MuleSoft Announces Crowd, the Next Major Release of Anypoint Platform to Harness Innovation From Across the Enterprise

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 20, 2017) -  MuleSoft (NYSE: MULE), provider of the leading platform for building application networks, today announced Crowd, featuring a set of powerful collaboration capabilities that enable the creation, saving, discovery and reuse of APIs and other integration assets within Anypoint Platform™ to drive new levels of business agility. This Anypoint Platform release introduces significant updates to Anypoint Exchange and the new Anypoint Design Center, making the discovery, promotion and consumption of composable IT assets, such as APIs and best practice templates, both easier and more natural for users of the platform. By enabling self-service access to reusable assets, central IT organizations can pave the road for innovation across the enterprise, and enable line-of-business (LOB) and broader IT teams to deliver their own integration projects quickly and securely. With this release, IT teams across the organization are empowered to innovate freely, deliver better customer experiences, quickly introduce new products to market and contribute to building a composable enterprise.

"As one of the world's leading insurers, we strive to constantly improve and extend our digital capabilities. Technology is a key enabler for us to drive a superior customer experience, and innovate faster on new features and services for our customers," said Mojgan Lefebvre, SVP & CIO, Global Specialty, Liberty Mutual Insurance. "Liberty Mutual needs technology partners who are driving innovative thinking and who want to be at the forefront of our digital transformation. MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform plays a key role in our strategy to enable reuse and consumption across the organization and to build connected applications with a digital-first approach."

"When deciding on a solution to connect all our internal applications and systems, we sought a technology partner that could support our cloud-based infrastructure. MuleSoft enables Splunk to orchestrate across multiple cloud services in a matter of weeks versus months," said Declan Morris, CIO, Splunk. "We are accelerating our business by leveraging MuleSoft's continuous innovation. With Anypoint Platform, we're able to extend API-led connectivity to enable reuse and consumption across the enterprise, resulting in speed while minimizing risk."

Current Ad Hoc Integration Approach Hampers Business Agility and Introduces Security Risks
According to Gartner, "Digital business transformation is driving ever-more connections between applications, systems and endpoints in complex, multiorganization ecosystems. Application leaders responsible for integration are having to empower almost every member of their organization to support this new reality."

The explosion of mobile, big data, SaaS, PaaS and the internet of things is creating spiraling levels of integration work and complexity. In addition, integration specialists, application developers and LOBs across the enterprise are increasingly doing their own integration on an ad hoc basis. As a result, applications, data and devices are inconsistently accessed, integrated and managed, and are hampering business agility and introducing governance and security risks. To reduce these risks, central IT will need to provide proper enablement and collaboration to empower these broader IT teams to deliver their own integration projects.

New Release of Anypoint Platform Enables a New IT Operating Model
This new release empowers users with the right tools and crowdsourced IT assets from their organization to be self-sufficient with integration. Through the new Anypoint Design Center and Anypoint Exchange, organizations can quickly save, discover and reuse secured IT assets to collaboratively build an application network for their enterprise.

Crowd highlights include:

• A new Anypoint Design Center that empowers every team across the enterprise to save and self-serve IT assets to build application networks:
  • Web-based flow designer: MuleSoft's web-based designer for integration flows is easy to access and suited for use by IT professionals.
  • Guided flow design: Every step is suggested based on the action that users take, helping them to compose their flows by following best practices.
  • Reuse becomes native: Reusable assets are embedded into every step of the design experience, making reuse a natural choice rather than merely an option users have.
    
    
• A native collaboration, reuse and consumption experience delivered through Anypoint Exchange:
  • Promotion of reusable assets: Exchange is now integrated with all components of Anypoint Design Center, including the flow designer and the API designer. Reusable assets are suggested and promoted as you design your APIs and integration flows.
  • Ratings and reviews: Any user can comment or reply to a comment on any asset within the Exchange to ask questions, offer suggestions, provide feedback and more. 
  • Quick view of dependencies: Every reusable asset has a portal. Within an asset portal, users can view the full list of other assets that have dependencies on it, providing visibility and insight into potential impact from changes to the asset.
  • New UI: Users benefit from improved search capabilities, enhanced manual asset publication flow and support for the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) asset portal.
    
    
• New API design capabilities within Anypoint Design Center:
  • Faster, consistent API design: Users can save API fragments (e.g., libraries, security schemes and data models) from within API designer into Exchange for discovery and reuse. API fragments can then be used for building any API spec, ensuring consistent, secure API design across the enterprise.
  • Seamless CI/CD automation: Users can promote APIs across different environments.

"With Crowd, central IT and product teams have a unified way to bring people, process and technology together to build an application network without losing governance and control. Different teams can collaborate on building APIs and integration while driving toward a common outcome on a shared platform," said Mark Dao, chief product officer, MuleSoft. "The innovations in this release are enabling businesses to change the way they operate by empowering more users to discover, reuse and connect technology and business assets to achieve greater levels of agility and speed."

Gartner, Inc., "Predicts 2017: Pervasive Integration Is Getting Ready for Prime Time" by Keith Guttridge, Massimo Pezzini, Eric Thoo, Elizabeth Golluscio, Paolo Malinverno, November 21, 2016.

About Anypoint Platform
MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform™ is a leading solution for API-led connectivity that creates an application network of apps, data, and devices, both on-premises and in the cloud. This hybrid integration platform includes iPaaS, ESB, and a unified solution for API management, design and publishing.

About MuleSoft
MuleSoft's mission is to help organizations change and innovate faster by making it easy to connect the world's applications, data and devices. With its API-led approach to connectivity, MuleSoft's market-leading Anypoint Platform™ is enabling over 1,000 organizations in more than 60 countries to build application networks. For more information, visit https://www.mulesoft.com.

MuleSoft is a registered trademark of MuleSoft, Inc. All other marks are those of respective owners.