Cast Iron Adds RightNow-Flavored Integration AppliancesCast Iron Adds RightNow-Flavored Integration Appliances

Cast Iron Systems offers system-agnostic and Salesforce.com-configured versions of its integration appliance. So what's next? The company answered that question today with three appliances optimized and configured for the RightNow on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) suite.

Cast Iron's appliances are billed as supporting application integration through configuration rather than coding. The boxes include pre-built connectors for SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Clarify, Remedy and Salesforce.com environments as well as for leading databases, flat-files (FTP/HTTP), XML and Web services. The boxes also include built-in transformation, business logic and management software so IT staff with basic knowledge can integrate through a mapping interface.

Launched in 2003, Cast Iron now claims more than 150 customers, including more than 90 that use the vendor's Salesforce.com-configured appliances. RightNow's base of more than 1,800 subscribers represents a new avenue for growth, and the CRM vendor says its customers are very interested in appliance-based integration.

"We're primarily focused on multichannel customer service, so our customers need call-center integration into back-office systems, Web-self-service integration into back-office systems and those sorts of SaaS-to-system connections," says Scott Creighton, VP of Alliances at RightNow.

The new appliances are preconfigured to plug into the RightNow suite, and they also include mappings and transformations for the connections that are most in demand, such transactional back-ends and order management systems.

"Until now, RightNow subscribers have been using our generic Web services connector, which requires a bit more effort," says Simon Peel, Cast Iron's senior vice president of marketing and strategy. "We've made it easier to do the final configurations to RightNow out of the box rather than accessing the API."

The new "RN" appliances are offered in three versions: the iA2500-RN connects RightNow to a single application; the iA3000-RN connects the CRM suite to multiple applications; and the iA3000HA-RN connects to multiple high-availability applications. The boxes are available on a subscription basis at $2,500, $4,500 and $6,000 per month, respectively. Upgradable appliances can also be purchased, with prices starting at $125,000.