MuleSoft Unveils Cloud Integration PaaS Beta

According to a survey of attendees at Interop earlier this month, nearly 70 percent have deployed or plan to deploy cloud computing, but nearly as many admit to not having confidence in the strategy for managing the performance of those cloud computing resources.

That sounds like good news to cloud integrator MuleSoft, which went live today with the public beta of Mule iON, its cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Referring to Gartner data, the company says that at least 35 percent of all large and midsize organizations worldwide will be using one or more iPaaS offerings in some form by 2016.

MuleSoft made its reputation with Mule ESB, a Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform that allows developers to connect applications together. To date, the open-source application infrastructure solution is used by over 2,500 organizations, including more than a third of the global 500, with more than 1.5 million downloads.

The company has always been focused on developers, says CTO and founder Ross Mason, and unlike first-generation cloud integration products like Cast Iron (bought by IBM) and Boomi (acquired by Dell), Mule iON is the first true iPaaS. "We need a way to integrate cloud silos. There are massive integration challenges arriving and iON is the first to address that," in that it does the tactical and strategic integration in the cloud.

Analyst Michael Cote, Redmonk, likes MuleSoft's experience and assets in this area. "They started out life as a mature, cheaper alternative to other expensive, ponderous ESBs out there, for example going after Tibco. That kind of ESB and data integration work is dirty, tedious, and time consuming: successfully working with all the different end-points, applications, and data formats out there requires one thing, time, which MuleSoft has had a lot of. I expect to see that maturity brought to iOS, and hopefully the open source community that helps build out all that functionality as well."Cote says it won't be easy for the company to compete billion-dollar companies like IBM and Dell. "The other risky part, with respect to Boomi and Cast Iron, is that Dell and IBM really like those two offerings at the moment: the acquisitions haven't gotten lost in those big companies." He says if you look through the cloud computing success stories of each of those companies, many of them rest on the cloud integration solutions Boomi and Cast Iron drive.

"As ever, MuleSoft's advantage is being small, theoretically giving it the nimbleness to deliver broader functionality more frequently than the larger vendors without worrying about cannibalizing existing revenue. For example, with IBM you have all sorts of 'potential' revenue conflict between Cast Iron's possible ambitions with queues, integrations, and even ETL software over in their Info group." An alternative to the David-and-Goliath scenario, he suggests, for a large company to buy them and give them the same attention given to Boomi and Cast Iron now.

The category of cloud integration is seeing a lot of interest and use now, says Cote. "You can see MuleSoft moving to that demand here, while IBM Cast Iron, Dell Boomi, and dozens of other little startups and projects are servicing that need as well. As with any type of software, whether it's running on-premise or in the cloud, you usually need to use several applications in concert to get the most value. This can be simple things like integrating between CRM and marketing & automation software to start and keep up with what your customers are doing, to more complex things like syncing between your ERP system and cloud-based invoicing. While there's definite savings and flexibility gains that using cloud-based platforms or, even just, SaaS applications, businesses will still need to look for ways to integrate data between all the end points on the cloud and on the ground."

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