Cast Iron Systems, an integration appliance vendor, has introduced a family of new appliances -- cute li'l darlings named iA2500-RN, iA3000-RN and iA3000HA-RN, traditional family names from the father's side, the mother wanted to name them Cooking Pot, Stomach and Dakota -- designed for RightNow's on demand customer relationship management (CRM) products.

Requiring no software to purchase, install, or maintain, these RightNow-optimized appliances are billed by Cast Iron officials as able to reduce integration costs by as much as 80 percent over traditional software-based alternatives.

Scott Creighton, RightNow's vice president of business development, said by simply configuring integration appliances that have built-in connectivity to RightNow "we can complete integration projects rapidly without writing code."

The RightNow series of Cast Iron Integration Appliances provide built-in connectivity using RightNow Connect to synchronize data between enterprise systems and RightNow in real-time, to give users a "consistent and accurate experience across all channels and touch-points." Cast Iron officials say.

Built-in technology is provided to integrate RightNow with such applications and endpoints as SAP (News - Alert), Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Clarify, Remedy, Salesforce.com, SQL Server, Informix, DB2, flat-files (FTP/HTTP), XML, and Web services.

According to Gartner (News - Alert) Research, the appliance-based approach to solving integration problems is set to become even more prevalent. "More than 40 percent of large businesses will deploy an application-fluent network appliance by 2008," said Frank Kenney, principal research analyst at Gartner. "Compared to custom integration, integration appliances can save money and accelerate the time to market for integration projects that involve common business processes."

Last month RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte was inducted into the CRM Hall of Fame. Nicknamed "The Lone Wolf," the tribute noted, Gianforte has spent the last decade "in Bozeman, Montana, far from the glare of Silicon Valley and the rest of the CRM cohort." CRM magazine has written that Gianforte "always recognized that the people matter at least as much as processes."

Gianforte founded RightNow in 1997 in Bozeman with a goal of creating a world-class enterprise software company in Montana, and within three years Gianforte had 500 customers, 100 employees and an on demand product that could "dramatically improve the quality and effectiveness of client's online customer service operations," according to the Hall of Fame citation.

In 2004 Gianforte took the company public with one of the most successful initial public offerings that year; RightNow stock rose 130 percent in 2004. By 2006 Gianforte had hired more than 500 employees and RightNow had facilitated more than one billion customer interactions.

Most recently, Gianforte oversaw the company's biggest product release ever with the introduction of RightNow 8. The product is designed to help companies and public institutions deliver customer service in person, over the phone, on the Web or via e-mail.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.