"What is AMQP and should I be interested in it?"
Back in October, Microsoft released a press statement announcing that it was joining the "Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Working Group" (an organisation focused on the development of the AMQP specification) at the request of some of its members.
AMQP is a specification for platform-neutral, open standards-based business messaging. Such a specification would, of course, be very useful for a lot of customers - probably in a similar way to how the standardisation on TCP/IP has made networking so much easier. Currently, having to integrate between MSMQ and WebSphere MQ (just for two examples) can be painful for customers and an unnecessary cost too. It will be interesting to see what messaging standard comes out of the group and what it means for existing products on the market.
Bryan Che's blog is very positive about the addition of Microsoft. He goes on to say that "Microsoft is bringing AMQP support to Windows and its ecosystem" and has made a "decision to integrate AMQP into its platforms". This does sound very enthusasitic, maybe too much so, as I can't find any public statement from Microsoft that says anything beyond group membership. I suppose all we can do is "stay tuned".
Looking at the AMQP Working Group membership [[as of 30th November, 2009]] is quite revealing:
Financial sector
Bank of America
Barclays Bank
Credit Suisse
Deutsche Börse Systems
Goldman Sachs
JPMorgan Chase Bank & Co.
Enterprise Linux companies
Messaging companies
29West Inc. (Ultra Messaging, high-performance messaging for financial markets)
Envoy Technologies Inc. (Envoy MQ)
iMatix Corporation (OpenAMQ - first production implementation of the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP))
Microsoft Corporation (MSMQ)
Rabbit Technologies (Rabbit MQ)
Solace Systems (hardware-based messaging)
Tervela (hardware-based messaging)
Networking companies
Standards Group
Open source / integration
So no Tibco or IBM representation currently. Jeff Gould has an interesting series of articles titled "Can AMQP break IBM's MOM monopoly?" (MOM meaning "message oriented middleware") which you can read here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.