-service model continues to advance, organizations should strive to maximize flexibility, utilizing open standards and protocols to not only standardize messaging but embrace and utilize it with cloud computing. Organizations should seek technology that provides easy integration and deployment of messaging and support for developers. Like other subscription approaches to software and technology in the cloud, unifying messaging in what now is called messaging as a service (MaaS) makes sense. With this approach, organizations can have not just interconnectivity but also the ability to ensure that the messaging is being properly managed by those who have the appropriate expertise. The reality is that there are not enough enterprise architects with messaging experience in the world for every organization to have those skills at its disposal. Coping with this situation requires that organizations make their computing environment simpler and smarter by working with companies that specialize in this technology.

While many IaaS and PaaS suppliers try to ensure the interconnectivity of their offerings by supporting messaging standards, they are challenged by the continuously changing technological landscape. But suppliers, particularly those that do not specialize in enterprise messaging, simply will not be able to keep pace with changes in computing environments they do not control. What’s more, if organizations have issues, they are left to talk to support teams that are not going to be trained in or responsive to an organization’s specific messaging needs. And the stakes can escalate quickly; the risk in working with technology providers that do not specialize in enterprise messaging increases as security and guaranteed messaging become increasingly essential for business continuity.

As businesses continue to invest in digital innovations that better ensure their future, their technology infrastructure will ever more urgently require a faster and smarter – as well as a more open and flexible – approach to enterprise messaging. A subscription-based messaging service that provides management of the hardware and secured interoperability in the software can eliminate the challenges found in legacy approaches. Reliable enterprise messaging is essential to the continuity of services that an organization provides. For this reason, it is critical that every organization take a closer look at manageability of the interconnectivity across cloud computing and enterprise hybrid environments and examine messaging as a service.