CloudMix

In 2013, despite MuleSoft being in the integration space, we had no official business partnership with any Tier 1 global system integrators. The Founder of MuleSoft, Ross Mason, and I, met a Senior Partner at Deloitte Digital at a conference, and I subsequently worked with him over the course of six months to develop the concept and working prototype for CloudMix, a pre-integrated, pre-configured suite of best-of-breed SaaS applications delivered as an ecosystem platform.

The challenge for Deloitte in working with clients that CloudMix addressed, was that, despite the emerging maturity of best-of-breed SaaS applications in various different "vertical" categories like Human Resource Management (HRM), Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ), Accounting, and Subscription management, they were finding that customer implementations were in some cases just as challenging, complex, and costly as previous monolithic on-premise offerings from companies such as Oracle, Siebel, and SAP.

In this context we developed the CloudMix ecosystem project, a collaboration between Deloitte, MuleSoft, Salesforce, Workday, Netsuite, Zuora, Apptus, and others. I created the first working reference implementation of a series of generic workflows in the Mule Flow programming language that could be mapped efficiently to various endpoints.

For example, an "Employee Onboarding" workflow, would consist of a primary system that would initiate creating the employee, such as Workday, which would receive a new employee with a new employee number, and then provision that employee into a series of all of the other applications. A "Quote to Cash" workflow would receive an event from Apptus, and then flow through to Netsuite and back to Salesforce to complete a validation that an order was actually placed.

In building support for this project in close collaboration and partnership with Deloitte, this project became a huge strategic initiative featured prominently as the primary demo at Deloitte's Dreamforce booth, with a big party at Dreamforce, SXSW, and many others, driving large commerce operations and opportunities for both Deloitte and all of the ecosystem partners. This ecosystem project eventually led to a major partnership between Deloitte and MuleSoft directly to establish a MuleSoft practice inside Deloitte, which still persists to this day.

Resources:

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/technology/us-cons-cloudmix-122013.pdf