We recently announced an exciting enhancement to MQ Advanced for z/OS.

Customers with entitlement to MQ Advanced for z/OS on 9.3 and 9.2 LTS will gain entitlement to the Connector Pack component for no additional cost. The Connector Pack was previously only available to customers with MQ Advanced for z/OS VUE entitlement. 

The Connector Pack at 9.2 and 9.3 contains the following:

• The Aspera fasp Gateway: This provides better performance than standard TCP/IP for transferring data between queue managers over lossy/high latency networks. The gateway is shipped as part of the Connector Pack installation on USS.
• Entitlement to the IBM provided and supported IBM MQ / Kafka connectors. These provide a simple way of moving data between MQ and Kafka. They aren’t shipped as part of the Connector Pack until 9.3.3, but they can be downloaded at 9.2 and 9.3 LTS and will be supported as described in the notes on this page.

The Kafka connectors in particular are very much a hot topic at the moment, so if you are interested in using them and you already have MQ Advanced for z/OS entitlement, today is your lucky day!