27 April, 1998 Group Proposes ISP Standard For 'Business Quality Messaging'
By Arik Hesseldahl

THE BUSINESS Quality Messaging Forum last month announced the first phase of its plan to work with ISPs in order to provide more reliable delivery of data over the Internet.

The new set of specifications, dubbed BSP (Business Quality Messaging Service Provider), outlines the steps that ISPs must take in order to comply with BQM's messaging standards. Founded by Intel, IBM, and Microsoft, the group includes more than 100 companies.

BQM co-chairman Mark B. Smith, Business manager of middleware for Intel's Enterprise Server Group, said that under BQM's definitions, messages are sent once and only once, that messages exist in only one place on the network, and that the messages cannot be changed while in transit.

ISPs must meet several criteria in order to be BQM certified, such as holding undelivered messages in a queue for 96 hours.

Currently, businesses often use leased lines for such transactions, a practice Smith said is expensive and can take several months to set up. But business trading relationships may last only months, Smith noted, making the "anywhere, anytime" nature of the Internet a natural for establishing reliable messaging guidelines.

While it does not propose to set technical standards, BQM seeks to craft industrywide agreements on how message queuing technology should be implemented and what end users can expect when buying message queuing products.

Smith said the group will test a prototype of a BQM commercial network in June.