Cast Iron Systems Introduces New Integration Appliances for RightNow's On Demand CRM Solutions

Market Wire, November, 2007

Cast Iron Systems , the fastest growing integration appliance vendor, today introduced a family of new appliances -- iA2500-RN, iA3000-RN and iA3000HA-RN -- designed specifically for RightNow 's on demand customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Requiring no software to purchase, install, or maintain, these RightNow-optimized appliances reduce integration costs by as much as 80 percent over traditional software-based alternatives.

"The Cast Iron Integration Appliance gives us a solution that quickly delivers robust integrations to our customers," said Scott Creighton, RightNow's vice president of business development. "By simply configuring integration appliances that have built-in connectivity to RightNow, we can complete integration projects rapidly without writing code."

The RightNow series of Cast Iron Integration Appliances provide built-in connectivity utilizing RightNow Connect™ to synchronize valuable data between enterprise systems and RightNow in real-time, ensuring a consistent and accurate experience across all channels and touch-points. Integration projects are accelerated because the need for software coding is eliminated through a "configuration, not coding" approach, and built-in technology is provided to integrate RightNow with all major applications and endpoints, including SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Clarify, Remedy, Salesforce.com, SQL Server, Informix, DB2, flat-files (FTP/HTTP), XML, and web services.

For PGP Corp., a global security-software company, the need to integrate the company's Oracle-based order management system with the RightNow solution led to selection of the iA3000-RN.

"With Cast Iron's iA3000-RN we completed the RightNow integration with Oracle within one week and without writing a single line of code," said Dave Burnett, director of informatics for PGP Corp. "The simplicity of the appliance has enabled us to complete many other integration projects, all the while focusing on business problems rather than on low-level implementation details."

According to Gartner Research, the appliance-based approach to solving integration problems is set to become even more prevalent. "More than 40 percent of large businesses will deploy an application-fluent network appliance by 2008," said Frank Kenney, principal research analyst at Gartner. "Compared to custom integration, integration appliances can save money and accelerate the time to market for integration projects that involve common business processes."

Cast Iron's RightNow series consists of three appliances, including the entry-level iA2500-RN for connecting the RightNow suite to a single application; the iA3000-RN, an enterprise solution for connecting the RightNow suite to multiple applications; and the iA3000HA-RN for high-availability applications. Each appliance offers a comprehensive set of configuration and management tools that enable companies to complete and maintain projects quickly and easily.

"Cast Iron is proud to be a top integrator of Software as a Service applications," said Ken Comee, president and CEO of Cast Iron Systems. "The Cast Iron appliance for RightNow provides companies with the same benefits as SaaS applications: it's simple to use, takes just days to get up and running, and customers can pay for it on a subscription basis."

All three appliances are now generally available.

About Cast Iron Systems

Founded in 2001, Cast Iron Systems is the fastest growing integration appliance vendor. The company's flagship iA3000 application integration appliance garnered Network Computing's Product of the Year for the past two years. Customers include Allianz, British American Tobacco, Emerson, PGP Corporation, salesforce.com, Siemens, and Thompson Tractor. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Lehman Brothers, Cast Iron is privately held and led by experienced technology executives from Informatica, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Siebel, Vitria and webMethods. More information can be found at http://www.castiron.com .

Cast Iron Systems, the Cast Iron Systems' logo, Integrate in days, and Cast Iron Systems Integration Appliance are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cast Iron Systems, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.