The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol has been developed since 2003 and, by way of exception, does not originate from a dedicated tech company, but was first conceived by JPMorgan Chase, a US bank. There, they decided to continue designing the project together with others. However, in addition to IT companies such as Cisco, it was the financial sector that continued to be primarily interested in AMQP. Why is that? Because, there more than anywhere, time is money! The transmission of information plays a major role at a bank, a credit card company or an exchange. Several hundred thousand messages are exchanged per second there. If news arrives too late or not at all, it can be expensive.
Since no commercial product was able to cope satisfactorily with the requirements at that time, project manager John O'Hara chose to conceive his own, separate protocol. O'Hara’s focus was on open standards such as TCP/IP and he decided to also make AMQP freely available, in order to advance the development of the protocol. Meanwhile, the OASIS working group, a non-profit organization, was working to develop the protocol.
AMQP single-handedly solves several problems: the protocol (in cooperation with a messaging broker) ensures a robust data transfer, while also allowing messages to be stored in a queue. This in turn enables an asynchronous communication: sender and receiver do not have to work around each other. The recipient (consumer) of the message does not need to directly accept the information, process it, and confirm receipt to the sender (producer). Instead, they collect the message from the queue when they have capacity available. Meanwhile, this gives the producer the opportunity to continue working - so there is no idle time.
The success of the relatively recent protocol also has to do with interoperability. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol establishes a common basis of its own. This even allows the different applications to be written in different programming languages. In this way, even programs in different organizations can easily communicate with each other. And as AMQP is freely available, any company can use the protocol at no extra cost.