Editors' Review by the API Management Software Review Team
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is a unified and highly productive hybrid integration solution specifically designed to handle the most difficult connectivity issues associated with APIs, SaaS, and SOA.
The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a feature-rich app development solution that caters to small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) and startups. It is a unified platform that is capable of creating a seamless network of data, devices, and applications with API-led connectivity. The platform integrates applications and data across the organization’s legacy systems, application programming interfaces (APIs), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions with hybrid delivery strategies to ensure greater flexibility. It provides connectivity and orchestration along with a managed API, all in a single robust package.
MuleSoft Anypoint is touted as a premier API management platform, providing hybrid integration solutions via the cloud and an on-premise setup. It offers great scalability and is capable of supporting multiple transactions on the largest cloud servers, but is also light enough to run smoothly in a microservices architecture or on a simple laptop. The Anypoint Platform is designed to support open standards, as it’s an open-source solution designed to help tackle the different connectivity challenges associated with APIs, SaaS, and SOA. However, it is not subject to the common limitations of open-source systems.
Anypoint can be customized and modified through well-defined runtime APIs and extension points in order to capitalize on custom, legacy, and new technologies without ever compromising runtime. The platform is designed for businesses and organizations looking to integrate devices, data sources, applications, and other technologies using application programming interfaces. Although it caters to various types of businesses, Anypoint is best suited for industries like healthcare, telecommunications, retail, higher education, government, and financial services, just to name a few.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform provides a wide variety of features and capabilities, such as metadata management, compatibility testing, connectivity management, web services, and a dashboard, all in one package.
The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform was developed to provide developers with the ability to connect devices, data, and applications anywhere, either via the cloud or on-premise. The platform provides tools and functionalities that network architects, engineers, and developers can easily and quickly adopt in order to design, develop, and manage the lifecycle of their software products, applications, and APIs. The Anypoint Platform offers several key features, which include universal API management, business automation, the DataWeave data language, and integration solutions.
MuleSoft Anypoint’s universal API management solution helps eliminate API sprawl by providing the tools and capabilities to effectively secure and manage all APIs built and deployed in any location. This particular function helps users carry all the capabilities and benefits of the Anypoint Platform over to every application programming interface, regardless of the environment, architecture, or origin. With an open and universal API, IT teams, DevOps, and network admins can easily develop, maintain, govern, and secure any application programming interface from any location. The solution also offers an enterprise-tested application programming interface development strategy for creating a robust and effective API program.
Through the universal API management solution, you can automatically detect and identify any API program that’s built into any platform. This includes their relevant documentation and metadata from your Git repositories or CI/CD pipelines with MuleSoft’s new Anypoint command-line interface (CLI). The Anypoint CLI is a scripting and command-line tool designed for both Anypoint Platform and Anypoint Platform Private Cloud Edition (PCE).
The Anypoint CLI supports both the standard and interactive shell CLI modes and works seamlessly with Anypoint Exchange, Anypoint DataGraph, Anypoint Runtime Manager, Access Management, and API Governance.
The Anypoint Platform’s business automation capabilities enable users to create effective automation tools for every department and every team within the organization. They can also create better and more sustainable experiences for their employees as well as their customers by seamlessly automating workflows and processes across modern and legacy applications, images, and documents. MuleSoft Anypoint allows developers to create automations faster and more efficiently without coding with easy-to-use tools.
The platform allows you to develop automations that address the complexities and challenges of your core processes and other workflows. With Anypoint Platform, along with MuleSoft RPA and MuleSoft Composer, your team should have everything necessary to successfully automate all of your work across legacy on-premise solutions and modern cloud-based apps, as well as unstructured data such as images and documents.
MuleSoft’s business automation capabilities also help with democratizing and accelerating innovation across the entire organization. This is mainly a result of Anypoint Platform’s capacity to empower business users to tackle automation challenges by themselves, especially since the process doesn’t require coding or programming language expertise. No-code tools such as MuleSoft RPA and Composer are simple, efficient, and easy to learn. These solutions are pretty straightforward, and they don’t have a steep learning curve, so mastering them doesn’t require months of training.
This is one of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform’s key features and arguably its biggest selling point, a function that enables businesses and organizations to fully unleash the true power of their data instantly, anywhere. The platform delivers a unified solution that brings together both real-time and batch processing for relevant data and app integration, regardless of the complexity or the location of the systems.
The DataWeave data language was developed by MuleSoft, and the sole purpose of its creation is seamless data integration. DataWeave was developed using MuleSoft’s highly performant runtime engine. Through this function, Anypoint Platform is able to drive batch and real-time processing of use cases at scale. DataWeave also provides users with a template-driven approach to the development process.
DataWeave is a straightforward yet powerful tool for querying and transforming relevant data within the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. It utilizes a JSON-like data language that is purpose-built to expedite the process of writing transformations and make them more maintainable over a longer period of time. The system supports a broad range of transformations, from basic one-to-one mappings to more elaborate and complex ones, including groupings, pivoting, filtering, normalizations, and partitioning.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is designed to facilitate all connectivity and integration requirements of businesses and organizations, regardless of size and scale. It offers integration solutions by industry, technology, and initiative, allowing companies and enterprises to stay ahead of the market, adopt a more impactful technology that shapes the marketplace, and accelerate time to market by implementing strategic projects.
Anypoint Platform has a wide variety of integration solutions, which include industries such as manufacturing, media, insurance, government, higher education, and telecommunications. It also offers connectivity solutions for various technologies like iPaaS, B2B/EDI, ESB, DevOps, Microservices, SOA, and IoT, among others. For key initiatives, the platform provides integration solutions for business automation, cloud migration, mobile optimization, eCommerce, omnichannel, SaaS, and legacy system modernization.
The key benefits of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform are its great potential for improving data integration and connectivity, its impressive feature set, and its user-friendly design.
As a software solution that adheres to open standards, Anypoint Platform is fully capable of handling the connectivity issues that are often associated with API, SOA, and SaaS processes. With its core features and capabilities, Anypoint Platform serves as a hybrid solution for development teams and admins that need a more streamlined connection between different applications and legacy systems. When implemented correctly, the process could result in a higher productivity rate for the entire organization.
Anypoint Platform is one of MuleSoft’s many different product offerings, and since it is a MuleSoft product, the platform effectively runs on a Mule engine. It is capable of serving as an enterprise service bus (ESB), a hybrid integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), or a gateway for application programming interfaces (APIs). This provides Anypoint Platform with a broader range of services, such as high availability, business group management, and analytics, among others.
MuleSoft Anypoint is fully equipped with a wide variety of features and tools that are more than capable of addressing the different requirements of architects and developers when it comes to designing, building, and managing programming interfaces. In addition, as an open-source system, developers have all the tools they need to collaborate with other builders, maximize productivity, and modularize the platform according to their needs.
As a cloud-based solution, MuleSoft Anypoint Platform offers a quick and efficient process for connecting corporate data, devices, and applications, regardless of location, whether via the cloud or on-premise. The platform has components and reusable modules that allow its users to design and build their own application networks by simply utilizing the available, ready-made templates with relative ease and efficiency.
Pricing for the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is available only upon request. Interested parties must visit the vendor’s official website to apply for the free trial and/or request a quote.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a comprehensive integration and connectivity platform, a cloud-based API management solution designed to facilitate the various app development requirements of small and midsize enterprises and startups. With its features and capabilities, the platform allows dev teams and companies in general to realize their business transformation with API-led connectivity.
Anypoint Platform is also a flexible and unified enterprise app integration solution that is capable of addressing the most complex and difficult integration problems across multiple initiatives and technologies such as APIs, SaaS, and SOA. Applying for the free trial should provide you with more insights into the power and effectiveness of this platform.
