Queuing in the cloud?

A post on the eai-select newsgroup mentioned OnlineMQ as an alternative to Amazon SQS. As stated in earlier posts, I think there is room and there are opportunities for cloud based integration solutions. A hosted queuing solution is a first step.

Therefore, I looked a bit around at the OnlineMQ website. I created a free ("Silver") account and played a bit around. The service will officially launch in September. The paid subscription ("Gold") is 60$/connection, no mention is made about maximum number or volume of messages.

Maximum message size is 256 KB, which is reasonable. Interesting feature is the option to configure a number of fixed IP addresses that are allowed to reach the server. It is typical in B2B solutions to work with fixed IP addresses and add extra security by only allowing access from the fixed IP addresses of your business partners. Which obviously requires everyone to have fixed IP addresses.

OpenMQ talks about JMS but doesn't seem to support the JMS API (yet). However, OpenMQ does support REST, POX (Plain Old XML) and SOAP interfaces. For the SOAP interface, it uses the (non WS-I compliant) rpc/encoding. And security is not based on WS-Security.

It would be interesting to know more about the company or individuals behind this initiative. Even more as the company seems to be located nearby in the Netherlands. The online agreement refers to UK law being applicable, so that points to a British initiative. From a reverse DNS lookup, I learn that the IP address is owned by Level3. So the servers are located at a Level3 facility.