IBM is acquiring Cast Iron Systems, a cloud integrations services company. The acquisition comes as the enterprise fits cloud computing into its business processes at a fevered clip.
The markets conditions are pointing to accelerated spending, vendor growth and a boom for middleware technology integration.
Cast Iron Systems, based out of Mountain View, Ca.,has been able to leverage the business process shift in the enterprise market, focusing its cloud integration mostly on financial services, media, retail and entertainment companies.
As a result, the enterprise market is starting to spend heavily on cloud integration technologies. IBM is reporting a 20 percent increase in sales for its business process and integration software portfolio.
According to IBM, companies are fast adopting software-as-a-service models and deployments to cloud-based infrastructures. The company expects the global cloud computing market to increase at an annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion to $126 billion by 2012.
The market’s exponential growth owes its acceleration to a host of factors:
Disruption. Tremendous confusion in the market means vendors are selling into an anxious market. Customers will buy a lot over the next several years during this time of disruption.
Results. Companies are seeing results. People we speak to talk about 30x savings in email network costs when shifting to a cloud computing model. IBM says the US Interior Department’s National Business Center showed a more than 50 percent increase in improvement after going to the cloud model.
Lack of Standards. Without standards, the market advantage goes to the vendors. Large scale data integration that can also properly integrate the metadata is largely dome through vendor tools.
High Demand. Due to the high demand, services are at a premium. Companies like Appirio provide expertise that few companies have. This lack of expertise is accelerating the need for integration and consulting services.
A 28 percent annual increase is significant. For a company like IBM, acquiring a company like Cast Iron Systems can mean deeper integration into this new middleware market that is emerging as more data is exchanged in a non-standardized, vendor dominated market.
