CastIron iA3000: EAI Solution in a box

I knew about a number of EAI solutions out there which were direct competitors of BizTalk but this one came as a surprise. There is EAI "solution" available from the company called CastIron by the name iA3000 x. Its a ready hardware/software solution for doing precisely EAI. Lets hear directly from the vendor and compare it with BizTalk:

* Pre-built connectivity to salesforce.com
* Supports all standard and custom salesforce.com objects
* Performance optimized for salesforce.com
* AppExchange certified
* Pre-configured Accelerator for SAP to salesforce.com integration
* Support for enterprise and partner WSDLs
* Support multiple salesforce.com logins
* Built-in session management to persist logins to salesforce.com
* Monthly subscription pricing
* Bi-directional Integration
* 24 x 7 production support
* No restrictions on number of users for configuring/monitoring
* Graphical data transformation
* Content-based data routing
* Lights-out management and error notifications
* Guaranteed delivery of transactions
* Web-based monitoring of integrations
* Secured management and data communication
* Real-time and batch integration
* Unlimited enterprise application connectivity
* Redundant hot-swappable components
* Dual CPUs for enhanced performance
* High throughput projects Integration Capabilities XML Standards
* XML Schema, XSLT, XPath Internet Standards Support
* HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Secure FTP, POP3, SMTP, MIME Middleware
* Websphere MQ (formerly MQSeries), Websphere MQ JMS, Web Services (WS-I Basic Profile 1.0), SOAP 1.1 Application Connectivity
* Pre-built salesforce.com connectivity (AppExchange certified)
* ERP including Lawson, Oracle, JD Edwards, SAP, Great Plains, PeopleSoft, NETSUITE, QAD, etc.
* CRM including Siebel, Salesforce.com, Clarify, Remedy, Right Now, etc.
* All major databases including Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix
* PLM including Matrix One, Agile
* Project Mgmt systems including CA Clarity (NIKU)
* Legacy applications using Flat-files, Web Services, etc.
* And many more…

Almost all of the above is already supported by BizTalk and a lot more probably because this  is  a  smaller  product and  BizTalk, after its evolution, has grown into a much larger one. Now to compare the two:

• BizTalk is not a boxed solution, its just software
• BizTalk is very expensive and is more than EAI
• BizTalk takes more horsepower than this solution but its java based
• It is supposed to be simple and very user friendly which BizTalk is as well though not necessarily as simple. It has a single web-based UI for administrating everything. BizTalk too has a single administration console
  
• It has a integrated development environment for solutions. BizTalk uses Visual Studio and due to the shear breadth of options, its a little more distributed.
• Does not have long-running transactions as well as human-intervention support.
• In web services supports only WS-I Basic profile whereas BizTalk supports the whole stack and in coming time will support every Microsoft protocol through WCF adapters.
• In workflow only supports sequential whereas BizTalk has both sequential and parallel support.