CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted

September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.

Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – often in the banking, insurance, and other financial services sectors – made the jump and helped make the Power Systems business profitable.

But that was two and a half decades ago, and apparently IBM is no longer interested in supporting the middleware that might offload applications from its mainframes.

Therefore, in announcement letter AD24-0665, which was dated August 27, we find that CICS Transaction Server for i, which is product number 5770-DFH and which is now included in a base IBM i license, is only going to be fully supported – meaning support for new defects – until October 1, 2025. After that, Big Blue will provide support under IBM i Software Maintenance or through software subscriptions, as the case may be if you are in a P20 or P30 tier that doesn’t yet have a requirement to move to subscriptions or a P05 or P10 tier that does.

IBM says the following about this CICS situation: “There is no direct replacement for IBM CICS Transaction Server for i (“CICS”). Customers can continue to use CICS as is. Migration options include using IBM i native options such as CL commands, Rest API, or other custom applications. There are companies which offer services for migrating customers from CICS to IBM i native options. For example, HiComp can provide these services. HiComp is not the only company that offers such migration services.”

We tried to follow the link to HiComp and it failed, and we can’t find a company by that name that has anything to do with CICS. Perhaps one is being formed by ex-IBMers as we speak? We did see some historical references to a company called HICOMP Software Systems GmbH based in Hamburg, Germany. There is another HiComp based in Asia that makes microfluidics machines, but that is not it. Micro Focus, which is now part of OpenText, used to sell ACUCOBOL-GT, a CICS-like transaction monitor, and IBM is probably not mentioning that because back in 2022 IBM claimed that Micro Focus misappropriated CICS code for its tools. On July 8 of this year, Rocket Software, which bought a bunch of tools from OpenText including the Micro Focus tools in question, settled the Micro Focus lawsuit with Big Blue and agreed to modify the relevant CICS tools. Which should mean the announcement letter should have at least mentioned Rocket Software as a potential provider of a replacement for CICS.

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