"The number of connectors we already have is huge," she said. "We think AMQP is less about how to get interoperability among unlike protocols, than a proposal to simply invent a whole new messaging infrastructure." Two-thirds of North American and European banks use WebSphere MQ, according to IBM, with one bank moving between US$7 trillion to $35 trillion daily by sending nearly 700 million messages via a WebSphere MQ SWIFT gateway.

"It's easy to build something that provides a simple level of messaging," Norsworthy said. "From our experience, creating a messaging infrastructure with the highest requirements for scalability and reliability is a nontrivial effort."

Other members of the AMQP consortium include messaging and Web services software providers such as Envoy Technologies Inc., iMatix Corp., 29West Inc., Iona Technologies Inc. -- which actually has its own proprietary version of JMS -- and TWIST Process Innovations, a nonprofit group that manages and lobbies for technology standards used in the financial industry.