 The Cube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillan. Paul Gillan, back we're live at IBM Impact with The Cube, SiliconANGLE's main platform. We're here interviewing IBMers, customers, analysts, all kinds of people about what's real and what's fictional about the cloud and mobile and big data and all the hot topics that are being talked about here. And I have a delighted today right now to speak to Matthew Webster as a senior software engineer at IBM. And this was a trip back in time for me because I started in this industry, in the technology media industry back in 1982 when it was all about IBM 360 and CICS was God. And it was what ran the biggest, the biggest mainframe installations in the world. And so when I saw CICS turn up on the agenda for The Cube today, I thought this is a great way to get back to a technology that people really don't talk about anymore. I haven't heard CICS mentioned in years, but it's very relevant in the age of the cloud. And your group is finding the new role for CICS in the private cloud environment. So why don't you tell us what that is? Absolutely. So we're celebrating 50 years of the mainframe this year and CICS has been around about the same sort of time, 45 years. But what's meant that CICS has still been relevant, we call it CICS in the UK, CICS still relevant. I always hate to kick, I always prefer CICS, whatever. During that whole time, what's kept CICS relevant is that it has been very good at embracing all of the technology advancements that have taken place during that time. So we've had support for web access for about 20 years. We started supporting Java 15 years ago. So CICS is an environment which hosts compiled applications like Coval, PL1 and C++, but we've been supporting Java 15 years. We've had support for web services inbound and outbound for about 10 years. And then in the last five years, we've been doing a lot of work around mobile as well. So it's really about keeping up with the changes, technology advancements, the business challenges that our customers have and also the whole social and development processes that customers and developers use. So that's what's kept it being relevant. We'll get into that, but I'm going to ask you to back up for just a moment because I'm going to assume that many of our viewers don't know what CICS is. So why don't you give us a basic definition first? So CICS is an application server that runs on system Z. So it runs applications written in Java, but it also runs applications written in compiled languages like Coval, PL1 and C++. And so what's tremendously advantageous about that is that for customers, applications and their data is everything, that is their business. And for us in CICS, it's about the application. And so a customer will have written an application that performs a very critical part of their business. And when new challenges come along, whether it be the web or web services or mobile, they want to be able to leverage the functionality that they have written that they have tuned that is reliable. They can't replace that with something else. So here you have an environment where you can actually modernize those applications. So provide rich web-based interfaces to those applications for back-office staff or provide direct access to applications from a mobile platform. But you can still keep that core business logic that's been tuned and refined and reliable over many years without ever replacing it with something else. So it's an environment that can host both the modern and the existing reliable applications in the same environment. And we should point out that the kinds of companies that use CICS are banks, airlines, telecom companies. I mean, we're talking very, very large processing environment. So basically, if you have a bank account or if you use a credit card or you withdraw money from an ATM or you travel with an airline or you have an insurance policy, it's very likely that any of those transactions that you engage with, kicks will be part of that activity. Maintaining the systems of record, your bank account, your insurance policy will be part of that. And what you're doing right now is you're helping some of these very large companies move from the mainframe environment to a private cloud environment. How does that differ from traditional mainframe? So it's still a mainframe back there, but what we're trying to do is to bring some of the qualities of series and experience that people would expect of a cloud, a private cloud environment to a traditional mainframe environment. And so when we embarked upon the most recent version of the product, we look, we give us a scorecard. We say, okay, what do people think about cloud? They think about being able to rapidly provision applications. They think about being able to access those applications from anywhere. They think about an environment that can host multiple applications at the same time, a resource pooling environment. They think about being able to measure the resource consumption, because cloud is all about pay as you go. So you need to measure that and charge the right people for the usage. And they also think about an environment that can scale to demand. So with mobile, things can scale very rapidly. So it's about providing to our customers that kind of experience with a mainframe environment, with a traditional transaction processing environment. They're also thinking about a virtualized environment, I presume. Oh, actually highly virtualized. And so one of the key, so we gave ourselves a scorecard and we did pretty well, but there were some areas that we felt were room for improvement. And one of the key ones was about how quickly you can provision new applications and new versions of applications. We felt this was really, really important in the mobile age. A lot of you, customers for banks and other businesses, their relationship with their bank is through their mobile phone. And if that doesn't work, they have many, many ways of expressing their opinion of that bank and that mobile application. Many of the apps- Hashtag fail. Well, they can go onto Twitter, they can go onto Facebook, or they can rate the application on the web store that they bought that application. It's very important that our customers can monitor the experience that our customers are having with that application and also to be able to respond to it very quickly. So I'm very excited at this conference to be able to talk about the latest version of Kix. So in April, we announced Kix Transaction Server version 5.2, which will be generally available in June. And one of the really exciting features that we've been talking about with customers at Impact this week has been the ability to be able to host multiple versions of an application within their same cloud environment. And you think you might say, well, why do you want to do that? Well, the best way of being able to bring a new version of application into your environment is to be able to run two side by side. Absolutely. And that's something Kix has always done very well. That's right. But now, what we're doing now is to say, well, to try to minimize the resource consumption, you can install different versions of the same application within the same environment. So you can say, okay, a subset of our users, they can get the new version. They can try out the new features. This is a mechanism that many of the web-based companies use. We're going to provide that for the Kix, the Kix customer. And really, so it really is virtualization. I mean, it's running multiple virtual machines. Absolutely. Now, we understand why a company that's been running CIS for a long time would have an interest in maintaining that environment. Is there a play for new companies as well? Are you selling new Kix licenses? Oh, absolutely. Especially in some of our developing markets around the world. So, especially in the Far East, you've got rapidly growing economies over there, particularly in China. You've got a population that more and more of them are getting a bank account. And so you have banks that are growing very rapidly. And what they've done is they've looked at the way that our customers have used the ICS as an environment for running banking. And so we have been successful in attracting new customers in those new markets. So yes. And what might be the alternatives they would look at? I mean, why might they choose CIS? What alternatives would they look at? So IBM has a number of products for hosting applications. The obvious one is WebSphere application server which runs on a number of different platforms. And so for those customers that are starting out new, running applications in Java, of course, there's an obvious choice that WebSphere has been the platform of choice for running those applications. But there's very much complimentary because you have a number of platforms that you can run WebSphere on, provide very rich interfaces to those applications. The key thing here is, is that we provide very sophisticated connection mechanisms to allow those new applications to connect into Kix. So if customers already have Kix, they can connect into that from WebSphere. But if they don't have Kix today, then we have other products like WebSphere where they can host those applications. CIS was written in the age of the 3270 terminal when you had a dedicated connection, you had a persistent connection. And of course now there's no persistent connections anymore. How have you evolved the platform to be able to handle this much more fluid and unpredictable connectivity connectivity environment? So we have to look at all of the uses of the product. So we have the people that actually run and administer the systems. We have back office staff that actually use the systems on-premise. And of course, obviously we have customers that are now expecting to interact with customer, with their businesses through either internet access or through mobile. And so again, while users are not likely to connect directly into Kix from a mobile, there's products like WorkLite, which we'll have seen a lot of talk about this week at Impact. And so WorkLite is a mobile gateway that allows you to manage the device relationship, to manage the diverse set of devices that you might have whether it's an Apple or an Android or Windows. And then WorkLite, we have just announced a number of specific features around mobile that it makes it much easier for someone that's deploying a mobile-based application that's managing it through WorkLite to connect that into Kix. So you're actually dealing with some of that diversity of platform with the connect traditions, the notification back to the client, that's the response proof of something like WorkLite. And then that can connect to Kix to access the systems of reference. So that's the way we deal with it. One of the big announcements at Impact was the cloud marketplace. Will CICS be interface to be available through the cloud marketplace? So maybe if I'm here in maybe five years time or then I'll be able to say yes to that question. So right now, the cloud support for Kix is very much about on-premise private cloud. That's where we're starting. The customers that we have, that's the business that they're in, whether it because of regulatory constraints because they're in the finance sector, or because that is the business they're in in terms of very skilled at deploying and managing those environments. So we just want to kind of bring to them the expectations you would have of cloud. But that means that we're getting ready for some point potentially in the future where we would be on the marketplace. Maybe new banks that are born in the cloud. They want that kind of reliability. So that's a very exciting announcement about what we're doing in the cloud with IBM, with the cloud marketplace. But that's not somewhere where we are with Kix, but five years time, maybe when I'm back here, we'll be able to talk a bit more about that. Matthew, let's give you the last word here. We have less than a minute left. What message do you want to leave for our viewers about the relevance of CICS in the world of the cloud? Well, I think I'm tremendously excited to be here at Impact this week. We are responding to all the demands that customers have of their software environments, whether it be cloud, whether it be analytics, whether it be mobile. And we would encourage customers out there that have CRCS to take a look at our latest version and how it can help them to deploy mobile applications and take a bus to that. And as IBM has always been known for, a company that does not leave customers behind. And I think seeing a CICS representative here at a cloud mobile analytics conference is further evidence of that. Matthew Lebscher, thank you very much. This is Paul Gillard, IBM Impact cloud on theCUBE. We'll be back after this message.