IBM’s UK laboratory at Hursley Park, just outside Winchester, which is responsible for the continuing development of the CICS transaction processing system, has been given additional responsibilities in the communications arena. It now takes charge of development of message-driven processing and transaction routing to improve end-user access to interconnected computer systems – IBM has in mind applications where almost any credit card could be used in almost any terminal for any kind of transaction. The lab also gets increased responsibility for work on IBM’s offerings in the Integrated Services Digital Network arena. And IBM has created a new European laboratory at its Program Development Centre in Rome, Italy, which will become its seventh in Europe and the first in Italy. The new lab gets increased responsibility for IBM’s very slowly-gestating plans to offer support for Open Systems Interconnection alongside its proprietary Systems Network Architecture. The new laboratory will also be responsible for network management applications development, where NetView is the company’s flagship product. IBM envisages creating several hundred new jobs in Italy as a result of the base’s elevation to laboratory status – but it is not ready to entrust running of the new lab to a local – it has drafted in Allen Millar, who was director of networking products in the Communications line of business in the US.
