Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Q&A with MuleSource CEO and Co-founder

October 02, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Q&A with MuleSource CEO and Co-founder

TAGS: Open Source

I'm not going to pretend that it was easy to nail this Q&A with the CEO and Co-founder of MuleSource. The company has been hiding in plain sight for about 2 months and my quest for an interview has been nothing short of Indiana Jones meets Get Smart.

Nonetheless, I persevered and bring to you a delightful Q&A with myself.

Q&A with Dave Rosenberg, CEO, MuleSource Inc.

Just what is Mule?
Mule is the leading open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and integration platform. Mule has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and is in production at more than 100 companies and governments worldwide.

The open source Mule project was founded in 2003 by Ross Mason, CTO of MuleSource Inc. Frustrated by integration "donkey work" Ross set out to create a new platform that emphasized ease of development and re-use of components. He started the Mule project to bring a modern approach, one of assembly, rather than repetitive coding, to developers worldwide.

How do people use Mule?
There are three main use cases:

1. Enterprise Backbone passing a very high number of transactions (we know of one bank doing 1 million transactions a day.) In this instance people tend to use Mule with JMS and MQ Series

2. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-- ESB is generally defined as "distributed synchronous or asynchronous messaging middleware that provides secure interoperability between enterprise applications via XML, Web services interfaces and standardized rules-based routing of documents."

3. SMuT Stack (Spring, Mule, Tomcat)-When we first started doing due diligence we repeatedly came across the unfortunately named SMuT stack. Many people figured out that you could use the SMuT stack to create a lightweight app server.

Will Mule remain open source?
YES. Mule will remain 100% but will switch to a Mozilla-plus-attribution license. The license is exactly the same as Alfresco, SugarCRM, and Zimbra.

What does MuleSource do?
We provide subscription support and services for Mule users. We will also support the SMuT stack. We started the company to meet the demand of the market. Ross had been out doing Mule professional services but couldn't keep up with the demand for his time. We also wanted to ensure that the product kept on the right path. As such we hired a number of the community developers to work on Mule full-time.

So why would people subscribe?
Mule is an interesting OSS product in that it seems to find its way into mission critical applications more than it does accessory-type apps. Across the board we have heard from users that they want to know that the product will continue to exist, that they want the development to continue and that they need to have a resource to call on when they go to production.

Most OSS companies have some bit of secret sauce to get people to subscribe. Our trick is a robust monitoring and management toolset, called MuleSource HQ, which does slick things, like auto-discover components and allow you to manage your instances from one webpage. We'll be rolling MuleSource HQ out over the next week or so. There are also some obvious things like patching and subscribers get access to our developers.

What the hell were you thinking?
Starting a company is very hard. Ross and I are on about 4 months of 16 hours/day 7/days a week. I went to Hawaii for four days and did conference calls at 5am. Yes, my wife was pissed. We're fortunate in that we have a huge number of users who we can now offer our services to, and the product is very mature. Nonetheless, starting from scratch is a tough ride. Our two main mistakes were not getting all our legal and intellectual property stuff in order at the get-go and not hiring some kind of helper monkey to do the non-core work.

How did you raise money?
I can't deny that I am pretty well connected (or at least my friends are) so I basically found all the VCs I knew and started pitching them on the idea. During that process we did a ton of research on the market ($8.5 billion for software, $132 billion for services says Gartner), we spoke to about 30 users and asked them if they would pay, and we put the product through the ringer with a broad range of technical folk.

We were fortunate in that a number of VC firms and private investors were interested in our idea. But choosing team members - especially ones who are going to give you a bunch of cash is very tough. In our case we needed a few things from our BoD.
-Operational experience-we wanted investors who had been in our shoes and recognized just how hard building a business is
-Understanding of open source - We're still in an experiment here
-Understanding that we will be disparate - We have people in 6 countries. This is an extreme challenge (don't listen to Marten Mickos when he says it's fine ;>) We have people in 6 countries already. It's not easy.

We chose Hummer Winblad and Morgenthaler because they met those criteria and showed a total commitment to the product and our massive team of 2.

Who are your partners for launch?
We've got a ton in the pipeline, but for launch we're starting with companies who we already had relationships with and have common interests in the enterprise.

ActiveGrid, Alfresco, cohesiveFT, EnterpriseDB, Funambol, GigaSpaces, Hyperic, Interface21, Jaspersoft, MySQL, OpenLogic and SugarCRM. Check out mulesource.com/partners for more information.

Who do you compete with?
Primarily with BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere and Tibco. To a lesser degree we compete with Sonic and Cape Clear. When we did the due diligence we found that Mule was being used as both an addendum to these products and as a replacement for them. We found that people would bring Mule in at the edge for a new application then since it's so easy to develop they would bring it deeper into the infrastructure.

Don't you usually work 3-5 jobs at one time?
Yes. Yes I do. I have the attention span of a hummingbird. But, this one is keeping me busy. You'll notice that I laid off the blogging over the last month. That was partly because I am so busy and partly cause we were still stealthy. [And it's partly because Matt is the only one with anything interesting to say.]

What did you listen to while you were writing this drivel?
I had iTunes on shuffle. The last 5 songs were Cro-Mags, Misfits, Unsane, David Bowie and Cream. Don't ask.

Any shout-outs?
There are many people who helped, but here are a few that I can recall:
Matt Asay (this blog + Alfresco), Lonn Johnston and Travis Van at PageOne PR, Zack Urlocker and Marten Mickos at MySQL, Jason Maynard at CFSB, Patrick J. Ennis at Arch Ventures, Tim Golden at BofA, Scott Miller at Austin Ventures, Peter Yared at ActiveGrid, Susan Wu at Apache.

Link: MuleSource.com

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on October 2, 2006 04:47 PM

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