What Mule Can Do

Mule ESB is an Eclipse-based integration platform through which software applications can communicate with each other.

Rather than building expensive, customized, maintenance-heavy solutions to link old systems to new, or connect with Web services, or access databases, you can use Mule ESB as a multi-tool to solve these integration problems and smoothly connect anything to anything.

Let’s say you work at a company that uses an online Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) and an in-house accounting system to manage all your customer accounts. Long ago, someone in the company wired those two things together — the CRM to the accounting system — so that a customer’s account details automatically move back and forth between the systems. This set-up has been working well for years with a little maintenance from a few IT administrators.

Then, you merge with another company and are faced with the problem of getting the systems and applications to communicate with each other. You could hire, or out-source, a team of developers to hard-code point-to-point connections between each…​

…​ but this exercise is labor intensive to set-up, and very maintenance-heavy over the long term. If one system upgrades to a new version, or if a system needs to be replaced, or if a new system is introduced into the network, the point-to-point connections have the potential to multiply exponentially and become unwieldily — and expensive — to maintain.

Alternatively, you could use Mule ESB, a light-weight integration platform that acts as an intelligent, message-routing hub between nodes. Plug other systems and applications into Mule ESB and let it handle the routing logic to facilitate communication between systems.