Top 5 Takeaways from MuleSoft Summit Amsterdam 2019

This one-day event at the Amsterdome promised to provide actionable insights from MuleSoft experts and customers on how to fast track your API and integration strategy.

The following sessions were on the agenda:

• Keynote: Achieving Agility Amidst Today’s Complexity
• Customer Presentation: Ahold
• Customer Presentation: Continental Tyres – a PON Company
• Anypoint Platform: What’s new and what’s coming
• Deep Dive – The Value of Integration w/ CAK
• Deep Dive – Management & monitoring best practices: bridging the observability gap
• Deep Dive – How to manage applications in heterogeneous IT environments

1. APIs for agility in digital transformation

API led connectivity was one of the key ideas prevalent in all the sessions in the summit. Digital Transformation requires faster delivery from IT departments amidst environments that are becoming more complex. Some of the key trends are:

• Reinventing business models to meet market demands
• Moving away from monoliths to APIs
• Layered security through APIs (from edge to core)
• Hybrid environments with a central control plane
• Agility and innovation through API reuse
• Application graph with insight into underlying data  
• Increase in self-service and citizen integrations

2. Anypoint platform innovations

The Application Network was one of the key new product features described in many of the sessions. The ability to provide functional data insights and analytics on top of system data is one of the key benefits of this network. Some of the most important features described and demonstrated were:

• Application Networks providing improved visibility and insights
• API Program Analytics to strengthen the API as Products approach
• API Community Manager – a new product in Beta (demo)
• Support developer personas from Central IT to LOB Citizens
• Ability to apply policies on queues and policies between flows
• Reinventing business models to meet market demands
• Using Machine Learning to automatically generate transformations from source to target data models (demo)

3. Value of integration

One of the well-known challenges in the Integration domain is the difficulty to articulate the benefits and value of integration. Integration being an abstract and usually invisible component of the IT stack, many stakeholders are not able to easily understand the value it adds.

To help IT leaders structure, calculate, and articulate the business value of their integration efforts, MuleSoft has developed a framework that calculates the value of integration in two categories:

• Direct value – platform benefits
• Indirect value – business outcomes

More information about this framework is available right here.

4. Hybrid and multi-cloud environments

Anypoint Runtime Fabric brings the flexibility and scale provided by Docker and Kubernetes technology to the Mule platform. It is a container service that automates the deployment and orchestration of Mule applications and API gateways. It is ready to be deployed on AWS, Azure, or on private cloud platforms.

In the emerging scenario of multi-cloud deployments, the Runtime Fabric enables centralized management through a single web interface within MuleSoft’s control plane.

More information on Anypoint Runtime Fabric is available right here.

5. Customer testimonials

Some of Mulesoft’s customers presented their solutions and experience using the Mulesoft products.

• Ahold Delhaize showed an interesting video of their Albert Heijn To Go product and presented a Global HR transformation project powered by APIs on the Mulesoft platform.
• Continental Tyres – Pon showed how they were able to consolidate their partner integrations via APIs and roll-out an internal self-service integration solution.
• CAK a government healthcare service company explained how they were able to implement ‘Regulations as a chain of services’ and accelerate compliance by using APIs.

Conclusion

Overall, it was an interesting day with lots of insights from MuleSoft and some of its partners and customers. Devoteam NL was one of the sponsors at the event and had a booth providing an overview of our services as well as an interesting contest that piqued the interest of many visitors! The competition has already finished, but for those of you who still want to solve this riddle we have displayed it below.