Review: Systems Integration In A Box

The iA3000, which Cast Iron Systems began shipping in May, bundles into an appliance most of the solutions now used to integrate applications that require point-to-point-type integrations.

Essentially, the appliance eliminates the need to enlist specialized integration experts by allowing application programmers to integrate systems -- opening the door for a broader range of solution providers to handle integration engagements.

While the Cast Iron solution doesn't compete with high-end integration suites from WebMethods, Tibco or Vitria, it will work fine for most midsize and small projects, the CRN Test Center finds. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also sells the iA3000-SF appliance, which simplifies Salesforce.com integration with any external system.

The iA3000 fits into the midsize market, where customers often hire system integrators to develop custom solutions. Typically, custom solutions require a myriad of components and parts such as adapter/connector software, specific platforms with brokers to facilitate integration, dedicated hardware to run those custom applications, databases and monitoring software. On critical systems, high-availability solutions must be resolved as well.

The traditional approach calls for all of those parts to be maintained by two to three IT groups during the life cycle of integration solutions. When adding new customization and patches into overall expenses, traditional integration becomes a costly operation. Most customers don't miss adding those costs when reviewing proposals from consultants, so the iA3000 can save money by reducing maintenance.

The iA3000 software performs connectivity between systems, data transformation and mapping, workflow and management. The management feature provides logs for the appliance's hardware and all the business transactions. In addition, the software handles all middle-tier custom coding through JavaScripts.

Many types of end points can be connected to the iA3000. The appliance comes with drivers for all major databases, flat files, HTTP, inbound/outbound e-mail, MQ Series and Web services using SOAP 1.1, and Cast Iron soon plans to offer JMS. The vendor's Salesforce.com appliance includes a specific set of Web services for that application.

The iA3000 can connect natively to SAP using BAPI and iDOC, and it supports many packaged back-office applications such as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, MatrixOne, QAD and Oracle. In addition, the appliance can mix connection points by exposing legacy protocols through Web services, an operation that's performed with one click of a button.

To connect to legacy mainframes and midrange servers, the iA3000 requires customers to expose applications using Web services wrappers or by linking to DB2 databases. Since the DB2 links provide direct bridging to other systems, the role of iA3000 is superficial on those deployments. The iA3000 can also connect to legacy applications through flat files.

For B2B integration, the iA3000 provides EDI, flat files, generic XML and custom XSLT mapping. All of the mapping is done via graphical interfaces between sources and targets. The appliance uses BPEL for its workflow engine, which uses a graphical drag-and-drop environment.

The iA3000, too, performs persistence and error handling behind the scene, so users don't have to do any coding to guarantee transactions and revoke processes. Errors are automatically sent to log files.

With the first purchase of an iA3000, Cast Iron will do the first integration project for free. The company plans to launch a channel partner program next month, but no details on the program were available.