IBM to strengthen CICS user group in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Having assessed the opportunities and advantages presented by service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, a majority of today's enterprises are now aggressively and decisively moving forward to implement flexible business processes to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

They are aiming to build business processes that are integrated across the company and with their partners, suppliers, and customers that enable them to build an ecosystem that can respond to any market opportunity or competitive threat.

IBM, which is committed to develop and support its premium Transaction Processing software products under the Customer Information Control Systems (CICS) portfolio, recently launched its CICS user community in India through CICS User Conferences.  Today, CICS is key in running large enterprise applications around the world.

The key business imperative for IBM CICS is to make SOA real for System z customers by providing them realizable value from application reuse. It does this by providing SOA with System z qualities of service, including high performance, reliability, security, and high value per transaction. Two of the major aspects of SOA are application reuse and connectivity. These are two areas, which CICS plays a key part in.

The CICS User Conferences held in India targeted CICS users and developers. Here, IBM showcased modern developments around the CICS products like the CICS Explorer, Web 2.0 support on CICS and the Business Events support, which created immense interest among a  large number of developers.

Speaking to CIOL, Dave Andrews, IBM Development Director for the CICS product family, said, “It's been very rewarding and good to launch the CICS User Group in India.” Andrews, who  heads CICS teams UK, US, Russia,  China and India, is responsible for the development support and service of CICS Transaction Server that runs on IBM Mainframes, TX series that runs on distributed platforms.

“In India, the team will work on the TX series of products. The development of CICS products is done in multiple centres and we are trying to have a world-wide presence in term s of development as well as help the customers,” he adds. 

“CICS is a transactional application server that enables execution of a complex and demanding  mixed-language application workload while efficiently integrating with SOA enterprise solutions,” he says.

Explaining how IBM's products have been making a difference to enterprise customers, Andrews said: “IBM has been surveying a lot of companies around to know what their challenges are. From a recent CIO study we have learnt that companies want to change. They know that they want to change and how do we bring about this change is the responsibility before us. We need to try and provide the ability to do this change.. So, we help them in in retaining the existing infrastructure, and with the help of CICS products enable them to bring about the change.”

Andrews says, through its CICS products, IBM is helping enterprises reuse the things that worked today and put the business logic that is there already in a way, which is quick and easy. This way, customers can build new solutions and reuse them in a very flexible and agile way.

On CICS in India, he says: “We have seen that there is a change happening in India. People have recognized outsourcing of applications. They have recognized our CICS-based applications. The structure of the local market is changing. As the local IT market grows, there will be a need for more systems. So, we wanted to establish a  community here, where IBM goes and contributes to.”

“We know the values of the community as seen in the US, the values they share with organizations. I want to build the same values here in India through this community. A lot of values of the user group and the best practices are shared. When there is a requirement that comes from a user group, it represents a very powerful voice thus marking the user's need. It is much more valuable for IBM to hear those kind of requirements rather than on individual products ans solutions,” he adds.

“This year out focus is around education and bringing the community together. It is surely going to be useful for the local Indian market when things mature,” Andrews feels.

“The level of understanding and realization is very high among the customers. This is the kind of response generated from the user groups.  Most people have heard about how to web service enable our products and learn a lot of things that will make their jobs lot more easier.” 

When it comes to the maturity and understanding of SOA and its benefits, people are actually understanding the value around SOA. Our business partners here know how to advice the customers on adopting SOA. 

More about CICS

CICS is extensively used in a large number of industries like banking, consumer products, financial markets, transportation, health care and life sciences, telecommunications, insurance etc. 

CICS ensures that enterprise policies such as request priority and security can be managed  with a single perspective. CICS configurations benefit from proven availability, security, and reliability,  and they can immediately scale to accommodate unpredictable peak workloads, while retaining a single  point of control for managing resource utilization throughout the enterprise.

CICS provides a complete systems management solution to enable management of resources  through a single point of control that is consistent throughout the enterprise.