Introducing CICS TS V5.6— a Release for Developers By Nick Garrod T echnological innovation is occurring all the time, be that in the health industry, communications, automotive or IT—just look at the change in the past 100 years. IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) has only been around for 50 of those 100 years, but continuous innovation has created success and the longevity of CICS. Enterprises are challenged to react in an agile manner to marketplace and technology changes and need to have the tools to take advantage of market opportunities as they present themselves. This is an area in which CICS excels and has demonstrated that excellence with capability such as web services, Event/ alert processing, Java support and more recently, supporting multicloud landscapes. In the early 2000s CICS became synonymous with putting the “S” in SOA. Now CICS is providing a platform to make those services available over a variety of mixed languages (COBOL, Java, Node.js and more) in a variety of cloud configurations like hybrid, public, private, to offer the best possible value for clients, consumers and partners. CICS Transaction Server has recently announced their latest and greatest release, 4 | Enterprise Executive | 2020: Issue 3 version 5.6. The theme for this release is very much around empowering developers, a role which in today’s digital transformation revolution has become integral for businesses to compete in the marketplace. Enterprises are looking to modernize their applications but keep a lid on the costs, and empowering developers to innovate, provide and create new solutions, to improve processes has proven to be a core part of this strategy. CICS TS V5.6 provides Spring Boot, Maven and Gradle support, giving developers more choice on their build tooling than ever before. But to all those traditionalists, panic not! We have not forgotten the core of CICS, and we still provide capability to improve its foundation. With well over 500 “Request For Enhancements” (RFEs) satisfied in version 5, the foundation of CICS is core to the platform, with focus on resilience in this release, primarily in the areas of security and policies. Foundation Foundation always attracts the lion’s share of RFEs; this release continues that trend, and can broadly be grouped into the areas of system resilience, security and broadening the scope of the number of policies available. In the area of system resilience there