IBM bought Cast Iron Systems because it simply had nothing in its huge Websphere toolbox that could do cloud integration. I just heard the company’s SVP of its software group Steve Mills admit this in today’s IBM press briefing, talking about the acquisition. While IBM has a massive catalog of technologies for integrating applications within a company, he confessed that tiny Cast Iron were the masters when it came to any form of integration that extends beyond the enterprise firewall: “Cast Iron connects customers to external suppliers. They do the inter-enterprise integration better than anyone else does,” he admitted.
There are other striking admissions implicit in IBM’s acquisition today. Did you hear the sharp intake of breath that reverberated across IBM Global Services on reading these two telling sentences in IBM’s press release announcing the acquisition today?
“Using Cast Iron Systems’ hundreds of pre-built templates and services expertise, expensive custom coding can be eliminated, allowing cloud integrations to be completed in the space of days, rather than weeks or longer.”
As WebSphere GM Craig Hayman told Redmonk analyst James Governor over breakfast this morning, Cast Iron’s “drag and drop technology” means that companies like ADP have cut new customer onboarding time from months to weeks, “removing the effort of building code.” For many long years, IBM — along with every other established enterprise software vendor — has avoided offering its customers such short-cuts…
