CICS TS 2.3 End Of Support today

CICS TS 2.3 goes out of support today … unless you have arranged an extended support contract!.

You probably don’t need a reminder, but there is a nice shiny new release over here in the form of CICS TS 4.1 😉

IBM business partners receive letter of thanks

Congratulations to all of IBM CICS business partners who received letters of thanks at Share! The letters were presented for sponsorship and support of CICS. I have a lovely collection of photos of the awards being handed out below. In order of appearance we have Calvin Fudge of DataDirect, Guy Givens of H&W, Dan Speer of Hostbridge Technologies and Ed Boulay of Sirius.

DataDirect receiving their letter of thanks

H&W receiving their letter of thanks

Hostbridge Technologies receiving their letter of thanks

Sirius receiving their letter of thanks

Also check out the great DataDirect blog, where they have beaten me to it and published a picture of Calvin Fudge, Director of Marketing for the Shadow Product Group receiving their letter of thanks and shaking hands with CICS director Dave Andrews. They even have an image of the letter of thanks on there as well!

Well done to you all!

Update 24/09/09: Fixed some bad grammar (CH)

IBM System z Expo (Oct 5th-9th) in Orlando, Florida

*Puts on marketting hat*

Straight from the home of Mickey Mouse and Universal studios – Orlando, Florida just became even better! Yup, the IBM System z Expo is going to be in town from October 5-9th this year.

You can even get a 10% discount by entering the promotion code A2N when you enroll. Everything you need to get registered and more is right here:

IBM System z Expo – http://bit.ly/16sbo9

From looking at the contents of the conference, there is a lot of new tech in there. Obviously the new System z10 and all the latest skills updates for that is on the list. So too is cloud computing which just about everyone who is cool is trying to work on right now ;), as well as virtualisation, Parallel Sysplex and Linux making big appearances. Also fairly relevant in the current climate there is also a focus on reducing costs. So how much can they pack in to those 4 1/2 days? Well apparently 300 sessions including hands-on labs, birds of a feather sessions and great opportunities to speak with developers and other subject matter experts.

I suspect you might need to take a couple of days vacation to recover from all of that!

CICS Interdependency Analyzer 3.1

CICS IA 3.1 has been announced today, see here for details.

So what is new in CICS IA 3.1 ?

• CICS TS V4.1 support
• CICS Explorer plugin
• Command Flow
• Natural/Adabas support
• Concurrent Dependency and Affinity data collection
• … and lots more

CICS IA 3.1 is planned to be available on Friday the 4th of September.