Messaging: The Hidden Force Driving Modern Integration

When it comes to enterprise integration, messaging plays a critical role.

In fact, the global message-oriented middleware market was worth around $8.2 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $14.5 billion by 2032—reinforcing the demand for robust, scalable communication backbones (DataIntelo).

At some point in almost every integration project, applications need to communicate, but that doesn’t always mean connecting them directly. That’s where messaging comes in. 

By decoupling systems, one application can publish an event or message, and another can consume it when ready. This flexibility helps teams build solutions that are more reliable, scalable, and adaptable whether they’re deployed in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment.

This approach, often called message-oriented middleware (MOM), is a cornerstone of modern integration.

Learn more with this overview from IBM.

Why messaging is valuable

There are two basic patterns:

• Point-to-point (queue) – one consumer processes a message
• Publish-subscribe (topic) – multiple consumers can react to the same event

These patterns help you:

• Build event-driven architectures (EDA)
• Modernize legacy systems by wrapping them with event APIs
• Handle IoT and streaming use cases where scale and low latency matter

Messaging is also important for DADA (Develop Anywhere, Deploy Anywhere). The idea behind DADA is that you build your integrations once and then deploy them where they make the most sense, such as cloud, on-prem, or hybrid. Messaging makes this possible because it gives you a consistent backbone for communication, no matter where the apps are running.

Reminder: DADA is IBM’s strategy that lets you design and build integrations once, then deploy them where they make the most sense: cloud, on-prem, or hybrid. It’s about flexibility and portability, ensuring your solutions adapt as your environment evolves.

Take Virgin Australia, for example. In early 2023, they transformed its SME Loyalty Program by shifting to a Kafka-powered event architecture. By streaming order, booking, and reward events across its booking engine, CRM, and rewards platform, the airline keeps every system in sync—no manual transfers or rigid integrations required. The result? Seamless, real-time loyalty experiences powered by daily event traffic.

Why it works:

• Decoupling: Each system (booking, CRM, rewards) subscribes to events independently, without needing direct point-to-point connections
• Scalability: Kafka handles thousands of events per day with predictable latency, letting Virgin grow the system without rearchitecting integrations
• Real-time consistency: Customer data (bookings, rewards, account balances) remains synced across platforms with near-immediate propagation

Messaging providers in webMethods Integration

In IBM webMethods Integration, there are two main categories of messaging providers you can use:

Internal messaging provider: IBM’s internal messaging provider is built into Flow Services and Workflows. Queues and topics are managed in the Events tab, while messages are published through the Messaging connector and consumed by subscribers defined in Events → Messaging.

External messaging providers: External messaging providers are connected through the JMS connector and include options like self-hosted webMethods Universal Messaging or IBM MQ. While Universal Messaging can be hosted in the IBM webMethods Cloud Container, it’s no longer widely recommended—making IBM MQ or self-hosted Universal Messaging the better choices for enterprise use. webMethods Integration also provides out-of-the-box connectors to a variety of external providers based on your architecture needs.

Connectors you can use out of the box

webMethods Integration includes a strong set of connectors specifically for messaging providers, supporting both open standards and proprietary platforms. The key ones include:

• AMQP – open standard protocol
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub – cloud-native pub/sub
• JMS – for connecting to external JMS providers like Universal Messaging or IBM MQ
• Kafka – support for both Apache Kafka and Confluent Kafka
• IBM MQ – for enterprises with existing MQ infrastructures
• Messaging (internal) – IBM’s built-in messaging provider
• MQTT – ideal for IoT messaging scenarios
• PubNub – for real-time streaming use cases

Together, these options cover most enterprise messaging requirements across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid architectures. Beyond messaging, webMethods Integration also provides access to over 600 prebuilt connectors for applications, databases, APIs, and SaaS platforms, allowing you to connect any system as part of your integration solution.

Key takeaways

For simple use cases, start with internal messaging, but for hybrid integration or enterprise-scale projects, self-hosted Universal Messaging or IBM MQ are the better choice. Modern workloads can benefit from out-of-the-box connectors like Kafka, MQTT, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub, all working together as the glue that enables DADA architectures in practice. 

For more details, see the full IBM messaging documentation.

Get started with messaging today

Ready to see how messaging can transform your integration architecture? Connect with a CoEnterprise webMethods expert today to design a messaging backbone that scales with your business.