As an industry, we have worked hard over the years to turn innovation from an art to a science. One of the major insights from this work is that innovations will likely not be found anywhere near the innovation lab. Companies have a habit of making policies and procedures to streamline operations that serve to inhibit rather than foster innovation. To innovate, it helps to look at problems differently and as a consequence, the innovators will often be found on the outer rim beyond the reach of the corporate bureaucracy. For an enterprise to innovate, we need to enable the innovators with the right tools and give them a forum to showcase their work.
With the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) we built centralized integration platforms where professional developers in the integration department would build integrations for the business. Due to the centralized and exclusive nature of the ESB, it became a bottleneck, making integration development slow and costly. MuleSoft disrupted the ESB by being open-source, distributed, and cloud-first. Innovators outside of the integration group could adopt the technology to build integration assets faster and cheaper than similar integrations on the ESB. MuleSoft has grown from these disruptive beginnings to become the default platform for enterprise integration: Anypoint Platform.
At Mulesoft we believe we need to continue to bring disruptive innovation to the integration market. That’s why we released MuleSoft Composer. Built on the foundation of Anypoint Platform, MuleSoft Composer broadens the addressable market for integration developers by providing a tool that focuses on ease-of-use and accessibility for non-developers. Non-developers offer fresh perspectives on workplace tools and understand the complexities of their desired business outcomes and their technology use cases in their specific work areas. They know the challenges they face more intimately than any professional developer ever could. By exposing the data to these innovators with MuleSoft Composer, we believe we can unleash the next wave of innovation within our enterprises.
Imagine a back-office integration expert building a complex set of System and Process APIs in an API-led connectivity approach that models the enterprise order-to-cash process. By using connectors to access and format the required data, the business analyst can enable a new localized business process to provide a market-leading position for the local subsidiary – something that may never have been accomplished under a centralized model. We have pushed innovation to the edge, enabling others to innovate on top of the corporate IT fabric.
One of the major advantages of innovation at the edges is that it changes the way we develop ideas. In addition to asking the integration group at the center to develop something specific, we put the individual components out there and say, “See what you can come up with.” This fuels creative thinking and new ideas which get added to the marketplace of ideas. The potential exists for many integrations, and this is where the governance and control capabilities of Anypoint Platform come into play to curate and foster the winning ideas and to manage out the losers.
We believe that Composer and the integration ecosystem it creates will take companies to the next level in the same way that Salesforce’s AppExchange has become a huge driver for Salesforce customers.
“Building an ecosystem is about acknowledging that the next game-changing innovation may come from a brilliant technologist and mentor based in Silicon Valley, or it may come from a novice programmer based halfway around the world. A company seeking to achieve true scale needs to seek innovation beyond its own four walls and tap into the entire universe of knowledge and creativity out there.”
– Marc Benioff via The Wall Street Journal
So what are you waiting for? It’s time to start Composing! Learn more about MuleSoft Composer in this demo or contact your Account Executive about unlocking innovation in your organization.
