CICS still going strong at 40

Hidden protocol forms the basis of everyday life

The first man landed on the moon in 1969, but less celebrated that year was the birth of the customer information control system (CICS), a protocol which now carries up to 30 billion electronic transactions per day according to its developers, IBM.

Those transactions today can involve anything from taking cash out of an ATM, buying a train ticket, booking a holiday, accessing medical records, or viewing telephone usage information. Specifically, CICS provides the communication functions between the terminals and systems used in those transactions, controlling the programs serving online users, accessing databases and files, and providing recovery processing and data protection if problems occur.

Originally, CICS was designed for public utility companies in the US as a standardised central repository for customer billing and usage details that they could all access and update.

“Folklore has it that an IBM executive sat next to a US airlines executive on a flight one day and commented on the number of empty seats,” says Nick Garrod, worldwide CICS transaction server market manager. “One said to the other, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had something to let us know immediately how many seats had been sold?’, and things took off from there.”

What specifically came out of that discussion in 1969 was a software product that IBM sold separately and charged a monthly fee for – an innovation in a world when software was still anchored to the hardware on which it ran, says John Knutson, IBM CICS Tools marketing manager.

Most of the 9,000 CICS licences in use today are still running on IBM mainframe computers, although versions are available for Windows operating systems, AIX and Linux, among others. The software is still sold for a monthly licence fee, though that fee varies according to usage or the size of the computer on which it runs.

The interface and CICS's ability to integrate with other Java-based web applications and services have changed, with the old green screen and macros in a command-driven interface long gone, now replaced with a prettier Java-based front end.

“Charging customers a monthly licence fee enables us to continue to develop CICS, moving beyond Java and web services to functions such as the distributed two-phase commit protocol [2PC – an algorithm that co-ordinates the processes in an atomic transaction, whereby databases respond to queries with a correctly automated response],” says Garrod.

The latest version, CICS transaction server 4.1, introduced Web 2.0 features such as Atom feeds, dashboards and mash-ups as well as a new CICS Explore interface, built on the open-source Eclipse framework, which provides developers and testers with a single point of control to monitor workflows.

Knutson says CICS has a history of inventing processes that have since become generic in the online transactions community which spans 20 years, and assimilated other technologies which IBM thinks will be very important for the future. These include the ability to generate business events from within a CICS event, taking the burden off programmers who would normally have to write additional code into their applications to achieve the same result, and delivering a simplified form of business intelligence to the end user organisation.

"Imagine a bank that sees a credit card password change, for example, then a couple of high-value withdrawals in the following period," said Knutson. "CICS can now path and match those events [to a pre-defined pattern], say 'this needs investigation' and turn that into some sort of action such as firing it off into a dashboard [application]."

Users may continue to grumble about paying a licence fee for the product. But as long as IBM continues to harden and upgrade CICS to deal with the continually evolving world of online transactions, the software is likely to remain a mainstay of web application development.