When people ask “what are your biggest concerns about cloud” you may think security, lack of standardization or reliability, but the real challenge is the same challenge that has challenged every enterprise; how do I get my applications to talk to each other and how to I respond to changes in my business?
The fact is that there are some major trends happening that are making integration an important if not the most important economic and business imperative.
Continue reading Integrating SaaS or Cloud applications with on-premise databases may seem straight forward enough at first pass but can be challenging if you don’t have the right approach.
Cloud applications like Salesforce.com provide APIs that can easily be used to integrate with your on-premise applications or databases. For example, using MuleSoft’s Salesforce.com Cloud Connector, developers can easily set up a process which polls for changes in their Salesforce org and synchronizes the data with a local database instance. The assumption here is that the integration platform is running behind the firewall and is always the one making outbound calls to the Cloud looking for changed data.
Continue reading We’re pleased to announce Mule iON public beta, a cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that enables developers to integrate and orchestrate applications and services. With Mule iON, you can integrate with popular SaaS application, cloud services, and social media platforms easily using a library of out-of-the-box cloud connectors. At the same time, you can integrate your enterprise applications as well, using a security gateway that is part of Mule iON.
Activiti is a light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and system admins. However, its standard version doesn’t allow you to integrate with your existing enterprise technologies (e.g. your JMS broker). In this post we will briefly explain how to integrate Activiti with JMS using Mule’s Activiti Module.
First, you will need to run Activiti in embedded mode inside your Mule application; it is pretty similar to run Activiti inside Spring. An example configuration is shown next; you will need to define your processEngineConfiguration and the service beans you can obtain from it:
Then you will also need to define your JMS broker; in our case we will use Active MQ:
On Monday we announced a public beta of Mule Studio, a new graphical tool that makes designing, testing and running Mule flows a snap.
If you were intrigued and wanted to know how to get started, we’ll be offering a webinar on Mule Studio on May 19.
This 45-minute demo-driven techical webinar will offer a tutorial to getting started with Mule Studio.
Topics covered will include:
Logistics:
Date: May 19, 2011
Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST / 7pm CET (find your time zone)
Register for the Webinar here
I spent 2 years of my life working as an Identity Management (IdM) consultant a long time ago, when clouds were related to weather and SAAS sounded like the Scandinavian Airlines. The environment changed an now more and more companies are moving to the cloud relying on applications living outside their firewalls, but there’s something that didn’t change: The need to provision user accounts. This is the main reason why I will like to spend some of my free time the next months trying to build an IdM solution for the cloud on the cloud.
Let me give you an easy example. I can bet that you have accounts in one or more of the following applications: email (google, yahoo, hotmail), Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, etc. In all those applications at least you provided your email address, username, first name, last name, password, etc. What will happen if you want to change your name? You will need to go to each application and change it. This is not a real world example as it doesn’t cover not even 10% of what IdM is meant for (It doesn’t make too much sense using IdM for personal use), but the fact is that people use different applications and have different accounts in each of them.
Companies have employees, customers and providers and in many cases each of them need access to different applications in order to be able to do their work. The challenges the company then face are:
These are only some of the problems IdM applications address, and in order to make things more clear, let me provide some examples of things you can do with them:
At this point I highly recommend reading the great post William Brant wrote about “ESB and Identity Management, a perfect match“. Most of the effort in an IdM solution resides on integration (connecting to each “external” application to provision user accounts), data mapping and, in some cases, workflows (approvals, notifications). With this in mind, this is the architecture I have in mind to start working on an IdM solution on the cloud and for the cloud.
The most important components are:
It’s just a matter of getting started. Lots of work to do (for example building the IDM application and creating more cloud connectors), but I enjoy working on these kind of projects. If you like the idea or have comments to make, please contact me. Also feel free to contribute with your own “Cloud Connectors” (and don’t forget to implement the APIs for user account provisioning!)
SalesForce.com has been a pioneer in the software as service(SaaS) space. By offering a reliable and highly flexible interface they have grown to a company with revenues of over a billion dollars a year. Currently today many companies store their system of record in SalesForce or at the very least use it for management of all customer accounts and opportunities. With such valuable information it isn’t any surprise that the need to integrate SalesForce with other systems in the enterprise is highly desirable. In this post I will take you though the use of Mule with SalesForce.
First, lets get things setup, the best place to find the needed connectors for Mule is by searching the MuleForge. There we can find information about the SalesForce connector which is located here.
Continue reading Last time that I blogged about Studio was when we had a limited private beta. The program went really well and we got a lot of great feedback. Now, I’m really happy to announce that we have released Mule Studio (beta) to the public. You can download it from here. Mule Studio is free and anyone can use it.
Continue reading Identity Management solution already exist so why look to an ESB for the integration services. Like any solution you want an identity and access management platform that meets certain criteria such as sustainability, ongoing innovation, Integration capabilities and completeness of platform.
Why are the above issues relevant for an identity management platform? The reasoning comes from the fact that almost all identity management platforms are built up by acquisition and not innovation. Because of the manner IDM platforms are built most are usually proprietary. The build-by-acquisition methodology usually translates to costly licensing scenarios and relatively slow innovation with incremental improvements that usually lag behind the industry. While the solutions are presented as a purposefully designed product suite, in actuality they are separate products that are bolted together and altered to look like a relatively seamless offering, however to really make the solution work, you need expertise in each bolt on component in the solutions
The following part of the blog will deal with “identity based services” and how they fold into the service oriented framework.
Continue reading Millions of online transactions occur every day in the purchasing of goods and services. With each transaction a number of systems are involved. First some form of payment must be processed. Next the customer information is captured which must end up in a CRM system. Then the order for goods must be fulfilled by notifying the fulfillment system or by alerting a specific department to the order. Each step in the process is normally handled by a separate system with its own set of APIs and data model. This type of integration is something that Mule eats up!
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