Cast Iron sold an integration appliance, most focused on integrations that involved SaaS applications such as Salesforce, with an option for doing all this purely in the cloud. IBM is accordingly spinning Cast Iron as a major cloud player, which is something of an exaggeration.

IBM will surely get value from whatever specific connectors Cast Iron does a better job at than IBM’s current offerings do. What I’m more curious about is whether Cast Iron’s core technology will survive in a form that continues it’s core message of “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”

I get the impression Informatica is still Salesforce-only, e.g. from this price list.

Pervasive DataCloud is currently vendor-specific too. In Pervasive’s case, the fixed point is QuickBooks Online. DataCloud, the pure cloud offering. is newish, with an undisclosed hosting partner. The most common integration is with, you guessed it, Salesforce.com, but Microsoft’s CRM is in the mix as well. Pricing is $1-2K/year.

The most comprehensive integration-as-a-service story I’ve heard may be the one Cast Iron Systems is rolling out. Cast Iron is hosting with OpSource any integration you can get in the Cast Iron appliance. To emphasize this, pricing is identical to that of the rental option for the appliance ($1K/month in the simplest two-endpoint cases), and customers are encouraged to switch between appliance and cloud usage as they see fit. (That said, I think the whole thing is way too new for such a switch ever to have happened yet; the official rollout is scheduled for October 20.) Cast Iron supports a fairly broad range of applications, SaaS and on-premise alike. (Cast Iron is particularly proud of what sounds like a beyond-Barney hug from Oracle’s CRM On Demand business.) Cast Iron claims less than a handful of direct sales of this new cloud offering. However, Cast Iron also claims 23 partners, combined from among several areas:

• SaaS vendor OEMing for ongoing data integration in the usual way
• SaaS vendor OEMing for one-time data migration
• Implementation VAR using the service

You may have noticed that everything I’ve cited above is for operational apps being connected with each other, almost always including CRM. What I haven’t heard is integration vendors getting much involved with analytics-in-the-cloud offerings, whether from data mart outsourcers or vendors with cloud DBMS offerings. Not coincidentally, I don’t think many offerings in either category have large customer counts. (Also — Kognitio, which along with Vertica is one of the two data warehouse DBMS vendors most emphasizing cloud offerings, happens to have a data migration subsidiary of its own.)

1. An appliance delivery format.
2. Lots of heuristics for automatic mapping and quick set-up. E.g., Cast Iron claims that 70% of a typical SAP-Salesforce.com connection can be done straight out of the box.
3. The absence of data cleaning/transformation features that might complicate things.

Cast Iron still believes in all that.

Even so, its messaging has changed a bit. Cast Iron now bills itself, in the first sentence of its press release boilerplate, as “the fastest growing SaaS integration appliance vendor.” And when I talked with marketing chief Simon Peel today, the only use cases we discussed were connections between SaaS and on-premises apps. Simon’s contention is that Cast Iron is much better suited for such uses than, say, industry leader Informatica, which he positions as being big, cumbersome, feature-laden and, above all, focused on batch processing. Indeed, Simon thinks Cast Iron has many more SAP-to-SaaS connection customers than Informatica. (I’m guessing that set includes an outright majority of a total customer base he says is in the 2-500 range, a figure that includes both end users and some OEMs. Other comapny metrics include 200%ish annual growth in both customers and revenue, and a little over 100 employees.)

Informatica and Cast Iron both seem to be on big pushes to gain partnerships with application software vendors. But their focus is different. Informatica is after — well, they’re after everybody, at least above a certain size threshold, and that threshold is going down. Cast Iron, however, is specifically focused on SaaS providers. To that end, they’ve proudly partnered with Opsource, and hence at least implicitly with however many hundreds of small app vendors are using Opsource to port their software to SaaS.

So what’s to keep Informatica or IBM from squashing Cast Iron? Simon fondly believes that he has a whole complexity/cost/business-model disruption narrative going. (My words, not his.) I think that’s somewhat overstated. Integration is fundamentally an add-on rather than platform technology; any vendor that has temporarily forgotten how to sell on-the-cheap ala carte tactical solutions could easily re-learn how.

So any sustainable advantage for Cast Iron probably lies in competitive barriers to emulating its simplicity. Cast Iron, in essence, is all wizards and (at least ideally) no code. Can a more fully-featured competitor put a wizard layer on a code engine? Sure. But Cast Iron seems ahead in actually building the wizards, at least in its target niche.

Among the companies they cited, you can find topical categories here for IBM (and Cognos), Informatica, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, SAP/Business Objects (both), SAS, and Teradata; QlikTech; Cast Iron, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP, ParAccel, and StreamBase; and Software AG. On Text Technologies you’ll find categories for some of the same vendors, plus Attensity, Clarabridge, and Google. There also are categories for some of these vendors on the Monash Report.

Simon claimed that for similar mappings via Pervasive you’d actually have to write code. I wonder if anybody from Pervasive would care to comment on that?

My other interesting takeaway was pricing — most of their customers rent rather than buying. Many sign long-term commitments to get discounts and still choose to rent. The main reason seems to be that’s where they have the flexibility to make room in their budget. An important secondary reason seems to be that many of Cast Iron’s customers are using Cast Iron primarily to connect to SaaS, so they’re oriented to periodic payments anyway.

• I recently talked with Pervasive Software about their data integration line. A large part of Pervasive’s new business is Salesforce.com integration, including at some big-name software vendors as customer/partner switch-hitters.
• I just rechecked my notes from my January talk with Cast Iron Systems. A large part of Cast Iron’s new business is also integration with Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and other SaaS vendors.
• Informatica keeps putting out press releases about Salesforce.com integration, most recently by offering replication in SaaS form itself.

But of course this makes sense. Without good data integration, SaaS applications would be pretty useless, at least at large and medium-sized enterprises.

Essentially, they offer data integration without the common add-ons. I.e., there’s little or nothing in the way of data cleansing, composite apps, business process management, and/or business activity monitoring. Data just gets imported, extracted, and/or synchronized, whether between pairs of transactional systems, or between a transactional system and a reporting database. A particularly hot area of application for them seems to be SaaS/on-demand app integration (Salesforce.com, Netsuite, etc.) In particular, they boast both Lawson and Salesforce.com as internal users, and at least at Lawson they are used for a Salesforce/Lawson integration.

The big advantage to this strategy is that their integrator is simple enough for appliance deployment. Indeed, unlike most other appliance vendors I talk with, they say almost nothing about the features or speed of their technology – it’s all simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I’m not being critical here; data integration can be pretty boring whether or not it’s simple, so keeping it simple is all to the good.

As for the hardware/platform side, it’s similar to what I’m hearing from other appliance vendors (Netezza and their emphasis on an FPGA are a real outlier). Namely:

• They assemble their own machines from fairly standard parts.
• The main part choices that are different from those in standard computers are in the networking area.
• Also, the mix of standard parts is tweaked to be optimal for them (e.g., they use lots of RAM).
• They have a lot of built-in redundancy.
• They wrote their own OS (“vaguely LINUX-based”).

Being even less dependent on hardware tweaks than some other appliance vendors, they might seem to be a natural candidate for the VMware “virtual appliance” strategy. But while Cast Iron has built a VMware-based prototype, they find that most of their customers don’t have a VMware infrastructure in place. Thus, going VMware-based would obviate many of the deployment advantages of the appliance format.