CUSTOMER SCENARIO

Hybrid architectures are common across the enterprise landscape. While these mixed cloud and on-prem implementations offer a multitude of benefits, challenges can develop with legacy systems. One customer in the gas and oil industry experienced this issue with their SAP implementation. They wanted to use their MuleSoft platform to expose SAP data to both internal applications and external partners. They also wanted to democratize API development, enabling business units to create interfaces on demand, thus preventing their MuleSoft team from becoming a bottleneck.

SOLUTION APPROACH

For stability and security, the project utilized modern authentication and design principles, like REST, on top of SAP for API buildout. This increased the number of partners and internal groups that could safely access company data. MuleSoft was deployed as a hybrid solution, leveraging the on-prem platform to interface with the on-prem SAP implementation. And the company established a Center for Enablement, decentralizing application interface development and supporting business capability teams to create, test, and deploy their own APIs. Request for APIs to access data was no longer forced to go through the MuleSoft team. Adding a robust DevOps process using Microsoft Team Foundation server enabled these capability teams to control their code deployments.

RESULTS

With MuleSoft in place, and with the Center for Enablement establishing standards and governance for API development, capability teams were able to quickly come up to speed to create application interfaces as needed. Using an Agile methodology, the company went from no solution to production-ready APIs in 12 weeks.