IBM Introduces New Web Services Technology for CICS, Extends SOA Capabilities

New CICS products enable customers to more easily integrate business processes and transform their existing applications

IBM today announced the release of CICS Transaction Server for z/OS V3.1 which provides an enhanced Web Services solution. Also announced is CICS Transaction Gateway V6, which provides a J2EE standards-based connectivity solution. Following on the heels of the 35th anniversary of CICS earlier this year, this announcement enables businesses to fully exploit the agility of an on demand operating environment. These latest products allow customers to extract more value from existing IT investments, while addressing and improving the flexibility and responsiveness via Service Oriented Architectures.

Traditional workloads are now able to participate in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) through CICS Transaction Server V3. This lays the groundwork for customers to address specific business problems, such as extending current CICS applications to new business opportunities. This new version of CICS Transaction Server provides businesses the ability to re-energize and transform existing applications, reducing the cost, risk and time to market of new applications that satisfy on demand business requirements.

“The latest version of CICS Transaction Server continues the path of IBM’s investment in the mainframe infrastructure and joins with the latest versions of Websphere, DB2 and IMS, enabling companies to deploy Web Services and participate in SOA. This standards-based support allows businesses to work faster and more effectively with customers, partners and suppliers,” said Dibbe Edwards, Director of CICS Products at IBM. “With this combination of IBM products, customers now have the right middleware that enables them to build on the qualities of service and reliability they have trusted for many years.”

CICS Transaction Server for z/OS V3.1 delivers the following capabilities:

• Increased ease of integration: Web Services capabilities which extend CICS applications to a Services Oriented Architecture and support for the industry-leading SSL security protocol
• Enhanced application transformation: optimized CICS data exchange capabilities and the ability to leverage a single development tool (WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer) for application transformation and integration.
• Improved performance and system management: simplified administration through the extension of the CICSPlex System Manager Web User Interface, improved workload throughput, and enhanced C/C++ programs performance

IBM CICS Transaction Gateway has been proven over many years to provide high performing, secure and scalable access to CICS, requiring minimal changes to existing CICS applications. It enables you to use your CICS applications in J2EE and Web Services solutions hosted on powerful application servers, such as IBM WebSphere® Application Server.

CICS Transaction Gateway V6.0 provides the following capabilities:

• Enhanced performance and scalability: Performance optimization to reduce CPU overhead and vastly improved scalability and availability on z/OS
• Improved systems management and security: More functional and integrated administration interfaces and enhanced SSL support and z/OS security integration

Tightly coupled, standards based solutions such as the Java Connector Architecture (JCA), and loosely coupled Web services solutions coexist to fully exploit the agility of an on demand operating environment.

The latest versions of CICS Transaction Server and the CICS Transaction Gateway allow customers to take advantage of a complimentary set of technologies that enable complete integration of CICS applications.

Additionally, IBM provides a complete end-to-end solution by providing a portfolio of IBM zSeries tools. The portfolio allows successful handling of the discovery, development and deployment cycle(s) in a mixed workload run-time environment such as CICS. CICS provides a runtime for applications written in COBOL, PLI/I, Assembler, C, C++ and Java, thus delivering a language-neutral approach.

As an addition to this portfolio of products, IBM also announced today CICS Batch Application Control for z/OS V1.1, allowing easier management of batch processes that must co-exist and share resources with one or more CICS online transaction systems. It simplifies tasks of operators and system programmers, reducing the time required for batch processing and moving CICS applications closer to a 24×7 operation.

As part of the ongoing commitment to providing the most comprehensive offering of application development tools, IBM plans to announce new updates in the first half of 2005 that will simplify the process of converting CICS business logic into reusable components that can share throughout the entire enterprise.

CICS Transaction Server for z/OS V3.1 will be available in the US and Canada in the first quarter of 2005. Pricing is machine-size dependent. CICS Transaction Gateway for z/OS V6.0 and CICS Transaction Gateway for Multiplatforms V6 will be available in the US and Canada in December 2005. Pricing is per processor or unit-based on z/OS

IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with more then 90 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key business partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, financing, solutions and technologies that enable customers to take full advantage of the on demand era.