Today, Cornastone Technology Holdings, the enterprise solutions integration company, announced it has created a strategic partnership with US-based Cast Iron Systems - a pioneer in the field of application integration appliances - to introduce a revolutionary solution to high-cost applications integration to southern Africa.
Lufuno Nevhatalu, executive chairman at Cornastone which specialises in the provision of middleware integration solutions to the local enterprise market, says the cost of integrating enterprise applications can often boost the initial purchase price of the software by more than 200%.
"Integration is a time-consuming process requiring significant skill levels which are not always readily available. It requires custom code - resulting in expenses for testing, documentation, the original effort of writing the code and maintenance; or it takes bulky software-based integration solutions that incur large amounts of overhead for installation, hardware procurement, training and even more maintenance.
"The Cast Iron Application Router eliminates all this. It`s a special purpose hardware device that effectively reduces application integration to a plug-and-play exercise," he adds.
As a result of its work on application integration appliances, Cast Iron Systems was recently hailed as one of the US`s "10 Start-ups to Watch for 2004" by the prestigious Network World magazine.
Cast Iron Systems CEO, Fred Meyer, who is currently in SA for the local launch of the Application Router appliance, says Cast Iron was formed to address the vast majority of business integration problems that can be solved in the network.
"These call for simple business processes such as order routing or data record synchronisation. These processes may be linked together to form more complex processes but at their core, they are simple.
"Cast Iron invented the Application Router with these needs in mind: simple, integrated appliances that can quickly and easily automate a company`s business processes. And because it has been designed specifically to solve the most common integration problems, the Cast Iron Application Router is 50% to 90% less expensive to buy and maintain than solutions developed using alternative approaches.
"We are now rolling out the solution to countries around the world and decided to partner with Cornastone to bring the appliance to Southern Africa because of its proven skills in and understanding of the integration arena and the challenges faced by southern African organisations in this regard," Meyer concludes.
Share
The IDC predicts application integration services will rise to a $25 billion market by end-2004, up from $5 billion in 2000. The Cast Iron Application Router is set to take a significant portion of that market.
It is a second-generation turnkey solution that provides an appliance-based platform that automatically transforms and synchronises enterprise data, acting as the underlying information hub for IT systems.
The Application Router is the only appliance of its kind on the market. It automatically pulls information over the existing IP network and sends it to the target destination/s, transforming it from source to destination format/s in the process. It was designed from the ground up to be managed as a "black box" - it does not have the latent, underlying management complexity that haunts traditional integration software.
Cornastone
Cornastone Technology Holdings (Pty) Limited is a black owned company founded by two IT professionals and entrepreneurs with an extensive track record of delivering business value to stakeholders. Lufuno Nevhutalu, a founder of Yashu Solutions (Pty) Limited, before merging Yashu Solutions business interests into Computer Configurations Holdings Limited in 1998, brings entrepreneurship and proven business leadership skills.
Hamilton Ratshefola, a former IBM and CCH executive director, has extensive business leadership and sales experience. Hamilton led the IBM Public Sector business from a R30 million business in 1995 to a R300 million business in 1999.
BMI-T Forge Ahead and Black IT Forum honoured both Hamilton and Lufuno as members of Top 20 Black IT Professionals in SA in 1999.
In 2001, Cornastone was HP VAR of the Year with over R80 million of sales in HP enterprise infrastructure. In 2002, Cornastone was voted the ICT Top Achiever Company of the Year 2002 with sales around R100 million.
Cornastone has assembled an array of highly skilled professionals at management and technical level, with outstanding track records in sales and solutions delivery.
Cast Iron
Cast Iron Systems is the inventor of the Application Router, and is working with a premier group of customers and inventors to build a revolutionary solution to application integration. Cast Iron`s unique products enable enterprises to drastically reduce their integration costs by offering a simple yet scalable device. Based in Mountain View, California, Cast Iron was founded in 2001 and consists of a world-class team committed to solving the costly and complex IT application integration challenges facing today`s Fortune 500 organisations. For more information, visit Cast Iron`s Web site at www.castironsys.com.
For a fascinating cover story article about application integration appliances, go to Computer Business Review Online here.
Editorial contacts