Open source enterprise service bus maker MuleSource is getting ready to offer ESB-based integration services in a hosted, SaaS fashion.The service will be “ESB in the cloud,” said MuleSource CEO Dave Rosenberg at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon. MuleSource plans to offer the service via a partnership with SaaS delivery vendor OpSource. “It will be the full functionally that you would get out of the service bus now, operating online and you’ll be able to connect to it over the Internet,” Rosenberg said. MuleSource currently offers the Mule ESB. Users at both the enterprise and small-business levels will be able to link data and applications.“Let’s say if I’m using salesforce.com and I have either an enterprise app or I have two on-demand apps and I want them to talk to each other and I want to transfer data from one to the other. You’ll be able to do that across the bus,” Rosenberg said. The service will provide transformation and protocol routing as well as the ability to break messages apart and store and forward. “It’s a literal bus in the cloud,” said Rosenberg. “Our focus is really on pushing enterprise data out to the cloud and being able to get data back in securely,” he said. Connectivity between applications will be done through a simple, defined schema, Rosenberg said. Availability is targeted for the third or fourth quarter of this year.MuleSource’s effort is similar to Microsoft’s recently announced BizTalk Services, which is an Internet-hosted platform featuring an “Internet Services Bus” that can offer data connectivity between end points as well as workflow and identity and access management. Technology Industry