Event
Summary
Candle Corporation, an independent software company specializing in fast,
flexible e-business solutions, today announced the release of Candle Command
Center (CCC) for MQSeries Integrator (MQSI) V2, IBM's messaging technology
for enterprise application integration. The new solution helps eliminate
system downtime and increase productivity for MQSI by tracking message
flow within business processes, recording arrival rates, message queue
times, and entire message flow times.
To
further simplify the task of ensuring optimal MQSeries Integrator performance
and availability, CCC for MQSeries Integrator features the introduction
of a new browser-based user interface, the CandleNet Portal/Systems Management
Edition (SME) that according to the vendor represents a new level in ease
of use and user-customization.
"IBM's
MQSeries Integrator is a valuable tool for enabling e-business," said
Steve Kiser, vice president and group executive of Candle's Enterprise
Computing Group. "With Candle Command Center, we are further solidifying
our support of IBM's technology with a solution that monitors, manages
and optimizes a company's e-business processes running on MQSI."
Market
Impact
This product will prove to be popular in the MQSI community. As an example
of its usefulness, if a sending application forwards a message to a receiving
application that is not ready to accept it, MQSI will store the message
in a queue until the receiver is ready (this is an asynchronous method
known as "store and forward"). If the receiver does not come back on line,
all the other messages can be blocked behind it. This can affect the business
processes, and may be difficult to detect. This is a typical example of
a "bottleneck".
According
to Steve Kiser, vice president and group executive of Candle's enterprise
computing group, "CCC tracks the message broker's availability status
and performance of message flow between end points and actually allows
the user to see what the broker is working on in real time." If implemented
correctly, CCC should make these types of bottlenecks quickly visible.
User
Recommendations
Users who have implemented MQSI Version 2 should definitely evaluate this
product. Its feature set should be compared to the management tools supplied
by IBM "out of the box" to see just how much additional feature/function
has been added. There are also other vendors with similar offerings. Another
question for Candle and IBM is how their developers communicate and collaborate,
since IBM develops MQSI in Hursely, England, and Candle is in El Segundo,
CA. This is an eight time zone difference.