IT Trends

Westmont College Taps Cast Iron Cloud for Application Integration

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/18/10

Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA has gone public with its use of cloud computing for application integration. The college is using a cloud integration platform from Cast Iron Systems to secure two-way exchange of real-time information between SalesForce CRM, Westmont's on-demand constituent relationship management application, and its Datatel enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which runs on the college's private network. The Cast Iron service provides a pre-configured template for achieving the integration between the two data sets.

"Cast Iron lets us harness both cloud and network applications very quickly and provide dynamic interaction with accurate, real-time data," said Reed Sheard, CIO. "We thought about in-house coding, but development and revisions would take far too long. Cast Iron lets us pick and choose which applications and data sources we want to integrate in a very granular way according to our business rules and objectives. The speed and flexibility of the Cast Iron solution give us a tremendous creative advantage."

Future projects, according to the IT organization, may include an internal cloud-based student information system, which would provide confidential personal data, class schedules, and class lists that would be connected to the institution's Moodle system. Students and faculty would be able to access the information on their iPhones and in the Google and Amazon clouds.