IBM Acquires Cloud Integrator Cast Iron Systems

IBM has expanded its SaaS portfolio even further with the acquisition of cloud integration service provider Cast Iron Systems. IBM’s goal is to make it easier for customers to move from legacy systems to a hybrid cloud model. Here are some perspectives.

While financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed by either party, Cast Iron counts some major companies as clients, including NEC, Peet’s Coffee and Tea, Dow Jones and Time Warner. Cast Iron’s speciality is to create hybrid cloud solutions by integrating on-premises applications like SAP and JD Edwards with platforms like Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) by way of an arsenal of pre-built templates that eliminate the need for custom code.

Big Blue is clearly expecting the Cast Iron announcement to pay off in the long run – the IBM press release indicates they expect the cloud computing industry to grow from $47 billion in 2008 to a $126 billion one in 2012. Given their high hopes, adding services to get large enterprises onto their cloud platform sooner rather than later seems to make sense.

Under the acquisition deal , IBM will continue to support Cast Iron Systems’ products and clients while easing them into the other cloud services they offer. Cast Iron’s 75 employees will all be integrated into IBM.

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