The new version, 3.2, which is the first for CICS in three years, is not the first that exposed transactions as web services (that already occurred in the previous version). But it keeps CICS current with emerging web services standards, including support for WSDL 2.0; WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and Security Profile 1.0; WS-Security; plus MTOM (for optimizing SOAP message transmission) and XOP (XML binary attachment packaging).

Additionally, it improves processing of unstructured data such as JPG, GIF, PDF, and BLOB files contained inside web services messages.