1 Oxen or 1000 beavers?
Nice to see people are starting to realize that those "nasty old mainframes" aren't so bad after all. It's really amazing how over the years the Wintel/Solaris marketeers have cast such an impression of leprosy on large-scale, mainframe business systems, when the truth of the matter is that each platform has it's own unique strengths, and when properly exploited, compliment each other with suprisingly positive results. Even more prevalent than IMS, CICS(Customer Information Control System), or Transaction Server as it is now called, is widely used in Government, Hospitals, and the privates sector as it is probably the most robust and reliable transaction processor currently availble, however, it's shortcoming is it's user interface, primarily 3270 green screen but IBM added web capabilities 15 years ago, yet nonetheless it is still clunky and cumbersome to develop green screens or web pages underneath. What has resulted is the trend of using of MQ as the SOA "service bus" for application components on the various platforms is growing, as it makes it relatively easy to leverage disparate systems and architectures into a unified, effective and efficient solution. After all, The beavers do a great job of felling the trees, but you're going to want the Ox to pull the wagon.