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Answer
Advantages to upgrading
With each new CICS TS release the following features are typically improved and made available:
- Improved capacity, performance, constraint relief, hardware exploitation, and better documentation
- Consumability and productivity improvements, such as an easier installation process, new off-line tools, and runtime improvements
- Removal of dependencies, such as those capabilities that were previously delivered in CICS TS SupportPacs and CICS TS Feature Packs being moved into CICS TS base code
- Better support for open standards, in particular relating to TCP/IP and web services
Having CICS at up-to-date release levels in your enterprise allows you to be ready when your projects need new features, rather than risk delay while you implement an upgrade to support those new features.
For example, consider the benefits of release CICS TS 5.6. This release delivers significant new capabilities to improve the developer experience, including the choice of APIs, frameworks, editors and build tools, while at the same time providing updates in the key areas of security, resilience, and management.
With each new release of CICS TS, you can expect comprehensive IBM product integration testing, such as:
- Latest maintenance is included; post-general availability enhancements are tested together for compatibility
- CICS TS is tested with all minimum-releases of co-requisite products, such as the z/OS operating system and other IBM co-requisite products
- Support for Enterprise compilers is included, such as IBM MQ, IBM Db2, and IBM IMS
See Announcement Letters for CICS Products to learn more about a specific release of CICS TS.
Costs and things to consider when upgrading
- The cost of upgrading the level of operating system, to support the new release of CICS TS.
- The cost and risk of implementing prerequisite upgrade and maintenance of other tools and packages.
- The cost and risk associated with upgrading CICS TS, especially in the planning and execution of that update.
- The announcement of stabilization (and possible removal) of CICS TS features that may necessitate an upgrade or changes to newer solutions.
- Some new features require new configurations, or changes to existing configurations, applications, and even development processes within your organization.
- Avoiding any disruption to systems and applications while executing an upgrade. This can necessitate a planned phasing or rolling upgrade to be implemented.
- Did you know? The cost of monthly license charge (MLC) between CICS TS releases is the same. This means that it costs the same for a later release of CICS TS as it does for an earlier release, making cost an incentive to move up to the latest releases of CICS TS.
- The cost of educating and re-educating your staff.
See Looking up prices for CICS TS and CICS Tools if you would like to use IBMLink to check for the price of a CICS product.
Requirements when upgrading
IBM provides guidance on Upgrading from previous releases of CICS TS in the product documentation, provided by the IBM Knowledge Center. In topic Changes between releases, details are provided on the impact of changes to CICS TS between versions or releases of the product.
The upgrading information for out of service (unsupported) releases of CICS TS, such as CICS TS version 3, CICS TS version 4, and CICS TS 5.1 can be found under Upgrading from end-of-service releases in the IBM Knowledge Center.
When upgrading CICS TS you should always review cross product dependencies in the CICS Preventative Service Planning (PSP) Buckets and the Detailed system requirements for the release of CICS TS that you are installing.
IBM also recommends that you review Upgrading information for CICS when changing releases of CICS, which provides information on problems you might encounter when upgrading CICS and also what to do to prevent the problems from occurring during upgrading.
Related Information
Product Synonym
CICS/TS CICS TS CICS Transaction Server
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Document Information
Modified date:
29 July 2020
UID
swg21046498