lustratus LiteBytes

Once upon a time I was a developer on CICS, IBM’s ubiquitous mainframe transaction processing product.

CICS runs in just about every large business in the world, carrying out many of the corporate ‘bread-and-butter’ transactions, and is particularly notable for its long life of more than three decades. To many, CICS remains the gold standard of Enterprise infrastructure.

So imagine my surprise when I saw CICS on Youtube today! The clip provides a simple and crisp introduction to the power of events processing in a CICS environment, and is actually rather good, but I am still in shock that Youtube, which I usually use for watching Eric Clapton or any of the three Kings (Albert, Freddie and BB) playing storming blues, is featuring CICS! Is this what they mean by Enterprise 2.0 I wonder? The old world colliding with the new? Is the next step to see CICS programmers throwing themselves from 5th story windows into drifts of snow?

I guess this is the mark of a truly successful software tool – something that constantly evolves to meet the shifting and developing needs and expectations of its customers. Good for you, CICS!

One final observation – there was also a small victory in the Youtube clip for any old hands. The voice-over is by an American lady, but she still refers to CICS as ‘kicks’. This is the way CICS has been known in the UK for years, but in the US it was always spoken as the four letters - C.I.C.S. Perhaps CICS has become the subject of a new international standard!

Steve