Cast Iron Unveils New Cloud Integration Platform

March 16, 2010 Alex Woodie

Cast Iron Systems last week unveiled a new integration offering aimed at simplifying integration projects involving applications residing in public or private computing “clouds” and on-premise servers. Called OmniConnect, the new offering is, itself, a cloud offering delivered via the software as a service (SaaS) model, a change from Cast Iron’s earlier appliance-based integration approach.

Cast Iron says its new OmniConnect offering handles all aspects of application integration, including data migration and process integration. The offering, which is targeted at large corporations and SaaS vendors, includes ETL-like capabilities for extracting, cleansing, and synchronizing data between on-premise “legacy” systems and newer SaaS apps running in “the cloud.” The offering also allows customers to model business processes, such as quote-to-order and purchase-to-pay routines, and execute them from within the OmniConnect environment.

OmniConnect also works at the user interface level, in addition to synchronizing and centralizing business application data and logic. Cast Iron says the offering can be used to create a “UI mashup” that combines screens from multiple application environments. The company claims it combines “three complete integration products in one.”

Over the last few years, Cast Iron has focused on helping customers to integrate their on-premise systems–such as those form SAP, JD Edwards, Infor, Lawson, Manhattan Associates and others–with SaaS offerings from Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and the like. Usually, this required deploying a Cast Iron appliance, which housed the integration software.

With OmniConnect, Cast Iron is putting its cloud integration software into the cloud itself, and allowing users to access the multi-tenant application over the Internet, if they choose. The company has even launched a new management console that runs “in the cloud” and is accessed through a Web browser. While customers can go “all cloud” with OmniConnect, Cast Iron is still giving customers to option of deploying the integration framework as a “virtual appliance” running on their own servers, or getting it as a pre-configured appliance directly from Cast Iron.

One early OmniConnect user is Awana, a non-profit ministry based in Chicago, Illinois. Awana has been successfully using Cast Iron offerings to integrate and manage data and process flows between its on-premise JD Edwards ERP system (running on Windows and the Oracle database) with Salesforce.com’s CRM offering. That job will be easier with OmniConnect, says Judi Smith, director of strategic services for Awana. “Using OmniConnect to design, run, and monitor our integrations will enable us to work even more efficiently,” Smith states in a press release.

OmniConnect is available now. For more information, visit www.castiron.com.