MIDDLEWARE Messaging Middleware: MQSeries W e honored IBM Corp.'s MQSeries with a Well-Connected award for best middleware product last year because it stood out as an exceptional product defining a category. This year, we broke out Messaging Middleware into its own award, and while the competition was tough, once again we've selected MQSeries to receive the top honor. MQSeries continues to deliver the goods by offering a highly reliable asynchronous communications layer. Using disk-based queues, MQSeries favors assured end-to-end delivery over top performance, letting it play directly into the strengths of middleware. Essential to the adoption of messaging across the enterprise, MQSeries is unmatched i n its support of the largest number of platforms, from mainframe to desktop. The combination lets MQSeries do the best job of adapting to mixed networked environments, while shielding networking complexities from the developer. Direct support of MQSeries by IBM's CICS Transaction Processing Monitor system makes the product even more compelling. New Era of Networks' NEONet 3.0 and PeerLogic's PIPES Platform deserve honorable mentions for adding innovative operations on the low-level messaging layer, easing application development for complex interactions. NEONet combines a sophisticated rules engine for message routing, while PIPES incorporates dynamic name services for enhanced fault tolerance. MQSeries , $1,595 to $4,995 (most Unix platforms and Windows NT), IBM Corp., (800) IBM-CALL, www.hursley.ibm.com/mqseries Honorable Mentions: NEONet Release 3.0 , $75,000 to $430,000, New Era of Netwo rks (NEON), (800) 815-NEON, www.neonsoft.com PIPES Platform , starts at $1,250 (developer's kit), PeerLogic, (800) PEER 601, www.peerlogic.com Awards Table of Contents

Updated April 24, 1997