Synchronous and asynchronous messaging underlie the whole business of distributed computing.
Reliable asynchronous messaging as exemplified by products such as IBM WEBSPHERE MQ and Progress SonicMQ, have found wide adoption in Enterprises because they abstract the network chores of moving data to and from servers and are configurable to guarantee delivery and message ordering.
Mobile Messaging is a natural extension of enterprise asynchronous messaging middle-ware such as IBM MQ. Yet currently no bridge exists between the mobile phone and MQ.
Traditional internet email is asynchronous messaging, mail is carried from mail server to mail server, call and forward until it arrives at the recipient. Again internet mail to SMS and MMS is an obvious candidate for integration and indeed many carriers offer a service of sorts from your mobile phone if you place an email address instead of a mobile telephone number in the “to” field. However these services are highly variable in coverage and quality, and no standard approach has been adopted across the carriers.
MobileIS simultaneously bridges the gap between mobile phones and internet mail and mobile phones and IBM MQ Series.
MobileIS is a mobile enabled messaging HUB, pluggable to the enterprise through MQ, Web Services, SMTP, ODBC etc. and with a rule based AI Engine at it’s core.
In SOA terms MobileIS is an Integration server, a component of the Enterprise Service Bus handling protocol to protocol and message format to message format translation and routing. In this scenario the rules defined to MobileIS form part of wider service definitions controlled and exposed by the ESB. The ESB dynamically inserts rules into MobileIS over it’s HTTPS/JSON interface and is free to use either HTTP, SMTP or MQ as the carrier of the actual messages.