StormMQ joins banking giants for software project

StormMQ will join JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Bank of America on the working group to look at setting an international standard related to message queuing.

The Skipton firm, whose software has been used to support Barack Obama’s drive for electrification in the US, also joins Credit Suisse, Microsoft and Cisco on the group, set up by international governing AMQP, which stands for Advance Message Queuing Protocol.

Peter Bowerman, sales and marketing director of StormMQ, said: “I think it shows tremendous endeavour that we are up there with huge global players.”

StormMQ spent two years developing its message-queuing software and was incorporated as a business in March last year. Message Queuing, also known as ‘middleware’, is a type of software that sits between different computer systems and allows the passing of data between them.

It provides a place – a separate computer server – that allows data or the ‘message’ to be stored until the other computer system is ready to receive it. This is necessary when businesses need to exchange large amounts of data constantly with the guarantee it arrives where it should, even if a server is not ready to receive it, so data will be ‘queued’.

Several investment banks use the technology as trading needs to combine data from several sources, such as risk management, market price feeds, more or less instantly, Mr Bowerman said.

The high cost meant JP Morgan decided to build their own message queue system. When it worked well they and other investment banks published the specification under the AMQP name and allow other software companies to build their own version, in the hope that more people will develop the skills and the cost will come down. Mr Bowerman said he hopes StormMQ will grow globally on the back of its involvement in the working group, which will release its first version of the software in the summer.

“It could be a massive stepping stone. We are on the radar of the leading global analysts, like Gartner Group, and we are having conversations with some firms in the US.”

StormMQ’s software has also been used by Smith Electric Vehicles US Corporation, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electric vehicles, to gather information from its fleet of vehicles to demonstrate the effectiveness of its new fleet of all-electric, zero emissions commercial trucks.

Smith US has received a $32m grant from the US Department of Energy for its electric vehicle demonstration programme and was singled out for praise by President Obama last year.