Cast Iron Systems Introduces Cast Iron Cloud

10/16/2008

Cast Iron Systems, the SaaS integration company, introduces Cast Iron Cloud™, the future of Software as a Service integration, today. Cast Iron offers the choice of a completely cloud-based integration service or an on-premise integration appliance as an organization’s application ecosystem evolves.

ebizQ received the following:

Now any organization, regardless of size or resources, can rapidly connect SaaS solutions with other on-demand and on-premise applications, immediately boosting productivity.

“Productive SaaS deployments don’t operate in a vacuum,” said Ken Comée, CEO and president of Cast Iron Systems. “Companies must be able to efficiently integrate SaaS solutions with other enterprise systems to effectively orchestrate cross-functional business processes. By delivering our integration solution in the Cast Iron Cloud, or via our on-premise appliances, we can provide organizations with a seamless and secure transition between on-demand and on-premise environments.”

As SaaS usage expands from departmental silos into the extended enterprise, integration of data and applications is even more critical to productivity and success. Cast Iron and its partners can now deliver the most widely used solution for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications through the simplicity and speed of Integration as a Service (IaaS). The Cast Iron Cloud leverages the company’s unique ability to deliver completed integration projects in just days and also eliminates the need for customers to invest in integration infrastructure or deep middleware expertise.

Partners Endorse Cast Iron Offering

“Our customers have been very successful using Cast Iron to bring Force.com and Salesforce CRM into their IT environments,” said Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at salesforce.com. “With Cast Iron integration solutions available on the Force.com AppExchange, small businesses and large enterprises alike tell us that Cast Iron gives them great time to value for their integration projects.”

“Given the growing number of vertical solutions built on NS-BOS for NetSuite, as well as the increasing sophistication of our customer base, we wanted to provide our customers and partners options on how to connect to specific vertical and legacy systems,” said Mini Peiris, NetSuite’s vice president of product marketing. “With built-in connectivity to NetSuite solutions and the flexibility to deliver integration in the cloud or using an appliance, Cast Iron accelerates adoption of our ERP, ecommerce, and CRM suite.”

Industry Analysts Endorse Cast Iron Offering

Leading analyst firms Saugatuck Technology and Gartner explain the importance of this announcement for both SaaS users and providers.

Analyst Michael West of Saugatuck Technology summarizes: “To take advantage of SaaS at an enterprise level, users must have access to broad, deep, and sophisticated integration capabilities. Requirements for integration could stifle effective and efficient enterprise-wide deployment of SaaS unless SaaS providers commit to delivering more and better enterprise-ready integration solutions.”

According to Gartner, “An analysis of a cross-section of successful SaaS vendors reveals that business-to-business (B2B) flexibility — rather than any one B2B standard or approach — lowers barriers to SaaS integration and helps drive SaaS adoption. The diversity of SaaS integration solutions from SaaS vendors is good because it gives customers more options to solve their diverse integration requirements.”*

By offering its SaaS integration solution in the cloud and on-premise, Cast Iron is anticipating these diverse end-to-end application integration needs, including data cleansing and migration, and application integration by offering intelligent connections, data transformations, process workflow, monitoring and management, plus guaranteed delivery of all data.

• Gartner, Inc., "Seeding the Cloud: B2B Flexibility Drives SaaS Adoption," by Benoit J. Lheureux, October 1, 2008.

Customers Endorse Cast Iron Cloud

Extra Space Storage Inc. (NYSE: EXR), the second-largest self storage company in the United States, is using the Cast Iron Cloud to integrate salesforce.com with its on-demand ERP system giving its call-center agents and management complete visibility into the company’s platform of 673 self-storage properties in real-time. “Our projects have short implementation trajectories,” said Bill Hoban, CIO of Extra Space Storage, “and the Cast Iron Cloud gives us the integration speed and agility we need and enables us to focus on our core competencies rather than on plumbing. This increases our productivity across the board.”

Cast Iron is transforming the integration experience using the Cast Iron Cloud. The company is introducing a cloud-based library of pre-configured Template Integration Processes (TIPs) for the most common SaaS business processes. Cast Iron has created these templates based on its experience with thousands of customer integrations. For example, if customers need to integrate two SaaS applications, they simply search Cast Iron’s cloud-based library of TIPs, choose the TIP that matches their scenario, and deploy it to the Cast Iron Cloud. In minutes, their SaaS integration project goes live rather than taking weeks or even months to develop using custom code. In addition, SaaS integrations can be monitored from anywhere, anytime using the Cast Iron Cloud.

For companies that want to customize TIPs based on their specific requirements, Cast Iron is providing a self-guided wizard similar to the simple wizard-based experience in popular products like Intuit TurboTax. Users answer a few questions based on the specific situation, and the integration process is automatically customized to expedite SaaS integration and adoption.

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