The first aim of CICS Runtime is to preserve the considerable investment already made in CICS applications by allowing migrated programs to run unchanged (except for a syntactic adaptation) by using an API emulation runtime on top of native Tuxedo features. This means the impact of migration is limited on:

• 3270 screens and BMS management; there is no impact on application end-users.
• EXEC CICS calls; there is no impact on developers.

At the same time, CICS Runtime is run entirely on a robust production environment based on Tuxedo that protects and guarantees application functionality.

In fact, CICS Runtime gives customers the benefits of Tuxedo distributed architecture without impacting application APIs. It allows the key strengths of Tuxedo to be leveraged and allows routes to the future including SOA to be opened.