I talk with the press frequently. They thankfully whack down my ramblings into concise quotes. For those who prefer to see more, I try to dump publish slightly polished up conversations I have with press into this category of posts: Press Pass. I emailed with Steve Wexler about today’s Mule iON beta announcement. Here’s the full press pass:
Q: What are the biggest strengths and weaknesses of this product?
What’s nice about MuleSoft is their 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.
Q: While MuleSoft is somewhat dismissive of Boomi and Cast Iron as outdated cloud integration solutions, they do have Dell and IBM attached to them, respectively. How big an issue is MuleSoft’s size for prospective customers?
It’s not easy competing against billion dollar companies. 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. 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. If you’re all into small vendor risk-management, as that type of MuleSoft customer you what you want to see is MuleSoft be so successful that a large company buys them and gives them the same attention given to Boomi and Cast Iron now.
Q: What are the biggest trends driving this market segment?
The category of cloud integration is seeing a lot of interest and, thus, use now. You can see MuleSoft moving to that demands here, while IBM Cast Iron, Dell Boomi, and dozens of other little startups and projects 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.
Disclosure: MuleSoft, IBM, and Dell are clients.
Great article and overview of MuleSoft in comparison with IBM Cast Iron and Dell Boomi. I agree with the notion that open source and smaller companies are by design more nimble than a multi-billion companies and “laptop manufacturers”. When we were selecting EBS vendor, we looked at are other open source companies, i.e. Talend and JBoss' Teiid amd I wish we heard about these guys sooner. I don't think Mulesoft is quiet in the same category in that, ESB is not exactly data integration product and vice versa.. I see how ESB consoles like MuleSoft potentially can be used for data integration (but it’s a huge stretch in my opinion); while ESB products have a very specific need in the enterprise, that is being a service bus.. We actually ended up installing a persistent metadata server for our integration with NetSuite and SFDC (from another start up called Queplix); this is also something completely new in the data integration market and it was quiet shocking to us to be able to use their virtual metadata server for data integration, but it works somehow 😉 Perhaps you can shed some light comparing the MuleSoft to other EBS products specifically..? Thanks!
~Ted
Thanks for that detailed reply!