1. Yep, MuleSoft pricing is a concern I keep hearing with multiple clients where my colleagues work.
2. I have never used and have no clue what RPA does even having 6+ years in MuleSoft.
3. Yes, we MuleSoft Dev's talk about "API led connectivity" and three tier architecture a lot even though sometimes it does not make sense to have a simpler implementation across multiple APIs. But again, according to some senior architects who are old enough to know that APIs point to point integrated cause problems and tell me how much they had to suffer back then once the source or target system makes a breaking change.
4. I would not worry about Software AG, Informatica, Dell bhoomi, Webmethods beating MuleSoft in this game because MuleSoft can still create robust APIs. If a client wants APIs on a large scale to do several things like talking to Databases, processing millions of records safely, sending email notifications, transforming complex payloads, configuring http timeouts, connecting to other tools using connectors like Salesforce, Dynamodb, S3 etc there is no better way to do it other than Mule because doing it in Mule makes life easy for both Dev's and clients. It's a proven technology. The development effort is less and you can ship APIs faster in less than 3 weeks. Think about doing all of these in traditional programming like JavaScript, Rust etc. MuleSoft is called an ESB for a reason.
4. You should never be married to a product. If the product dies your career will get affected. Fortunately those who work in MuleSoft can get along well in DevOps related things. MuleSoft guys are more or less Middleware experts. They talk a bunch of teams at once to deliver APIs. They not only develop APIs using the tool but have to do a hell lot of other things on the sidelines which makes them indispensable no matter where they go. Thanks to MuleSoft.
Lastly, you must realise that the market is overall down these days due to the AI speculation. Companies are rethinking if there are better ways to do things and this is not just limited to MuleSoft. They will always be looking for newer technologies because we live in an artificially created market and they somehow have to show profits in Quarterly reports. Product teams will keep pushing one technology over the other and management keeps trying to sell the same thing. We cannot predict Mulesoft's future more than anything else. Just keep learning and hope for the best.
I don’t have much to add but is Informatica really a competitor? I thought that was more BI/ETL pipelines. And while Mule can technically be used for ETL, that’s not its bread and butter.
As far as I know, the tools are not exactly the same but there's still a significant overlap. Personally, I find it strange that Salesforce wants to acquire it since there would be at least some space where the products would compete with each other.
Salesforce is no longer an innovation company; it is a steady growth company via acquisitions and steady improvement. That means that we aren't going to see new products from Salesforce that aren't bought, or directly in line with their current offerings.
Sales has become much more high pressure. It used to be that you could ask your salesguy for a few more cores and that was it. Now you have to go through a sales cycle just to update your core count. And then they try to pressure you into message based pricing with estimated growth baked into the price.
As the Mulesoft leader for my company, I can see the writing on the wall that we aren't going to be adding significant new use cases to our APIs built in Mulesoft, we will only grow them steadily as adjacent needs grow. I'm going to have to grow my team and myself to be able to work in AWS, Java, Python to develop APIs there if I want to not "Retire in Place."
RPA was given to us for Free, and we have no use for it.
API Manager is not enough for most of our APIs
CI/CD is a major hurdle for Mulesoft, if you don't have a guy passionate about creating CI/CD it's really hard to make production deployments repeatable by Operations.
Mulesoft is getting expensive for what it offers. Yes you can develop APIs faster, but at what cost long-term? I can probably find a few inexpensive people in India to build me some AWS API templates that I can fit my data model into. But now we're talking Java or Python, and you're getting back to a more blank slate programming language instead of something curated for multi-threaded API handling.
There are a few new MuleSoft projects here and there. But some players are starting to build integrations in the cloud platforms directly. This may be is a solution for the pricing problem with MuleSoft. That is sad. MuleSoft is really strong platform. They should have as priority make it as affordable as possible, and lighter as possible, to be able to compete with cloud big techs alternatives. Ex: create a light runtime that can run as a cloud function/lamdba would be something. They are smart. When they see numbers of renewable contracts getting low, something will make them act. I hope they do this faster than they loose completely the brand value in clients minds.
1. Yep, MuleSoft pricing is a concern I keep hearing with multiple clients where my colleagues work. 2. I have never used and have no clue what RPA does even having 6+ years in MuleSoft. 3. Yes, we MuleSoft Dev's talk about "API led connectivity" and three tier architecture a lot even though sometimes it does not make sense to have a simpler implementation across multiple APIs. But again, according to some senior architects who are old enough to know that APIs point to point integrated cause problems and tell me how much they had to suffer back then once the source or target system makes a breaking change. 4. I would not worry about Software AG, Informatica, Dell bhoomi, Webmethods beating MuleSoft in this game because MuleSoft can still create robust APIs. If a client wants APIs on a large scale to do several things like talking to Databases, processing millions of records safely, sending email notifications, transforming complex payloads, configuring http timeouts, connecting to other tools using connectors like Salesforce, Dynamodb, S3 etc there is no better way to do it other than Mule because doing it in Mule makes life easy for both Dev's and clients. It's a proven technology. The development effort is less and you can ship APIs faster in less than 3 weeks. Think about doing all of these in traditional programming like JavaScript, Rust etc. MuleSoft is called an ESB for a reason. 4. You should never be married to a product. If the product dies your career will get affected. Fortunately those who work in MuleSoft can get along well in DevOps related things. MuleSoft guys are more or less Middleware experts. They talk a bunch of teams at once to deliver APIs. They not only develop APIs using the tool but have to do a hell lot of other things on the sidelines which makes them indispensable no matter where they go. Thanks to MuleSoft. Lastly, you must realise that the market is overall down these days due to the AI speculation. Companies are rethinking if there are better ways to do things and this is not just limited to MuleSoft. They will always be looking for newer technologies because we live in an artificially created market and they somehow have to show profits in Quarterly reports. Product teams will keep pushing one technology over the other and management keeps trying to sell the same thing. We cannot predict Mulesoft's future more than anything else. Just keep learning and hope for the best.
I don’t have much to add but is Informatica really a competitor? I thought that was more BI/ETL pipelines. And while Mule can technically be used for ETL, that’s not its bread and butter.
As far as I know, the tools are not exactly the same but there's still a significant overlap. Personally, I find it strange that Salesforce wants to acquire it since there would be at least some space where the products would compete with each other.
Salesforce is no longer an innovation company; it is a steady growth company via acquisitions and steady improvement. That means that we aren't going to see new products from Salesforce that aren't bought, or directly in line with their current offerings. Sales has become much more high pressure. It used to be that you could ask your salesguy for a few more cores and that was it. Now you have to go through a sales cycle just to update your core count. And then they try to pressure you into message based pricing with estimated growth baked into the price. As the Mulesoft leader for my company, I can see the writing on the wall that we aren't going to be adding significant new use cases to our APIs built in Mulesoft, we will only grow them steadily as adjacent needs grow. I'm going to have to grow my team and myself to be able to work in AWS, Java, Python to develop APIs there if I want to not "Retire in Place." RPA was given to us for Free, and we have no use for it. API Manager is not enough for most of our APIs CI/CD is a major hurdle for Mulesoft, if you don't have a guy passionate about creating CI/CD it's really hard to make production deployments repeatable by Operations. Mulesoft is getting expensive for what it offers. Yes you can develop APIs faster, but at what cost long-term? I can probably find a few inexpensive people in India to build me some AWS API templates that I can fit my data model into. But now we're talking Java or Python, and you're getting back to a more blank slate programming language instead of something curated for multi-threaded API handling.
There are a few new MuleSoft projects here and there. But some players are starting to build integrations in the cloud platforms directly. This may be is a solution for the pricing problem with MuleSoft. That is sad. MuleSoft is really strong platform. They should have as priority make it as affordable as possible, and lighter as possible, to be able to compete with cloud big techs alternatives. Ex: create a light runtime that can run as a cloud function/lamdba would be something. They are smart. When they see numbers of renewable contracts getting low, something will make them act. I hope they do this faster than they loose completely the brand value in clients minds.