IBM System z software announcements : CICS

I told you lots of announcements were made on October 3, so here's some more. There were also announcements around DB2, IMS and CICS. So let me start out with the CICS announcements.

First of all there's the announcement of CICS Transaction Server V5.1 (ZP12-0422). CICS V5.1 is mainly focusing on two areas : driving operational efficiencies, while increasing service agility.

Driving Operational Effeciencies focuses on four areas :

• Greater capacity is delivered through significant vertical and horizontal scalability enhancements.
• Managed operations are provided through the introduction of policies, which deliver automated control over critical system resources
• Increased availability enhancements reduce the need for planned outages
• Deeper insight into performance and compliance information can help to tune and audit system usage

Increasing service agility also focuses on four key areas :

• First-class applications enable the creation of agile services from existing assets
• First-class platforms enable the creation of agile service delivery runtimes
• Modern interfaces enable customers to build rich web experiences for critical applications
• Foundational enhancements extend the core CICS capabilities in a number of areas

Planned availability is December 14, 2012.

There will also be a CICS TS Developer Trial V5.1 and that one will be available from January 11, 2013. As you know the Developer Trial version was first introduced with CICS TS 4.2. That trial version can still be ordered until January 8, 2013.

There were a couple of other CICS related announcements :

• IBM CICS Transaction Gateway V9.0 (ZP12-0420)
• IBM CICS Tools for z/OS V5.1 (ZP12-0478) : these include CICS Interdependency Analyzer for z/OS, CICS Deployment Assistant for z/OS, CICS Configuration Manager for z/OS, CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS, CICS VSAM Recovery for z/OS and a plug-in for CICS VSAM Transparency for z/OS.

If you want to have more details on these announcements, links to webpages, datasheets and so on, then do have a look at the new CICS Portfolio eNewsLetter which you can find over here. Again, they did a great job at gathering all the relevant information around these new announcements.