MuleSoft Summit 2018 Debrief

MuleSoft is the world’s leading integration platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs. They have been named leader in API Management and Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) by Gartner. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform provides exceptional business agility to companies by connecting applications, data, and devices, both on-premises and in the cloud with an API-led approach to build your Application Network. By leveraging the platform, companies can re-architect their SOA infrastructure from legacy systems, proprietary platforms, and custom integration code to create business agility.

As the Italian Mulesoft partner we couldn’t have been elsewhere than at the Mulesoft summit 2018 in London the 22 of May. Of course they’ve handled the expected topic of Salesforce acquiring Mulesoft, but the event also featured sessions from technology innovators at leading companies including Airbus, HSBC, Big Bus Tours and AD Delhaize.

Some highlights where:

• executive keynotes on the power of application networks and the product roadmap for Anypoint Platform
• the case studies from customers across financial services, retail, transportation and logistics, and healthcare. Specially the session where Airbus showed how they use Mulesoft to join all their microservices and API’s to join all data together
• the breakout sessions tailored for IT executives, architects and developers, covering industry trends like microservices, containerization, hybrid deployments and DevOps
   

Salesforce acquires Mulesoft

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is banking on MuleSoft’s ability to unlock data from legacy systems and connect them to the cloud.

The recent acquisition of Mulesoft by Salesforce was an ever present topic at this edition of the Mulesoft summit. Yet it’s clear that there will be no immediate leadership changes and MuleSoft will continue to operate independently as a Salesforce subsidiary. They will continue to be an open, technology agnostic platform.

"Salesforce is great at helping businesses connect to their customers and MuleSoft is great at helping business connect to their data.” The explosion of mobile apps, software-as-a-service applications, big data and IoT made it more expensive to connect data. The emergence of artificial intelligence will only add more complexity.

The modern API has grown up to be the de facto building block for pretty much all the software innovation that we've seen in the last ten years,

Bringing together the best of Salesforce and MuleSoft will offer an unparalleled customer-centric platform.
 

The keynotes and breakout sessions

The key themes were speed, agility, and legacy modernisation.

1. Speed
   “It's not the big that eat the small-- it's the fast that eat the slow”
   Are your ready for the fourth industrial revolution? It’s in full swing and the rate of change itself is also increasing.
   Technology is enabling change at faster rates each year, and it has never been easier for a new entrant to overtake an established player in just a few years. The bar for customer service is also rising; both internal and external users now expect customised, real-time, seamless omni-channel interactions.
    
2. Agility
   Companies that can’t adjust quickly to the changing market expectations will be at best, marginalised, and at worst, out of business. There are lots of casualties in retail, companies that couldn’t adapt quick enough to the changing landscape.
   But it doesn’t only affect retail, lot’s of other industries are becoming victim of this evolution. Nobody is immune. Nowadays IT is present in every company and their future depends on how quickly they realise they have to act.
    
3. Legacy Modernisation
   Companies grow and IT systems age. Implementing changes has become more difficult because old technologies don’t adapt well to new requirements. Years of accumulated technical debt slows down the progress.
   After acquiring and merging a company, most likely a company’s IT landscape will become a distributed, heterogeneous environment that raise projects’ costs and timelines. Instead companies need tools that connect their systems, hide the internal maze, create friendly interfaces and break the tight dependencies that create monolithic architectures.
   Innovation, modernisation and being ready for the fourth industrial revolution is allowing the development of new applications and features to be built on top in a decoupled way simultaneously.
    

New features

With the Anypoint platform Titan release Mulesoft allows you to eliminate observability gaps and maintain control over the complex landscape of cloud and on-premises applications, data, and devices without sacrificing agility.  

During the summit, MuleSoft announced several new features/functionalities:

• Mule 4 and Studio: next-generation multi-cloud runtime engine and IDE.
• Anypoint Runtime Fabric: A container service for deploying Mule runtimes across clouds.
• Anypoint Monitoring: Monitoring and diagnostics purpose-built for application networks.
• Anypoint Security: A suite of advanced security capabilities advanced perimeter and tokenization services, simple to apply.
   

What’s next?

Speed, Agility and Modernisation are more important than ever, and across industries. While the products are different, the IT challenges are very similar. We’re looking forward to see what Salesforce and Mulesoft will accomplish together and what next years features will be.

In the meantime we keep on being the Italian Mulesoft partner for all system integration infrastructures using API integrations, ESB, SOA and Microservice.
 

Thread Solutions as a Mulesoft partner

Multiple companies across the retail, health care, finance, and transportation industries presented case studies of how they are transforming their operations and enabling agility using MuleSoft.
In many/most of these situations, the companies partnered up with a service provider, like Thread Solutions, to help plan, implement, and manage the transformation.

Here are some examples of companies we’ve helped to develop a system integration infrastructure using Mulesoft.

Infosyn delivers electronic invoicing services to public and private entities. Connecting to the Interchange System (SDI) managed by the central revenue agency (Agencia delle entrate), their customers are able to gather all information and details needed for every invoice through their system. We’ve configured Mulesoft in such a way that the central invoicing tool gathers the information from the different platforms for every single invoice. As a result Infosyn’s clients only need one platform to have all information.