Microsoft steps to UC interoperability

Friday, Microsoft announced it signed up with the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group, an organization focusing on the development on an open industry standard for ubiquitous messaging. In other words, a standard so apps can talk to each other.

Microsoft says it is signing up at the behest of existing AMQP members, including several of its customers in the financial services industry; figure Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and/or J.P. Morgan "requested" that Microsoft sign up. Cisco, Novell and Red Hat also are among the AMQP members.

Since AMPQ is a spec for platform-neutral, open standards-based business messaging, this would presumably mean that, down the road, Microsoft unified communications apps would be able to communicate with Cisco, Red Hat and Novell UC apps. Customers would be able to mix and match applications to improve business process communication both within an enterprise and outside the corporate infrastructure.

AMQP may provide greater interoperability for a number of vertical "scenarios," in addition to obvious ones for financial services, insurance and health care.

For more:
- Microsoft's press release [1] on joining the AMQP working group.