Cast Iron Systems announced that it has won the Best of SaaS Showplace Award, presented by THINKstrategies, the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market. The Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award program recognizes the SaaS companies delivering solutions that produce measurable business benefits for their customers

"The key to success in leveraging today's powerful new SaaS and cloud computing alternatives is integration," stated Jeffrey M. Kaplan, the founder of the SaaS Showplace and Managing Director of THINKstrategies, the strategic consulting firm that conceived and administers the Showplace. "Cast Iron Systems offers organizations a variety of integration methods to meet their specific technical requirements so they can achieve their business objectives."

While SaaS and cloud-based solutions offer tremendous business value with low cost of implementation and ease of use, integrating those solutions with other on-demand and on-premise applications realizes their true potential. Cast Iron provides integration solutions and Integration-as-a-Service which allows providers and consumers of SaaS and cloud computing solutions to more quickly and economically connect their on-demand and on-premise applications and systems. Cast Iron offers its customers unmatched deployment flexibility -- they can choose a completely cloud-based integration service called Cast Iron Cloud or on-premise integration appliances (physical or virtual) as an organization's application ecosystem expands and diversifies.

One Cast Iron customer, AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group (ABSG), a subsidiary of AmerisourceBergen Corporation, handles specialty pharmaceutical distribution and related services. The company deployed Salesforce CRM in three of its distribution business units using the Cast Iron Integration Solution to connect the SaaS application with its corporate data warehouse. This has given ABSG's customer service associates immediate access to accurate, real-time data across three business units so they can rapidly resolve issues and respond to customer requests. The company is pushing tens of thousands of record updates a day through Cast Iron integration into Salesforce CRM to service sales of medicine and other healthcare products through the company's ecommerce-enabled call centers.

"Cast Iron has emerged as the de facto integration standard based on our success in the enterprise market and extensive experience in SaaS and Cloud integration," said Ken Comée, CEO of Cast Iron Systems. "Speed, simplicity, and flexibility are the core tenets of the Cast Iron solution -- our customers connect their SaaS and Cloud applications with the rest of the enterprise in days with cost savings of as much as 80 percent. That is real business value."