 ::The article fails to point out (and this has been pointed out in many publications which I will dig up when I have the time) that CICS is essentially an aging 1960s character and screen-oriented technology.  I've heard several horror stories of how people have to use screen scrapers and the like to make legacy CICS installations cooperate with modern Web-based interfaces.  Nowadays no sane programmer would design a new large-scale app on CICS when there are so many nice new technologies available like Java, .NET, SOAP, XML, HTML, etc.  The only reason CICS still lives is because, like COBOL, there is so much legacy code written for it.   