Dr Robin Paul, chairman of the Royal Academy of Engineering's MacRobert judging committee says awarding the prize to Websphere MQ has extended the idea of what engineering is about: "It is an undoubtedly brilliant innovation which has conquered the world."
He sees Websphere MQ as "the Tower of Babel in reverse" by allowing different systems to communicate. Another important element for the judges was reliability: "The other impressive thing is that every message is sent once and only once - you don't want a cheque for a million pounds getting cashed twice."
Mike Thompson, principal research analyst at the Butler Group says Websphere MQ does deserve this kind of respect, and is one of the most important developments in computing, along with the Internet, the PC and the relational database.
"The great thing about it is that it is asynchronous, which is the key. It will queue the messages until the other application becomes available - and with the queue comes guaranteed delivery. It's probably one of the top technologies of the computer age," says Thompson. "A large part of the banking system relies on MQ Series because it's a proven platform. When an application sends off a message it will be delivered."
Neil Ward-Dutton, director of technology practices at analyst Ovum says WebSphere MQ has been very influential -- especially in terms of how big organisations put together heavy-duty transactional systems.
"Without something like MQ you can send a request from one system to another, but the fundamental thing that is missing is reliability. [Without MQ] what happens is that if the network goes down the message is lost. What MQ does by using the idea of queuing is it provides a very resilient system for sending messages," he says. "One of the things that gives you is very high levels of predictability and scalability, so systems can react in a much more graceful way. All the really heavy duty transaction systems run it so it's really part of the furniture."
And IBM is still finding new uses for MQ technology, particularly in terms of pervasive computing, and collecting data from small devices such as temperature probes or radio frequency identity tags.
It is, for example, helping chemists at the University of Southampton remotely monitor experiments from smartphones. Sensors in the lab gather data on temperature, light levels and motion in the room and relay this to the MQ message broker, which makes the data available to anyone authorised to see it via the web or a smartphone using GPRS.
In the next phase it will be possible to use a Web page or on a smartphone to turn something on or off in the lab, explains IBM's manager of pervasive messaging technologies, Dr Andy Stanford-Clark. WebSphere MQ might have its own museum exhibit, it is clearly no museum piece yet.
