01/17/2007

MuleSource, a provider of open source infrastructure and integration software, today announced that Mule has reached the 500,000 downloads milestone.

ebizQ received the following details:

Following an initial open source release in 2003 by creator Ross Mason, Mule has become the enterprise developer's most-used integration platform, and is currently in production at multiple Fortune 50 companies and more than 120 large enterprises worldwide.

Mule gained initial developer traction as the industry's first open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). Over time the user community has leveraged its simple configuration-based programming model to execute a wide range of J2EE integration tasks, with the ESB as one of many implementation topologies for Mule.

"As a developer, you face an infinite number of integration scenarios, so rigid tools that mandate specific architecture and standards choices have very limited value," said Mason. "Mule was designed to be the developer's first multi-purpose platform for integration. Because it's so modular, and because it supports such a comprehensive list of technologies and standards in enterprise production environments -- Mule is the one integration platform that truly adapts to the developer's environment. It's a great alternative to the rigid integration frameworks that impose architecture choices and approaches on the developer."

Today Mule use cases span every conceivable enterprise integration task - from integrating web services and applications, to creating powerful messaging backbones for financial services trading, to establishing frameworks that facilitate SOA deployments.

In November of 2006, venture capital firms Hummer Winblad and Morgenthaler funded MuleSource to serve as the official support and services organization for the Mule user base.

"In 2007, we are engineering a number of other exciting new capabilities into the Mule platform," said Dave Rosenberg, CEO and Co-founder of MuleSource. "While the platform supports the vast majority of technologies in today's enterprises, we are bringing in new capabilities to help users bridge the integration needs of new architectures and software development models they are evolving towards."

According to analyst firm Gartner, 25% of new business software will be delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) packs by 2011, up from 5% in 2005 (source). As SaaS continues to rise, both service providers and consumers will face new transport-level protocol integration and data integration challenges. Mule was originally created in the financial services trading environment, and is uniquely suited to enable SaaS providers to scale their platform to handle these type of transport-level issues as their subscriber bases grow. In 2007, Mule will announce a number of new integration offerings for SaaS providers.