MuleSource: Lightweight integration for heavyweight companies

What do you get when a Swiss Army knife meets enterprise software? That’s the pitch from MuleSource, an open source startup that’s striving to bring flexibility, speed, and low cost to the complex world of large-scale integration.

MulesSource’s open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and integration platform takes a lightweight approach to enterprise application integration. “It’s sort of a meta-bus,” says Dave Rosenberg, who — in addition to being CEO — is co-author of the Open Sources blog hosted by InfoWorld.com.

“People think of it in their own context, and everyone uses it differently,” he explains. Rosenberg believes that for real world SOA, a single, giant bus sitting in the middle is not realistic, which is why Mule users often end up installing Mule on many boxes and setting it up in front of multiple systems. “They end up with many little buses connecting legacy apps into a bigger backbone, moving and managing data across disparate systems.” Given the varied use cases, the Swiss Army label seems apt.

“You can think of Mule as kind of a giant container that will consume and transact with any type of functional data,” Rosenberg adds. In practical terms, that means Mule can do message brokering, routing, and transformation between any inbound point and any end point, enabling many-to-many communication.

Started as the open source Mule project in 2003, MuleSource has been around only since 2006. Like many open source projects, Mule was born out of frustration and the need to solve a problem. English developer Ross Mason, who was working for a bank at the time, was tired of what he called “donkey work” — writing rote, largely non-standards-based code to allow a few applications to work together. He was sure there had to be an easier way, something that would leverage service orientation to integrate apps and attach end points. Mule was his answer to the problem.

And the answer seems to be resonating with customers. The current client list includes seven of the Fortune 50, meaning this scrappy little startup has found a home within the core, mission critical systems of some of the world’s largest companies. The diverse customers set also includes the FAA, the state of Texas, and Major League Baseball, which uses Mule to feed its Web site, handling I/O for all play-by-play and pitch-by-pitch data, player information, box scores and more. Another client, HR Block, ran an initial pilot with 60 Mule servers; by 2009, according to Rosenberg, every HR Block store will have a Mule server running.

The growing Mule community is responding as well, writing and donating connectors for just about everything, from Siebel and the open source CMS Alfresco to the entire WS-* family. “People like Mule because it’s just Java and XML,” Rosenberg says. “All your logic is in Java, all configurations are in XML.” That means developers can code quickly, using the tools they want.

As proof of the wisdom of Mule’s open source model, Rosenberg cites a recent survey, which revealed that 60 percent of Mule users make some kind of extension or plug-in to the product. Customization like that is time-consuming, expensive, and just plain difficult with conventional software, which is why Rosenberg believes the old model has to go. “Enterprise software has failed completely in this spot [integration],” he insists. “Here you have something that’s crucial to the business and you need a huge level of customization. But you can’t get that with a proprietary vendor.”

Rosenberg believes you can get that with MuleSurce, which isn’t such a newfangled sort of company that it doesn’t believe in making money. Mule itself is free (licensed under MPL), but MuleSource offers subscription support and management tools that will do autodiscovery of your infrastructure. That approach may not open the door to untold riches, but it will get Mule in the door of many businesses looking for a loosely coupled, lightweight integration solution that just plain works.