Cast Iron Launches Powered By Cast Iron(TM) Partner Program to Accelerate Software as a Service Adoption

Market Wire, October, 2008

Cast Iron Systems , the #1 SaaS integration company , today officially launched Powered By Cast Iron (TM), a comprehensive program uniquely designed for SaaS providers. Powered By Cast Iron solves the challenges of selling SaaS into the enterprise by combining leading products, proven services methodologies, and customized sales and marketing strategies. The program eliminates the need for SaaS vendors, VARs, SIs, and OEMs to develop and maintain their own integration solutions and gives them everything they need to deliver low-risk, high-reward Integration as a Service (IaaS) to their customers.

"Cast Iron is the only company to offer a comprehensive program that transforms integration into a major advantage for SaaS providers," said Ken Comée , CEO of Cast Iron Systems. "The Powered By program shares Cast Iron's technical and marketing experience with our partners to help accelerate sales and rapidly deliver the full benefits of SaaS to their customers."

Many SaaS buyers believe they must face complexity when integrating SaaS with existing systems that contain business-critical information. The Powered By Cast Iron program eliminates this complexity by offering simplicity, speed, and flexibility through a choice of offerings including but not limited to multiple products, including physical or virtual appliances and the Cast Iron Cloud (TM).

Industry Analysts Endorse Program

"Integration is one of the biggest concerns for companies considering SaaS," according to Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies, Inc. and founder of the Software as a Service Showplace. "The Powered By Cast Iron program gives SaaS providers a new way to demonstrate their integration capabilities, respond to customer concerns, and satisfy their requirements."

Analyst Michael West of Saugatuck Technology agrees: "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."

Powered By Cast Iron partners can deliver an elegant IaaS or on-premise integration solution to their customers, accelerating user adoption and boosting productivity enterprise-wide. Neither SaaS providers nor their customers need to invest in integration infrastructure or middleware staffing. The Powered By Cast Iron program leverages the Cast Iron Cloud and Cast Iron appliances to provide secure, robust, rapid integration development, support, maintenance, and monitoring -- anytime, anywhere.

West further notes: "Cloud-based collaborative and integrative capabilities will be the key drivers and enablers of SaaS adoption worldwide through at least 2012. The most successful SaaS vendors will be those that make a successful transition to integrative cloud services."

Partners Endorse Program

Many leading SaaS providers, including, Gearworks, Intelenex, NetSuite, salesforce, Serene Corporation, Taleo, and Xactly, among others, have already joined the Powered By Cast Iron program. They recognize integration as both a competitive advantage and a promising value-added revenue stream. Powered By Cast Iron lowers the costs and risks associated with integration by delivering a solution that has been proven and refined over many years, hundreds of providers and thousands of customer integrations.

"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."

"We're using Powered By to migrate our customers' historical employee and candidate information into Taleo Business Edition," said Jason Blessing, general manager and group vice president, Taleo Business Edition, for Taleo, the leading provider of on-demand talent management solutions. "Regardless of whether we need to migrate this data from other on-demand solutions, on-premise applications, or a mix of both, we now have a single solution with flexible cloud- or appliance-based options that allows us to on-board new customers very quickly."

"As the leading provider of on-demand sales performance management software, we do for post-sales processes what CRM does for pre-sales," said Steve De Marco, vice president of business development for Xactly Corporation. "But in order to help our customers optimize their sales compensation strategies, we have to help them get a holistic view of their business from company performance, inventory, and shipping schedules to sales history and lead conversion rates. Powered By Cast Iron gives us the integration resources we need, when our customers need them."