Published on the 29/10/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Organisations weaving together computing fabrics out of various cloud services can hit the wall when it comes to successful integration…
One bi-product of the race to cloud services combined with a hunger for mobility has been an integration headache that has been left to enterprise IT departments to resolve. Unless applications and data can be integrated, enterprises using cloud services and mobile devices are at risk of creating new silos of information which can’t be easily accessed or mined for value.
Will Bosma, MuleSoft vice president for Asia Pacific explains the problem: “Business can swipe the credit card and they don’t think of the implications about how to integrate with legacy systems which may be behind the firewall.” The challenge will only grow – even though there are already more than 4000 SaaS offerings on the market, according to Bosma.
Enter MuleSoft. The company, which was set up in 2006, but born out of the 2003 open source initiative called Mule which was intended to take the “donkey work out of integration”, claims its system is the most widely used integration platform for connecting cloud and on-premise applications, along with mobile device APIs. Its approach secured the company a “visionary” award in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for application services governance.
Bosma opened the Sydney office for the company in March this year, which represented its first official foray into the region, although given the tool’s open source heritage it was already widely used here.
Used locally by the likes of Deakin and Victoria Universities, and Toyota, the integration platform features a graphical drag-and-drop interface to allow IT shops to manage integration flows between applications. While Bosma acknowledged the dearth of Mule skills, he said the tool could be easily learned by anyone with a Java background.
Competing with the likes of Oracle’s Fusion middleware, Bosma claimed Mule was available as either an open source system, or as the enterprise edition which was made available as integration-as-a-service hosted on Amazon Web Services’ platform. This enterprise version has greater functionality and support options, along with access to more than 120 ready-to-use connectors to different APIs including NetSuite, Xero, Zuora and Intuit.
The entry level pricing is around $US12,000 per year.
