IBM MQ is a family of message-oriented middleware products that IBM launched in December 1993. It was originally called MQSeries, and was renamed WebSphere MQ in 2002 to join the suite of WebSphere products. In April 2014, it was renamed IBM MQ. The products that are included in the MQ family are IBM MQ, IBM MQ Advanced, IBM MQ Appliance, IBM MQ for z/OS, and IBM MQ on IBM Cloud. MQ allows independent and potentially non-concurrent applications on a distributed system to securely communicate with each other, using messages. MQ is available on a large number of platforms (both IBM and non-IBM), including z/OS (mainframe), OS/400 (IBM System i or AS/400), Transaction Processing Facility, UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris), HP NonStop, OpenVMS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows.