IBM Acquisition of Cast Iron Makes Sense
Posted by TrishaG on May 3, 2010
Today, IBM announced its acquisition of Cast Iron to bolster WebSphere’s reach into the cloud. From our perspective, this move makes a ton of sense for IBM, as Cast Iron’s appliance complements and extends WebSphere nicely by focusing on data integration between traditional on-premise applications and newer cloud-based applications, such as Salesforce.com, Taleo, NetSuite, etc.
The appliance may also act as a basic connectivity tool for WebSpan – the joint IBM/Hubspan solution, which is focused on more sophisticated cross-enterprise integration. The lightweight appliance approach can be appealing to smaller, less technically sophisticated companies, and it can simply solve simple problems, which is easy to say but tough to do!
It is clear that integration and middleware are core to IBMs cloud computing strategy, and they are aggressively executing on their plan.
I also think this latest move further establishes the fact that market adoption for “cloud” solutions is evolving and maturing. Today, it is not just small and mid-size businesses that are interested in cloud-based solutions. Even larger enterprises are demonstrating an increasing willingness to deploy certain technologies and business processes in the cloud. This is likely due to the compelling TCO and time to market value proposition that is the hallmark of cloud solutions and business models.
Even though the economy in general appears to be looking up, most of us are forever changed by the financial crisis and the lingering effects. I believe that demanding rapid return on investment and speedy payback timeframes is a tenet of business that is not likely to change in the near future. As a result, I believe that the forecast looks quite “cloudy” for the foreseeable future.
Tags: Cast Iron, Cloud Computing, IBM, WebSphere
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