Affordable and easy to build solutions with, Mule really packs on the functionality.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We began experimenting with Mulesoft about 2 years ago, and it has grown into a complete corporate competency within a year, complete with its own IT shared service department of developers, managers and support administrators. While the core department does all the work and management, each division throughout the company has one or more developers who leverage the core team for major projects, but can build and utilize approved pre-built modules as needed. It was brought in mainly for us to connect internal legacy databases and systems to our Salesforce instance, but we find it has a lot of other utility uses in building API’s to connect just about anything. The main use case would be to extract order data from our Infor ERP and Oracle-based repositories and pipe it into Salesforce.
Pros
- Extracting order and invoice data from our Infor ERP and related Oracle-based repositories, Mule then pipes it into Salesforce, enabling us to gain a 360-degree view of the customer order life-cycle.
- We have a very complex pricing tool written in a .net application that is very difficult to get information extracted from for analytics. With Mule, we can easily pull the data out and load it into a repository for our BI tools to go after.
- Mule lets us connect our legacy CRM system (built on .net) easily to both Salesforce and our Data Warehouse for faster analytics and access to historical customer interactions. Additionally, since our Salesforce instance it new, it aids in the roll-on of new OEM partners and loading of their historical data.
Cons
- As with any system, setting up secure agents and firewall permissions was a bit of a challenge. We ran into a few SSL and certificate roadblocks that required some extra follow through with out networking staff. I think an easier plug-and-play approach with more documentation would have helped, but since Mule is newish, I assume documentation will simply improve over time.
- Lack of decent in-person training was a challenge early on, but we created our own competency internally to resolve that so haven’t had to look outside for over a year now. Recommend any newcomers follow the same path, and ensure you have redundancy in case an important resource departs.
- Pricing could be a little better, there are other options (Red Hat, etc.) and I feel like the price is only what it is because it has the Salesforce brand behind it.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you’re bringing anything into Salesforce you should just invest now into Mule, you will get your money’s worth and find a myriad of uses to build APIs between many other systems. Once you build a component you can easily reuse it as a building block to attach to another source/destination. This makes it easy to ramp up quickly and spread usage of Mule throughout your enterprise. A good value for medium to large companies, but probably cheaper to outsource your job to a consulting firm if you are smaller.
