MuleSoft is on a mission to help customers accelerate the rate they deliver projects. We achieve this through taking a strategic view of integration and providing a supporting integration platform.
To further this mission, we now offer an automation suite on top of our integration platform. This automation suite will expand the number of systems we can integrate to and also allow a larger developer audience to build integrations. By increasing the number of developers, we can help organizations currently challenged with staffing shortages to deliver on their digital transformation initiatives.
API-led connectivity: A strategic approach to integration
Many integration projects are implemented in a point-to-point fashion. Using this approach, integration for new projects needs to be built from scratch. This is inefficient and leads to brittle and inflexible integrations.
To remedy this, MuleSoft has changed the way the industry approaches integration by promoting an alternative approach called API-led connectivity. API-led connectivity focuses on re-use of assets and accelerates project delivery by up to three times the speed of point-to-point approaches.
Introducing MuleSoft’s automation suite
We’ve recently announced an automation suite. While tools like robotic process automation (RPA) have been in the market for some time, the MuleSoft automation suite builds on top of our strategic integration platform to help deliver additional value.
To make automation tools useful, they should be able to easily consume systems and processes from the back-office and other components delivered by core IT. Once consumed, these systems and processes should inherit all the security and governance needed for enterprise grade deployment. The MuleSoft integration platform makes this possible, and it allows users to rapidly deliver digital experiences.
Blazing a trail
The business users mentioned above represent a new, previously untapped generation of integration developers. In this year’s Dreamforce keynote, we featured a trailblazer named Sima Samara. As a refugee, Sima’s skills as a healthcare worker were not recognized in her adoptive country, so she needed a new career direction.
Sima notes she “would never have believed [she could] be a software engineer”. But through Trailheads and with the help of the trailblazer community, she was able to reskill her abilities and is now a Salesforce developer.
Sima’s story is inspirational primarily because of her personal journey. But there’s another aspect of this story that’s important. Tailblazers like Sima can help our customers solve one of the most pressing problems they face: where to find staff to build their new digital experiences.
Bridging the skills gap
One of the top concerns for IT managers is how to fill the skills gap to deliver on their project backlog. While we’re doing a lot on the training front to increase the available pool of Mule developers, we needed to do more. We looked hard at our products and asked why do you need to be a Mule developer to build integration flows? Could we make tools for people who don’t have a background in computer science?
The skills shortage experienced globally made it obvious we needed to widen the aperture of what a Mule developer is and make our integration platform accessible to folks from diverse backgrounds and skill sets.
To realize this goal, we’ve released MuleSoft Composer and MuleSoft RPA, tools that can be leveraged by non-technical users to build and automate common tasks. Collectively, these tools make up our automation suite of products. Now in addition to the army of professional Mule developers we have added an army of trailblazers, like Sima, to accelerate our building efforts.
Spinning the production and consumption flywheel
We then set about applying the concepts of re-use and API-Led connectivity to create a flywheel of creativity between these two groups. Professional developers build APIs with Anypoint and are able to publish these assets into our central repository, Exchange.
Exchange assets are in turn available to be incorporated into Composer flows by non-technical users. The users can also publish their RPA assets into Exchange and these assets can be consumed in Composer and Anypoint. We also added pre-built industry specific use cases into Exchange where they are accessible to Salesforce admins to leverage from their Salesforce flows.
The rise of the fusion team
This new collaboration of technical and non-technical users has been recognized in the industry as what are called fusion teams. Fusion teams represent the increasing levels of collaboration between business and technical teams needed to deliver digital experiences. At MuleSoft, we are arming these fusion teams with the technology they need to deliver these capabilities. Allowing existing API-Led architectures to be leveraged from a suite of automation tools allows this new extended community of Mule developers to reuse assets.
Create value through values
Through following our core values of innovation and equality we are combining cutting edge automation tooling and connecting it with a new community of developers. We are blazing a trail with this effort and invite you to join us on the journey. If you’re a business user, look to step into the world of API-led connectivity at our Composer Trailhead. If you’re an existing Mule developer, look to see how Mule can now extend to more systems by finding our RPA Trailhead.
