One of the things I love about the MuleSoft platform is Anypoint Exchange, a platform for APIs and integrations. While customers can build up their own assets and share them amongst their business units and teams, it’s also where MuleSoft, as an integration provider, also develops accelerators for different platforms. If you haven’t come across the term, an accelerator is effectively a group of reusable prebuilt components, best practice patterns, and API designs.
Putting accelerators in context
Two examples of MuleSoft’s highly successful accelerators are Salesforce for Service Cloud and Salesforce for Healthcare.
The first is a joint MuleSoft and Salesforce solution that helps you implement critical integration use cases for Service Cloud and B2C Commerce Cloud – three times faster! It’s a prebuilt solution which includes APIs, connectors, integration templates and easy to follow instructions. According to the official documentation, it helps you “unlock critical data from external systems such as SAP, ServiceNow, and Jira; all the while guiding you to adopt best practices synthesised from thousands of customer implementations. Use the assets as they are, or extend them to meet your company’s unique needs.”
The second accelerator was developed by healthcare specialists from MuleSoft and Salesforce and validated by customers. Again, from the official brochure: “It enables healthcare developers to unlock critical patient data to build a patient 360 within Salesforce Health Cloud, faster and easier than ever before. The solution includes pre-built APIs, connectors, integration templates, and a prescriptive end-to-end architecture to bring patient demographics information and COVID-19 test results from any EHR/EHR into Health Cloud, providing options for both HL7 V2 and FHIR standards. The solution also provides a library of USCDI and FHIR R4 resources to help healthcare developers adhere to interoperability needs and jump-start the development of healthcare digital transformation initiatives.”
Reading that, you can immediately see the value the accelerators bring to a wide range of industries – mainly when it comes to synchronising back-office operations to platforms like Service Now, Jira, Service Cloud, and Salesforce.
Faster by far, and free!
The beauty of these prebuilt assets it makes integration projects on average three times faster while establishing best practice. And for MuleSoft customers they’re free to use!
While the accelerators by themselves are not an end solution, they’re an amazing way to jump-start a project. We’ve used them to great success for several of our largest customers on some significant projects.
In one case, we used service cloud accelerators to remove manual duplication between our customer’s platforms and systems. We explained the value of automating the integration between systems, walked them through the architecture, and ran workshops on how to optimise and extend the accelerators to match how they work. And we improved their security on the way!
Another major customer wanted system APIs that exposed Jira (they use Jira heavily for service desk and all their project teams). The end goal was to give them the ability to interact with Jira. Using MuleSoft accelerators, we extended that even further so they had more useful features, and made it a richer system API. As we used accelerators, we had a real head start and saved weeks of development time.
Why our customers love MuleSoft accelerators
You’d think that as integration is our business, we’d be a bit precious about doing things faster – in less chargeable hours. But our attitude is that it gives us more time to focus on the bespoke parts of the project and deliver more value when it comes to the parts that require more skill, innovation and thought leadership. It also gives our customers a head start on their competitors – for less. And that’s what we’ve built our business on.
References
https://blogs.mulesoft.com/cloud-integration-connectors/introducing-service-cloud-accelerator/
https://www.mulesoft.com/platform/enterprise-integration
https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/exchange/org.mule.examples/mulesoft-accelerator-for-salesforce-clouds/
