CASE STUDY: Choosing a messaging system for our client’s Middleware requirements

Our client, a leading investment bank in the UK, was constrained by the frequent incidents, high hardware costs, and inflexibility of their business-critical middleware system. Their current JMS messaging system was not cloud-ready or strategic for the bank and they needed to migrate their Middleware messaging system to a new distributed, hybrid integration platform.

The requirements for their new messaging platform included:

• Low latency messaging capability
• Support for both on-prem and public Cloud
• Fully scalable
• Fault-tolerant

The bank engaged Sandhata to do technical research and analysis, and perform a Proof-of-Concept to evaluate each potential new messaging system. Sandhata’s team of highly experienced integration specialists conducted a comprehensive tool evaluation and delivered a recommendation to the client.

Systems chosen for analysis and Proof-of-Concept were Kafka, RabbitMQ, Tibco EMS, and TIBCO FTL.

The large amount of choice available on the market today and the mature messaging features available make messaging tools a very competitive area. There are new vendors joining the market with new capabilities, processing efficiencies, and greater speed – this means that it can be hard to determine the best solution for your needs.

Selecting the best messaging tool will depend strongly on the client’s current architecture, existing messaging products, their performance requirements, and their strategic goals.

See below for the tool evaluation details including criteria and our rating for each area. In this case, we recommended RabbitMQ as the best messaging system for our client’s specific needs.

• RabbitMQ would enable a quick migration as there would be minimal impact on the existing code – no major rewrites required
• RabbitMQ provides more features than their current messaging system for example flexible routing, message models, message filters, message priorities, message time-to-live (TTL) and fault-handling capabilities.
• RabbitMQ is cloud-ready
• Flexible routing available in RabbitMQ has the potential to reduce complexities in their application code
• RabbitMQ has a lower TCO than their current messaging system

All four messaging tools support the following:

1. One-to-one communication
2. Synchronous and Asynchronous messaging
3. Fault Tolerance and Load Balancer

Our Sandhata team have driven this project from start to finish. We bring our expert knowledge and innovative ideas gained from many client experiences to ensure that our clients achieve the best solution appropriate to their goals.