Mulesoft is a software integration company that was founded in 2006 by Ross Mason. The firm, which provides one of the world’s most widely used integration platforms, announced earlier this year that it has been positioned by Gartner in the "visionaries" quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Application Services Governance. Alongside this, Mulesoft has won numerous other awards including winner of the 2012 Cloud Awards and a Gartner ‘cool vendor’ award.
The company runs a platform as a service (PaaS) approach for enterprises. For consumers and developers, it provides a catalogue of APIs along with an interactive development environment for running basic queries. For API providers, it offers a publishing platform and various tools to automatically generate create API documentation.
CBR spoke to Ross Mason, founder and VP product strategy, to get a brief overview of the company.
What does Mulesoft provide?
"We basically focus on connecting systems together. The whole premise is that we want Mulesoft to be the leading integration platform. Think about it as Mulesoft ‘gluing’ things together.
"It’s actually unusual; integration space has been together for around for 25 or 30 years. A lot of the companies that were in the ’90s early or early ’00s, The IBMs, Oracles, they sort of moved on from integration and started buying applications to sell to people. We’ve stepped in the gap.
"The integration problem has changed dramatically for providers. Mulesoft was really born out of frustration that working with traditional vendors was very difficult. The genesis of the company was to build a software platform that the developers wanted to use and would choose to use. We enter organisations through developers deciding to use our product to solve their problems.
"Then we have our commercial version, where the customers will start working on the open source version to make sure the thing work, then they will move to the enterprise version as soon as they’re doing anything mission critical.
"Developers like using us, and our vision extends well beyond traditional integration.
"We’ve been around for seven years, and we have 35 per cent of the Global Fortune 500 customers. We specialise in mission critical deployments – be that swiping credit card transactions, helping with mobile transactions – these all run through our platform."
How does Mulesoft differ to other vendors?
"I used to work in investment banking, and back then decisions were made at the top, and then the software was passed down to the architects and developers to go and figure out how to build their solutions.
"The problem with that model is often you were buying bad software at a high price, so Mulesoft adopted a different model, which is a subscription-based model. This means if you’re not successful in that subscription period then you can very easily just switch it off again. We measure our business on customer satisfaction, and that’s very different from the other vendors who are all propriety based, that’s working really well, and it also resonates very well.
"Last year our customer satisfaction was 97%, re-sub rates were 92%, and interestingly our upsell was 186%. That’s pretty much our model, that and getting the customer successful.
"Our business model is very different from other vendors. Having a hybrid integration platform is a lot more attractive for customers. Hybrid IT is becoming the new norm. We’re coining these changes the new enterprise.
"The other way we’re different is, I think, in our vision. Seven years since we started, I haven’t seen any innovation from the big guys in integration, yet the IT enterprise landscape has changed dramatically, but we’re working to keep that manageable.
"I think the key trend and the one I’ve certainly been talking about the most is that we’re entering the era of the new enterprise. Previously it’s been called extended enterprise which really doesn’t do it justice. The problems that these enterprises are facing, they’re actually looking at running hybrid models.
"Rather than talking three years to get a product to market, its taking 9 months, the integration has to keep up with that."
