Hewlett-Packard Co has announced its implementation of the IBM Corp CICS/6000 for the HP 9000 HP-UX servers. CICS/6000 is based on Transarc Corp’s Distributed Computing Environment-based Encina transaction processing software. This is also the basis of Hewlett’s Encina/9000, Digital Equipment Corp, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and other Unix transaction processing environments. CICS/6000 was developed to enable its mainframe customers to integrate Unix transaction processing systems, business Hewlett-Packard is now after. Now, says Hewlett-Packard, any CICS or CICS/9000-based system can initiate a transaction in the other’s environment and CICS/9000 users can develop transaction processing applications for IBM mainframes via the PPC Program to Program Gateway and employing two-phase commit launched in February (CI No 2,349). It also enables Encina/9000 and CICS/9000 transaction processing monitors to use Common Programming Interface-Communications over SNA using PPC Executive and TCP/IP. CICS/9000 Bundle includes Distributed Computing Environment, Encina and CICS components and costs from $24,000 on E, F and G servers, from $57,400 on H and I servers and from $177,000 on T500 one-to-12 way Emeralds. An autoconfigurator to get DCE/9000, Encina/9000 and CICS/9000 working once they are installed costs extra. A CICS application programming interface for HP 9000 servers costs $10,000 to $90,000, clients are $150. It is all available now. A Japanese language version will follow by mid-1995. Software partners for CICS/9000 include the usual database vendors, communications suppliers and systems integrators plus independent software vendors such as Computer Associates International Inc and American Management Systems Inc. Hewlett-Packard’s Cobol, Cobol/C and Cobol-C++ SoftBench 4.0 development tool sets are also now shipping for use in CICS/9000 and DB2 for HP-UX development. Prices start from $2,800.