Integration Service Provides Orchestration Across Enterprise and Cloud, Solves Emerging "Cloud Silo" Problem

MuleSoft, the provider of web middleware built on leading open source projects Mule ESB and Apache Tomcat, has announced a private beta program for a new integration platform as a service (iPaaS) called Mule iON. Mule iON enables developers and application teams to integrate and orchestrate applications and services seamlessly across the enterprise and cloud. It also provides IT operations with the same runtime visibility and control they would expect from an on-premise integration platform, all without the need to install or manage middleware or hardware infrastructure.

 

The distributed, open-source SaaS model will expand the range of available software

Right now if you think about the way software-as-a-service is delivered, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google are the most commonly cited examples. All these companies deliver their software using what is known as the multi-tenant model. Just as multi-tenant software knocked on-premise vendors for a loop, new distributed, open-source models for delivery of SaaS software will have a powerful impact.

The implications for vendors will vary by the nature of their applications, but for businesses, the result will be an increased array of choices delivered with the benefits of SaaS. This week we look at how the arrival of distributed, open-source SaaS is likely to play out.

The leading SaaS companies started about 10 years ago. They saw how the Internet could change how business applications are created and delivered, lifting much of the annoying details of running a data center from the customer's shoulders. They built their applications to run on a remote data center and be delivered through a browser. Both the multitenant and the distributed open-source models deliver this same SaaS experience using different architectures.

Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source.

Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.

One of the main open source concerns about SaaS in the past has been that the largest open source outfits, like Google, don’t support true copyleft through the Affero license. Google itself prefers the Apache license to anything copyleft, and this is fast becoming the norm.

Buytaert believes open source companies can disrupt this model through services like his own Drupal Gardens, which allows exporting of codes, themes, and data to any other Drupal hosting environment.