Mulesource

The inevitable march of open source software up the stack continues with Hummer Winblad and Morgenthaler's investment in MuleSource, reported here by Cnet's Stephen Shankland.

MuleSource develops and supports Mule, the leading open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Integration Platform. At funding, the Series A company is blessed with an active developer community (200,000 downloads), Fortune 50 enterprise deployments, and the enviable value proposition of superior, standards-based products available at a fraction of the cost of commercial source alternatives.

Mule is a Java-based platform that enables enterprise developers to perform a wide variety of integration tasks, from bringing new applications into production, to modernizing legacy applications and platforms, to enabling SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). Mule's programming model enables faster integration results than proprietary solutions, at a fraction of the cost. And unlike proprietary approaches that frustrate users with complex, closed frameworks, specialized skill sets and architectural lock-in, Mule’s modular design enables enterprise developers to take integration into their own hands.

Enterprise IT organizations must grow IT capacity in a non-linear relationship to revenue and transaction volume growth. The move to SOA and composite applications requires that IT organizations make systems and applications available to an ever widening array of consuming systems and applications. Integration, traditionally a source of high-costs, must provide operating leverage -ie support the capacity of increased integration without a linear increase in the cost of integrating the nth system.

RDHT, MySQL, and others offer a mechanism of adding capacity at greatly reduced costs - keeping IT budgets flat to 1-2% up while adding 30-50% incremental capacity.

MuleSource is fundamentally aligned with IT's mandate to be a source of operating leverage for the business and it will be a great company to watch.

Also, the CEO Dave Rosenberg is an active blogger and co-writes InfoWorld's open source blog. Check it out.