What is "cics"

n. (CIC English)

Customer Information Control System (CICS®) is a family of mixed language application servers that provide online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM Mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE.

CICS is middleware designed to support rapid, high-volume online transaction processing. A CICS transaction is a unit of processing initiated by a single request that may affect one or more objects. This processing is usually interactive (screen-oriented), but background transactions are possible.

CICS provides services that extend or replace the functions of the operating system and are more efficient than the generalized services in the operating system and simpler for programmers to use, particularly with respect to communication with diverse terminal devices.

Applications developed for CICS may be written in a variety of programming languages and use CICS-supplied language extensions to interact with resources such as files, database connections, terminals, or to invoke functions such as web services. CICS manages the entire transaction such that if for any reason a part of the transaction fails all recoverable changes can be backed out.

While CICS has its highest profile among financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies, many Fortune 500 companies are reported to run CICS along with many government entities. CICS is also widely used by many smaller organizations. CICS is used in bank-teller applications, ATM systems, industrial production control systems, insurance applications, and many other types of interactive applications.

Recent CICS Transaction Server enhancements include support for Web services and Java, Event processing, Atom feeds, and RESTful interfaces. CICS Transaction Server 5.3, which generally became available on December 11, 2015, provides new and enhanced capabilities in three main areas; Service agility, Operational efficiency and Cloud with DevOps.

CICS is the Customer Information Control System, a transaction server that runs primarily on IBM mainframes.

CICS may also refer to:

• CICS-FM, a Canadian radio station
• Chicago International Charter School, Illinois, United States
• CICS Chennai, the Centre for International Co-operation in Science, Tamil Nadu, India