MuleSource, the company behind the top open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) and a leading open-source service-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor, has been without a chief executive for some time, having lost the services of CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg in September. On Monday, the company announced the appointment of Greg Schott as its new CEO.
Schott may familiar to those who follow the sometimes-incestuous open-source talent pool. That's because Schott joins MuleSource from SpringSource, where he was senior vice president of marketing.
Prior to joining SpringSource, Schott had served as senior vice president of marketing and vice president of corporate development at Agile Software, which Oracle acquired in 2007.
At SpringSource, Schott led the company's rebranding efforts from Interface21 to SpringSource, as well as the complete overhaul of the company's marketing, a difficult feat in a start-up with such impressive engineering chops as SpringSource has.
Schott joins MuleSource at a good time. The company has delivered 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth and now counts more than 2,000 enterprise deployments at major enterprises like Wal-Mart Stores. The company just completed its best quarter ever, and it named MySQL sales executive Mark Burton to its board of directors.
Schott is a good fit for engineering-heavy MuleSource. He has technical chops, and a wealth of marketing and operations experience. I'm biased, as I'm an adviser to the company, but I'm also a good friend of Rosenberg, MuleSource's former CEO and co-founder.
Disclosure: As noted above, I am an adviser to MuleSource.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Nestle's Nespresso division, a Switzerland-based global leader in coffee, with more than 1,700 employees and sales into 50 countries, had the kind of problem most companies would love to have: growth. As its traditional retail channels moved online, it found it difficult to scale its systems to be able to manage its online growth.
Enter MuleSource, with its open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology, Mule. In conjunction with a leading open-source system integrator, Optaros, the two put together a highly scalable services-oriented architecture for Nespresso that makes the coffee drip on time:
Nespresso engaged Optaros and MuleSource to help its corporate architecture team define and implement a new middleware architecture called Nespresso Open Architecture, or NesOA. This new modern architecture is based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles, including fully decoupled systems that support both synchronous and asynchronous integration.
With these capabilities, Nespresso's IT infrastructure can now enable new distribution channels, improve business agility, cope with increased transaction volumes, and more easily introduce new applications and services, as needed.
Sounds great, but it's especially telling that the initial implementation took only six months, a testament to the lightweight, open approach that open-source projects like Mule offer enterprises.
But open source isn't just a short-term time saver. In fact, its biggest benefits may come from increased flexibility down the road, as Nespresso's Joel Schmitt, an enterprise architect, declares in a case study describing Nespresso's deployment:
We are committed to an open-source approach, including MuleSource's Mule ESB, because complying with open standards is key for future extensibility and growth...With our new architecture, we have been able to add flexibility and agility to our system landscape.
In this case, Optaros and MuleSource delivered cost and flexibility benefits, but the same types of benefits are being discovered for a wide variety of applications by enterprise IT.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to MuleSource, and my employer, Alfresco, partners with Optaros. I do not, however, drink coffee, so theoretically, I'm biased against Nespresso. :-)
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