The let a hundred flowers bloom policy at the new IBM Corp is this week expected to see the company acknowledging the existence of Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT in a very visible manner by announcing a version of its CICS transaction processing software for the arch-rival to OS/2. IBM told US PC Week that CICS will be put up under NT as part of IBM’s plan to downsize the transaction-processing environment used by large companies to build mission-critical applications. IBM has already said that it will offer NT as an option on its PS/2 super server. We’ve been on track to make CICS available on every platform critical to our customers – and NT is critical to our customers, Pat Sueltz, director of transaction systems at IBM’s Hursley Laboratories near Winchester, UK. CICS for Windows NT will be functionally equivalent to the client-server version for OS/2, which is planned to ship in September. Both NT and OS/2 servers will initially support MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2 clients, with Macintosh client support to be added to both later, the company said.
