IBM WebSphere MQ is a family of network communication software products launched by IBM in March 1992. It was previously known as MQSeries, a trademark that IBM rebranded in 2002 to join the suite of WebSphere products. WebSphere MQ, which is often referred to simply as "MQ" by users, is IBM's Message Oriented Middleware offering. It allows independent and potentially non-concurrent applications on a distributed system to communicate with each other. MQ is available on a large number of platforms, including z/OS, OS/400, Transaction Processing Facility, UNIX, HP NonStop, OpenVMS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows.