Thoughts On CICs and MQ following Impact 2008

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Thoughts On CICs and MQ following Impact 2008

Is CICS just a cashcow? That's the question I found myself asking at Impact 2008 last week. Is it really enough to service enable a CICS system,  or will a renaissance require the kind of skills drive that IBM is putting into other areas of the mainframe business? My concern is that some of the noises from IBM sounded like the bad old days of the 1990s when IBM often seemed content to see the mainframe profitably walk off into the sunrise. I used to argue with Linda Sanford at the time that IBM needed to look beyond MIPS growth and try to find net new customers for the box. Leverage existing workloads? I am most interested in net new workloads on Z - and I don't just mean Linux-based.

SOA helps customers to extend existing investments and IBM is investing in all the surrounding tooling to make this easier.

My problem with this argument as it relates to CICS is largely down to the fact that without skills growth a platform can only ever be a cash cow. The law of leaky abstractions is a major problem for service enablement. As Joel says:

“The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting.”

What happens if you want to change the underlying enterprise data model, for example? You can’t do that without changing the code. You can service-enable all you want, but SOA is as much about component and service isolation, enabling flexibility and portfolio maintainability, than service reuse. Martin Nally Rational CTO (As seen on RedMonkTV here) made a similar point in our unconference last week.

When I wrote a blog a while back called Mainframe = Youth, which gathered together a number of news stories that all talked to mainframe skills rejuvenation, it was clear that it was the skills revival, not the product, that was the story, as least as far as the wider market conversation was concerned. If SOA is veneerware it is far less valuable than the hype would suggest. But how do you get under the veneer?

Could CICS remerge as an information management platform, not just a transaction management system, or is that IMS role and never the twain shall meet? Either way I think net new skills will drive net new workloads. What about you?

update: now this is too funny. I forgot my colleague Cote had taken this picture:

James_cics_5

by James Governor April 18, 2008
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Comments

Actually I believe we are the cash cows but for more info see my blog called "Happy Cows" here: http://www.cicsworld.com/node/609

Thanks for also blogging about this.

Best Regards.
Corneel.

Posted by: Corneel | Apr 23, 2008 10:48:46 PM

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