James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk, has a great post on CICS over at the Mainframe Typepad blog. His basic thesis: CICS is becoming a cash-cow because IBM is invested in SOA-ing it to death instead of in expanding the features of CICS itself:

What happens if you want to change the underlying enterprise data model, for example? You can’t do that without changing the code. You can service-enable all you want, but SOA is as much about component and service isolation, enabling flexibility and portfolio maintainability, than service reuse.

Governor, who lists IBM as one of RedMonk’s clients, adds that down at Impact 2008, an IBM conference on SOA held in Las Vegas earlier this month, it sounded to him like IBM was too interested in, as he wrote it, “extending existing investments” instead of trying to find “net new customers for the box.”

“Leverage existing workloads? I am most interested in net new workloads on Z - and I don’t just mean Linux-based,” he wrote.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that I’m always asking IBM about. New mainframe customers, especially in the United States, can be hard to find. It seems that IBM is investing in existing customers in the U.S. and then grabbing new customers outside the U.S. Whenever I ask about new mainframe customers, IBM always falls back on the BRIC acronym — Brazil, Russia, India, China. Hoplon Infotainment is one of IBM’s most-often touted new customers because a) they’re a new customer; and b) they do online gaming on a mainframe, which is a novelty all its own.

But as much as IBM talks about BRIC when it comes to new mainframers, it seems like they’re throwing bricks in the U.S. There may be some American companies new to the mainframe, but overall for new customers, IBM seems focused overseas.