Large technology vendors are known for many things, but humility isn’t one of them. Even the most visionary and deeply philanthropic of large vendors has a stroke of hubris alongside their other traits. This is true of Salesforce as well – a company that is known for reinventing corporate philanthropy and with a visionary CEO and founder who is often at the forefront of important debates. Notwithstanding all this undeniably good stuff, Salesforce is the company, after all, that prides itself on building the tallest building in San Francisco (don’t mention towers of Babel, anyone.)
So it is interesting to see MuleSoft, a company which Salesforce acquired only weeks ago, displaying some similar tendencies of its own. You see MuleSoft was named after the modest mule, a lovable but slow animal, known for being a little ornery and understated. How well does that sit within the PT Barnum style company that is Salesforce?
Well, if its latest release is anything to go by, MuleSoft is taking its new ownership seriously. The company’s latest release of its integration platform is immodestly being called Titan. Titans, of course, come from Greek mythology where they were a race of gods. Somewhat apt because in these modern times, software companies would seem to be our current gods.
Anyway, enough of that and onto the news. MuleSoft, as I mentioned before, has just been acquired so from the perspective of keeping the markets happy, it’s important for them to be seen to be rolling out new stuff. Which is where Titan comes in – not actually a new product per se, but rather a new release of the existing MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Titan delivers some new infrastructure options, as well as some monitoring functionality.
OK, so what’s actually new?
From the briefing materials, Specific Titan highlights include:
A new multi-cloud runtime designed to simplify development and operations:
- Mule 4 and enhanced Studio: New runtime version automates and simplifies common complex integration tasks and expands the scope of reusable assets to increase development speed.
- Anypoint Runtime Fabric: Container service for Mule applications allows rapid deployment on most common cloud providers and on-premises, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, virtual machines and physical servers.
A security model for distributed architectures:
- Anypoint Security: Policy-driven, enterprise-grade perimeter gateways, and automatic tokenization and encryption simplify how advanced security is delivered across the application network.
- Managing compliance: Enables customers to meet government-mandated compliance standards, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), FedRAMP In Process, EU Data Residency and EU-US Privacy Shield.
New monitoring service:
- Anypoint Monitoring: Real-time insights, dependency mapping and instant access to historical log data across APIs and integrations give operations teams the ability to speed up issue identification and root cause analysis.
More connectors expand MuleSoft’s ecosystem to scale application networks:
- New MuleSoft certified connectors include SAP BusinessObjects BI, Docker, Microsoft Office 365, Google DFP, Edifecs XEngine Server, Zoho Books and Amazon DynamoDB.
What’s the customer use cases here?
Organizations, or at least those who have attained a certain level of maturity in their adoption of modern IT practices, are certainly looking at multi-cloud as the deployment of choice (or, more correctly, they’re looking at multi-cloud precisely to avoid having to decide on a deployment of choice – rather they can give their individual teams a degree of autonomy to make those decisions for themselves). The multi-cloud deployment models are therefore a timely offering.
The other aspect is, of course, the security one and it is undeniable that all this easy integration via the proliferation of open APIs, while increasing flexibility, also introduces many new threat vectors. It is therefore timely for MuleSoft to be making a strong security play. As Saurabh Sharma, principal analyst at Ovum puts it:
The modern IT landscape is growing increasingly complex, and the pace of change for today’s IT team is unrelenting. The adoption of mobile, cloud services, microservices and the internet of things (IoT) have rapidly expanded the boundaries of the enterprise, while IT’s ability to gain visibility to detect security attacks, mitigate business risk, and operate at the same scale is constrained. A single business transaction now crosses over dozens of different systems, and legacy security and monitoring systems can’t keep up. By leveraging a unified hybrid integration platform… IT teams can achieve a more holistic view of the organization and across different IT environments, while enabling developers to securely self-serve and innovate for the business.
MyPOV
I’m always fascinated to see what transpires in the weeks and months after a company gets acquired. This is some timely news from MuleSoft and looks to stand them in a good position to drive uptake for their new corporate overlords.
Very nice one