support  syncToOSThread for J2C connections for CICS on Websphere Liberty for Z/OS

This idea is to get it on product roadmap after discussion with PM .Previous submitted idea : https://ideas.ibm.com/ideas/TWAS-I-255

Feature Summary 

Social Security Administration (SSA )uses tWas 8.5 on Z/os and is migrating to Liberty with Identity assertion to CICS .  

The feature ask from SSA to our internal dev team is to support  syncToOSThread for J2C connections for CICS and not just db2 on Websphere Liberty for Z/OS.The currently use tWAS 8.5.x  . 

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/was-liberty/zos?topic=zos-enabling-synctoosthread-j2c-connections .  

Details based on customer conversations  

Although there are alternatives that are possible via code changes ,SSA has explicitly told us  this imposes a significant resource burden on the customer to change their connectivity from the Java application server to CICS and changes to a significantly  inventory of applications. SSA has a large mainframe footprint and they are currently  doing a impact analysis on no of impacted applications .   

 If IBM accepts the requirement, then they have a migration path of least effort ensuring continued usage.I think that given there is no End of Support date for either release of tWAS, we could convince SSA to wait for Liberty to deliver the syncToOSThread support, even if it were 18-24 months out.  Otherwise, as Judah (SSA customer) pointed out, they may be considering a total rewrite of the application in order to deploy it in a cloud environment (which probably won’t be IBM Cloud) and will result in the loss of WAS/Liberty revenue on zOS at SSA.  It might also wind up being a story told at conferences or published in journals highlighting their “successful” migration from z/OS to the Cloud. 

Impact to no of applications  

Awaiting Judah and his team (SSA) to provide the collector output on no of apps connecting to CICS using this assertion mechanism   

Financial Revenue Impact  

Websphere and associated mainframe software (, Worklod simulator, Sterling Connect Direct, WSSR, CICS , DB2 (also tools associated)  etc) , storage .Cost of Dev tools (ADDI,Taz, zD&T,zVD&T , zVTP etc) being positioned .

Reputational impact 

Migrating off mainframe has long term financial impact as well as being in the news for moving off mainframe to public cloud  

Other considerations from sales org perspective 

We also have an impending mainframe upgrade to Z17 and SSA has made it explicit they will reconsider other platforms if they cannot be supported for existing apps  

We can consider this z17 upgrade a roughly $30m transactional opportunity for IBM.