Now armed with its ‘any client-to-any server’ CICS philosophy, IBM Corp will take its transaction processing strategy forward on the Unix side of the house by gradually converging CICS for AIX with its 1994 Transarc Corp Encina transaction processing acquisition – though not with any great haste, it adds. In its estimation, the two products serve useful and quite distinct roles. CICS for AIX is sold as the predominant transaction processing environment for mainframe users embracing client-server and Unix worlds. The more lightweight – and less robust – Encina is the more usual choice for folk usually already steeped in Unix. As a low-level technical Unix device, the Encina monitor is fine for developers writing transactional C applications, IBM says. Although CICS for AIX and Encina both use Transarc’s Encina toolkit and structured file server, there are some important distinctions between the two in other areas, CICS for AIX of course implementing much of the heritage of tried and tested mainframe CICS. Although it will not admit it in as many words, IBM will also have CICS up under SunSoft Inc’s Solaris in the not too distant future (it already counts a Solaris client). UnixWare is only a dim possibility at this stage of the game and an evaluation team has already written off the prospect of a version for NetWare. Already set for later on in the year is a combined CICS for AIX/Encina/Distributed Computing Environment release supporting multithreaded AIX 4.1. Indeed every software technology that makes use of the re-worked AIX 4.1 kernel has be re-written, the company says. IBM’s CICS for Windows NT implementation – a re-worked CICS for OS/2 – is a six beta sites.
