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This is the most exciting time to be in the enterprise. When I started my career, I was usually asked to integrate to two types of applications: large legacy mainframe systems that had a team of ‘experts’ acting as gatekeepers and horribly customised enterprise applications that frankly nobody wanted to touch without a team of ‘experts’ to blame if things broke. There was nothing glamorous about my chosen vocation, yet I loved it. I wanted to figure out how to make these applications to better work together.
My biggest problem 12 years ago was finding the right tools to build the architectures we wanted to build; lean, light and low-maintenance. There were slim pickings and most people would default to point-to-point integration; the environmentally-unfriendly practice of tying applications together with custom code and then forgetting about it.
When I created Mule I wanted to make it easier to connect systems together. A few years later, as SaaS emerged, we created cloud connectors and DevKit to make it easier to connect to SaaS applications and APIs. Then we created CloudHub to make enterprise-grade cloud integration a reality. And today we’ve taken the next step by announcing The Anypoint Platform: the only platform that connects any application, any data source, any device and any API, in the cloud and on-premise.
The Anypoint Platform combines our existing platform (Mule ESB, CloudHub and connectors) with new capabilities for API creation, publishing and governance, rounding out everything you need to connect the New Enterprise. We’ll be covering the new capabilities in new posts over the coming days and we have the Mule Summit tour coming up that will go in depth on the Anypoint Platform, but for reference the new capabilities include:
- APIkit: This is our open source design toolkit for building REST APIs. The focus is to allow you to build consistent and scalable APIs. APIkit allows you to model what your API will look like and take care of versioning, URI scheme, security, and content negotiations as wells as adding CORS support and Swagger built in.
- Anypoint Service Registry: Built from the ground up to manage policy enforcement at run-time, this is a cloud-based registry offering (built on CloudHub, using APIkit). ASR is used to govern and manage all of you internal services and APIs, both on-premise and in the cloud. As well as support dynamic service lookups and virtualization.
- Anypoint API Manager: Released in Beta today, this cloud-based API management service allows enterprises to connect with business partners and public communities.
APIs are the driving force that is enabling change in the enterprise. Open APIs have given the enterprise a playbook on how to decouple complex systems and make them accessible to everyone. In 2005 there were just a handful of open APIs from the likes of Yahoo, eBay, Salesforce and Amazon. Today that number has exploded to over 13,000, and APIs in the enterprise is set to explode too. The consumption of Saas is critical to enable seamless processes that can span on-premise and cloud applications and API publishing is fundamental to enabling mobile and device strategies as well opening new revenue channels. We’re entering into an era of hyper-connectivity, the Anypoint Platform has been built to meet these needs of a hyper-connected world.
We’re not a fan of fat software stacks and as such each piece of the Anypoint platform is designed to stand alone, opposed to being a feature in a giant stack. This means you can pick and choose the parts of the platform you want to use. For example, you may choose to just use Mule Community and APIKit, or CloudHub, APIKit and Anypoint API Management, or everything together. However, each piece of the Anypoint platform will also work well with the others.
Integration is no longer just about connecting legacy and package applications together behind the firewall. The advent SaaS and mobile in particular have forced enterprises to think differently about the IT landscape. The number of endpoints has exploded and all of these applications and consumers live outside of the firewall. This is the New Enterprise and its highly fragmented. Our platform is designed to take on any integration challenge whether it is modernizing legacy systems with services, publishing device APIs for mobile consumers or connecting SAP and Salesforce. The Anypoint Platform connects anything anywhere.
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