Microsoft and AMQP

October 24, 2008

Building on my post from the other day, I wanted to point out that today Microsoft announced that it had been invited to join the AMQP Working Group. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol is an open specification supported by open source communities. The specification addresses the issue of enterprise messaging, which is of critical importance to businesses that run on real-time messaging and need to have the expertise to drive changes in their messaging platforms that fit their business. Companies such as Cisco, Novell, iMatax, RabbitMQ, JP Morgan and Red Hat have contributed to the development of a standard for ubiquitous messaging called AMQP. The head of the Platform Strategy organization at Microsoft (which is where I work), Sam Ramji, has blogged more about the details of this announcement.

As someone whose job at Microsoft is to drive greater openness and interoperability, this is a very exciting announcement for me. It builds on other inclusive actions we have taken recently, most recently joining the Apache Foundation. Even more exciting, Microsoft is joining the AMQP Working Group at the request of its members,, in order to help support the development of interoperable solutions across heterogeneous IT environments.

Microsoft’s goal in accepting this invitation is to contribute to the development of the specification and to enable our customers a greater selection in the marketplace.

With this invitation, I think we could be beginning to see a sea change in the attitude of the IT community towards Microsoft and a growing understanding of the potential value that Microsoft participation can have in projects like these. But this has not happened spontaneously. Rather, Microsoft’s moves towards openness and interoperability, as well as our increased efforts at participating within the community, had to occur first.

The evidence is stacking up of Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability and openness. Look for us to continue to find ways to bring value to these types of projects, in order to continue providing the most choice and value for our customers.

Posted in Uncategorized, Interoperability, Microsoft