IBM gives a kick to CICS

To modernize its venerable line of mainframe-based CICS middleware, IBM last week introduced an updated version of its CICS Transaction Server that enables IT to extend the product to work better with SOAs (service-oriented architectures) through Web services. With the release of CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Version 3.1, administrators can now integrate their traditional workloads to fully participate in an SOA.

“Many of our users have their apps written in Cobol, but now those apps can play a bigger part in a Web services story going forward,” said Phillip Hanson, a CICS manager at IBM.

Another important addition to the release is its compliance with the WS-Security and WS-Atomic Transaction Web services standards. IBM has also added support to the release that allows it to take advantage of the company’s workload management and balancing technologies. Some observers see the added support for Web services and SOAs as an evolution for CICS because the latter technology is often at the center of most enterprise IT shops’ core operations.

“[CICS] is an important touch point for an awful lot of business processes,” said Susan Eustis, president of Wintergreen Research. “To bring Web services and SOA architectures into the mainframe is tantamount to interconnecting distributed servers with mainframes.”

The new version also features improved CICS data-exchange capabilities along with the capability of exploiting IBM’s own WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer.