Every business needs to stay agile. Every business wants to improve their speed. Every business wants to innovate faster. And they want to achieve these things not only today, not only tomorrow but for years in the future. This is true for established businesses dealing with digital disruption, but also the disrupters themselves. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Spotify, the world’s most popular and powerful streaming music service, has implemented MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ to improve business agility and operational efficiency.
Spotify is raising the bar for digital music services. They are experiencing explosive growth; they have a presence in 60 countries and recently announced 100 million monthly users. Spotify recognized that with this rapid growth, they needed to improve their internal connectivity to streamline business processes and ultimately create a more agile and responsive organization.
The music streaming service has been at the forefront of the DevOps movement. DevOps has allowed Spotify to create a competitive advantage through its ability to innovate faster than others in the market. As the company scaled and entered into new markets, Spotify adopted MuleSoft as its standard integration platform to complement its move to microservices and support its overall business strategy of increased agility and fast innovation. In fact, according to Ross Mason, MuleSoft teams at Spotify are known as “Squid Squads” because they have their tentacles in every system!
Microservices have become imperative to Spotify’s enterprise IT architecture. Through MuleSoft, Spotify deploys microservices to streamline the integration of existing systems such as data warehouses with company ERP infrastructure layers. This enhances business functions like forecasting and reporting through improved information sharing across the enterprise.
“Maintaining market leadership is about speed and innovation—anticipating market trends, rolling out new services and reaching new geographies as quickly as possible,” says Peter Stolt, service owner at Spotify. “MuleSoft’s approach to application development helps us maintain our ‘start-up’ agility as we scale over the longer-term. With MuleSoft, we can maximize our business support systems through an application network that can rapidly evolve in line with new initiatives and business development.”
At MuleSoft’s Connect conference in 2016, Katharina Probst from Netflix and Uri Sarid, CTO of MuleSoft, made the point that the most productive and innovative businesses at the moment, like Spotify, Tesla, and Netflix, don’t just compete with the products they offer to their customer. But they compete on the ability to be digital platforms. In other words, their success hangs on how quickly they can get those products, services, and experiences to customers at scale and in real-time. This is why maintaining “start-up agility” is so important to Spotify. As they grow, they don’t want business processes and the product development processes to calcify over time. A microservices architecture can prevent this by breaking down monolithic software architecture into small services that can be composed into processes, that can evolve independently, can be built as quickly as they are needed, and are optimized for change and reuse.
We’re excited to welcome Spotify to our customer family and equally excited to see how they create innovations with our products. Microservices architectures are becoming increasingly important to businesses that want to become more agile and innovative. We hear from most of our customers that their key business goals are achieving greater speed and agility. Combined with DevOps, microservices can create the results organizations are looking for.
Take a look at our resources on microservices best practices, and how to implement them in your organization.
