Technologically Connecting SecondLife to a Real Business System

Poking around through IBM's developerWorks site, I came across someone someone trying to connect SecondLife to a CICS. My first thought was related to drug screening.

For those of you who don't know what a CICS is, it's a 'Customer Information Control System'. It's basically a transaction server, running on a mainframe. A mainframe. SecondLife. Remember that comment about drug related screening?

The idea behind it is pretty interesting - that companies might want to be able to deal with transactions outside of SecondLife, maintain records and analyze it to spot trends. Of course, such data is incomplete without many other aspects of the environment being involved; conditions which create trends. But I'm still marvelling that a CICS would be something useful in this regard. How big of a company would it take to make the use of a CICS worthwhile?

I smell a service industry there.

But why a CICS? What makes a CICS so special? I mean, it's good for IBM, but for the average small business - barring a service from IBM - a PC is more than sufficient for much of this. In fact, give it another decade and a mobile device will be handling it.

I agree with not wasting sim resources on laggy vendors. I wonder at cost efficacy and the technology being played with on this one. Still, it's too early for me to be cynical - so let's see what happens.