The US investment bank is teaming with Cisco Systems, Envoy Technologies, iMatix Corporation, Iona Technologies, Red Hat, 29West and corporate treasury body Twist to create the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) Working Group.

The formation of the Working Group follows a multi-year development effort at JPMorgan Chase aimed at creating an alternative to expensive proprietary messaging middleware such as IBM's MQSeries. By releasing the AMQ Protocol, the firm hopes to build momentum within the open source community and develop the technology to a level where it could be promoted as a stable, industry-wide standard that is capable of integrating across various platforms, languages and protocols.

The Working Group expects that it will take a further 18 months of development effort before the wire level protocol has realised its full potential and is ready for submission as a true industry-standard application.

John O'Hara, vice president and distinguished engineer at JPMorgan anticipates that AMQP will ultimately lead to the emergence of a standards-driven market in enterprise middleware.

"AMQP solves the 'missing middleware standard' problem," he states. "By deploying AMQP-based solutions we will realise operational efficiencies, enable scalable and reliable Service Oriented Architectures and have access to an open transport for other important business protocols such as FpML. JPMorgan is committed to AMQP in the same way we are committed to FpML and related market-enabling technologies."

The AMQP specification is designed to interoperate with many of the current messaging and Web services specifications, including JMS, SOAP, WS-Security, WS-Transactions, and many others, he adds, making AMQP an ideal messaging layer for use in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).