Enterprise Cloud Track at Cloud Expo

Cast Iron Systems, good as its name, wants to do the heavy lifting and synch applications running on-premise with those in the cloud, any kind of cloud.

It says it can connect any combination of cloud and on-premise applications.

And nobody has to leave its multi-tenant cloud environment although they could use a web-based on-premise or hosted virtual appliance or a physical appliance.

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They may not even know they're using Cast Iron's mojo since it's letting ISVs rebrand it. Dell's Integration Services folks, for instance, are selling it. Cast Iron is also providing the widgetry to Amazon's EC2 customers.

Cast Iron's next-generation cloud integration platform fittingly dubbed OmniConnect promises data migration, process integration and UI mashups, effectively making it three integration products in one.

It says users don't have to use a mish-mash of other products to get what they want.

Unlike first-generation technologies that made users execute their operations on-premise, storing only management data in the cloud, Cast Iron users can configure their integration processes in the cloud, run them in a multi-tenant cloud-based environment, and monitor all integrations from a single cloud-based console.

OmniConnect can take data from different sources and display it within the native user interface of a single application, blessedly without taking the data out of one application and putting it into another.

SaaS applications can access, cleanse and synchronize data stored in legacy systems in real-time. Processes such as quote-to-order, purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash can be modeled and seamlessly executed without leaving the OmniConnect environment.

It's got a so-called Secure Connector (CSC), a secure channel that enables the encrypted exchange of firewalled data between a company's enterprise applications and Cast Iron's multi-tenant cloud service.

It's also got a Connector Development Kit (CDK) that lets all OmniConnect-created connectivity be re-used. Cast Iron figures these connectors will typically halve the time IT and ISVs spend building integrations.

To simplify things the OmniConnect platform includes hundreds of reusable Template Integration Processes or TIPs that are searchable in an online library that contains templates for the most common processes between cloud and on-premise applications.

Cast Iron customers and partners can also create their own wizard-driven reusable templates, publish them internally or make them available to the Cast Iron community of users.

Cast Iron figures the online TIP library can save up to 80% of the time and aggravation IT or SaaS providers spend building and managing their integrations.

The widgetry, evolved from the company's older IaaS and on-premise offerings, is directed at both the cloud-struggling enterprise and SaaS providers, and is supposed to overcome any hesitancy about the cloud that people may be having.

Integration starts at $500 a month and rises with complexity to $1,500 or maybe $4,500.

• 2010 Report: Application Integration and Data Integration for Cloud and On-Premise Applications