Avoiding the silos of Software-as-a-Service

September 17, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/integration-as-a-service/201806725

Joining us today is Dave Rosenberg, co-founder of MuleSource, a company that develops open source infrastructure and integration software, focusing on assembly, rather than repetitive coding.

DDJ: Dave, we know what Software-as-a-Service is, but what is Integration-as-a-Service?

DR: MuleOnDemand is a SaaS offering. Typically SaaS or OnDemand offerings are siloed applications. Integration-as-a-Service is taking the functionality of system integration and putting it into the cloud, providing for data transport between the enterprise and SaaS applications or third parties. MuleOnDemand acts as the mediator between applications and data sources regardless of where they physically or virtually reside.

Users subscribe to IaaS as they would any other SaaS application.

DDJ: Can you describe for readers a typical scenario involving IaaS?

DR: An example scenario would be an e-commerce site that processes orders but has order fulfillment provided by a third-party fulfillment house.

In this case:

• The order is taken from the retail site and logged internally.
• The internal system sends order data to MuleOnDemand.
• MuleOnDemand parses the order accordingly (for instance converting XML or switching from JMS message to CSV) and passes it on to the fulfillment house.
• fulfillment can subscribe to a web service that manages the transactions from the retailer.

DDJ: Is IaaS an open source project? If so, why is this important?

DR: MuleOnDemand is built on top of Mule. We expect all the additional functionality to be built back into the core product. This is important as there are a broad spectrum of APIs and other access methods that can only be addressed by a user community. Our end-goal is to provide any-to-any integration.

DDJ: Is there a web site readers can go for more information?

DR: MuleOnDemand.com has the information about the product along with the Beta.

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