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MuleSource is building onto its Enterprise Service Bus technology with the Jan. 15 announcement of a subscription-only offering of its open-source service-oriented architecture infrastructure software, an open-source SOA governance offering and a beta release of a business activity monitoring tool.
San Francisco-based MuleSource is now offering Mule 1.5 Enterprise Edition, which company CEO Dave Rosenberg calls an out-of-the-box ESB solution for any enterprise integration or SOA project.
With the subscription-only offering, MuleSource is splitting its technology “between a community version and an enterprise version,” Rosenberg said. “We’re going down the Fedora/RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] route,” he added, referring to Red Hat’s sponsorship of the Fedora Project, which maintains a community version of Red Hat’s Linux. RHEL is the commercial version of the technology.
New features in Mule Enterprise include support for the Apache CXF Web Services Framework; patch management and provisioning via MuleHQ; streaming of large data objects through Mule without being read into memory; BPM (business process management) process initiation and management, including parallel processes; and nested routers to decouple service implementations from service interfaces, company officials said.
MuleSource also announced the community edition release of Mule Galaxy 1.0, an open-source SOA governance platform with integrated registry and repository capabilities. Mule Galaxy is “the open-source Systinet,” said Rosenberg, referring to Hewlett-Packard’s popular Systinet SOA governance technology.
Click here to read about MuleSource’s developer collaboration Web site.
The Mule Galaxy offering delivers registry and repository features such as governance and life cycle management, dependency management, artifact management, and querying and indexing, he said.
The pluggable Mule Galaxy can be used with the Mule ESB or as a stand-alone piece of an overall SOA architecture. It can integrate with Mule, Apache CXF or Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation, Rosenberg said.
Mule Galaxy supports Mule configurations, WSDL (Web Services Description Language), Web services policies and custom artifacts, according to the company.
The new Mule governance platform supports a REST (Representational State Transfer) and Atom publishing protocol approach to enable integration with a variety of platforms, the company said.
“We’ve taken an RSS approach of being able to subscribe to services,” Rosenberg said.
“We’ve taken a pragmatic approach to connecting with the user,” said Dan Diephouse, a MuleSource software architect, the creator of Xfire and project lead for Apache CXF. “We’ve focuses on the governance aspect, and we establish run-time policies via a Web services policies language.”
Mule Saturn for BAM
In addition to the new enterprise release of Mule ESB and the beta release of Mule Galaxy, MuleSource also announced the release of Mule Saturn 1.0, a tool for business activity monitoring for business processes and workflow.
Mule Saturn’s features include business user views into workflow and state, process visualization, drill-down and root-cause analysis, and reporting on service-level agreements, the company said.
Rosenberg said with the combination of Mule Enterprise Edition 1.5, Mule Galaxy and the Mule Saturn BAM tool, MuleSource is making SOA infrastructure software more accessible to enterprises.
Indeed, the cost of Mule’s governance solution will be just a fraction of what HP charges users for Systinet, Rosenberg said. He said he expects a fully functional Mule governance solution to cost around $75,000, whereas a comparable Systinet solution might start in the range of $350,000.
Roy Schulte, an analyst with Gartner, said overall interest in open-source SOA technology is growing with the increasing use of SOA technology. The low cost of open-source ESBs has “the potential to reduce software costs and enhance vendor independence,” he said.
Rosenberg said the emerging popularity of the Mule ESB has enabled the company to credibly add the new capabilities that the market will accept.
“This validates the Mule ESB,” Rosenberg said of the new capabilities the company announced. “I don’t know that we would have attempted this if not for the Mule name. We do believe we have the brand behind us.”
Rosenberg said MuleSource continues to grow, and he is looking to expand the company’s engineering and sales groups immediately.