During Impact 2008, it was mentioned that perhaps CICS had forgotten its roots as it pushed towards SOA enlightenment. It was easy to see where this came from since Impact is a very SOA-focussed conference and we just released a whole ton of web-services functionality on our customers.
Personally, I see SOA as another opportunity for customers to take advantage of their existing assets. Rather than a move away from what we do, I see it as an embracement of current technology and using that to grab more value from the time and effort that customers have already invested into CICS. One thing that CICS director (Dave Andrews) mentioned numerous times during the CICS Q&A was that we were looking at non-disruptive technologies as a way to do just this. Hence all the focus around SOA, Atom feeds, CICS WEB interfaces and such like. There is a reason we are seeing some of our fastest adoption rates for the new release.
As I said previously, I may just be biased and I’ve only been at this a little under 3 years but that would be my take on it. I wouldn’t assume that because we are doing SOA, that we aren’t working our butts off improving, innovating and building on the traditional aspects of CICS TS 3.2 as well.
Chris
