Chapter 1 Understanding Application Integrator for CICS

Why Use AI for CICS?

To understand how AI for CICS can provide solutions for business problems, consider the following scenario.

Problem

A company needs to attract new prospects and keep them as customers, and at the same time, lower the cost of sales.

The company wants to allow customers to self-service their accounts through a new application over the Internet. Therefore, the customer can easily renew an account, and by deploying the application over the Internet, the company can expand its target market without increasing its direct sales force.

However, the company faces the following constraints:

Existing operational systems were not designed for direct exposure to customers over the Internet.
The company cannot afford to rewrite all the applications or consolidate all the data on a common platform. The business logic and security infrastructure is spread across LAN database stored procedures, mainframe CICS applications, and C++ DLLs.
The new application must be developed using HTML and Java (for broad Internet accessibility), but none of the existing systems are "Web-enabled" today.

Solution

For its solution, the company uses Sybase Enterprise Application Server (EAServer) as a platform to integrate their internal applications and make them accessible through the Internet. Using AI for CICS and AI for Stored Procedures, they can access business logic in their mainframe applications and database stored procedures quickly and easily from the Jaguar middle tier for new application development.