KICKS for .NET™

Intensity Software’s KICKS for .NET™ is targeted at organizations with CICS applications who are burdened by lack of flexibility and the high costs associated with operating their mainframe. KICKS for .NET™ was first introduced in 2003 and has proven to be an invaluable tool in a migration undertaken by the State of Washington Department of Licensing.

Intensity has found that organizations seeking to move off of the mainframe are typically driven by one or more of the following reasons:

High Costs Associated with maintaining and upgrading the Mainframe
Need for more flexibility in order to deliver more agile solutions to their customers
Fears of support issues due to aging workforce

One common aspect of all organizations wishing to migrate is the desire to minimize risk and maximize the existing investments in their CICS systems. A company might be quite reluctant to migrate a mainframe application that has been stable for 20 years – until recently, the risk of introducing new bugs was just too large to justify the migration.

KICKS for .NET™ was specifically designed to solve all of these common customer concerns. The risk of the migration process is minimal due to the preservation of the system’s business logic – the business logic remains completely in-tact – with all changes concentrated at the EXEC CICS statements. The end result is a true Microsoft .NET assembly containing the same business logic that has been maintained for years. Because all of the original business logic remains virtually untouched, the system can be maintained by the same staff currently maintaining the system on the mainframe. Likewise, since the source code compiles to a .NET assembly, your .NET developers can use the full power of the Microsoft .NET framework to extend your applications using Visual Studio .NET.

In addition, KICKS for .NET™ is an automated solution. This means that 80% or more of the migration process is completed easily by running the system’s source code through the KICKS for .NET™ SDK tools. This eliminates a significant portion of a migration process that was normally done manually. The end result is significant savings.

Once your system has been migrated to the Microsoft .NET framework using KICKS for .NET™, it is a true .NET application. This means that your migrated system will be as extensible and agile as a Microsoft .NET application written today. The migrated system will have access to XML web services and to the extensive .NET Class Library. The user interface of the migrated system also has all of the flexibility of a ASP.NET system enabling the presentation layer to be easily customized by modifying the HTML, adding images, changing CSS styles, etc – right inside of Visual Studio!