What is our primary use case?
We worked predominantly for the BFSI financial sectors and for one of the automobile industries. They're taught in Europe.
The applications where the customers wanted to download a report, a customer is associated with multiple customers, where they wanted to download the reports for analytics or just wanted to see what is the annual income or something like that. We expose an API for each customer. We will apply a policy where the APIs are being secured. So, each customer will have their own client ID and client secrets.
How has it helped my organization?
It has improved a lot in terms of monetizing your API. You get a benefit out of it, and then you secure your API. You restrict the external threats, managing the API end-to-end and governing it. All the features are pretty cool.
What is most valuable?
Overall, the platform is pretty good, I cannot say which one specific feature is good. The idea of an API Manager is really interesting.
What needs improvement?
One improvement is to add a plugin in the API Manager. If an organization is using SOAP services or legacy APIs. Maybe I don't want to migrate it to rest API, but my plugin should be able to convert Jason to XML. Basically, protocol transformation features in API Manager.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used it for over eight years as a service provider.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
As for the stability, no issues up until now.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
For scalability, our current licensing is for only ten APIs. Regarding the scalability part, haven't tested it yet.
How are customer service and support?
We had some production issues, and we did escalate them. We got a good response from the customer support team.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
It's cloud, so that's the pro. It has all the features that other API manager does, and there are some features that vary from product to product. Everything cannot be brought upon MuleSoft or Anypoint API Manager.
Right now, the universal API Manager is applicable for any API hosted in any server, it is not only MuleSoft. If we can bring the feature, I am a customer who has a MuleSoft API, as well as an on-prem API, which is developed on Java or some other integration tool. Still, I wanted to leverage the API Manager capability to my non-mule APIs. If these kinds of features are provided to the customer, I think they should be very happy with that approach.
How was the initial setup?
It is complex because it requires a lot of development effort and to understand the business. Additionally, it also requires an understanding of the requirement of how the API behaves. It should be very generic. So first, we can start off with SOAP services because the SOAP services accept only the XML. There should be some kind of configurations that you are plugging in the API Manager where you just define a scheme. This is just an idea where you have to define your scheme as in your platform API Manager and then define your SOAP services. API Manager will do a protocol transformation so we don't touch the existing applications.
Many clients will also be attracted to this approach. The solution is deployed on the cloud. Deployment time depends on the deployment topology. In the cloud, it is pretty fast. We leverage the CICD framework for any deployment. It takes a maximum of a minute. One person can handle the deployment. There is no maintenance required for the product.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Our customers have a lot of concerns about the increased pricing. The customer feels MuleSoft is very costly, and they are also exploring other integration tools for a lower price. Maybe we should retain the existing customers by offering some discounts. At least the existing customers can be retained this way. This is regarding the licensing part only because customers based out of North America and Europe have shown many concerns recently. They are a bit concerned about pricing.
What other advice do I have?
We help customers to build and manage an API. We help them to integrate their platforms and applications. I think a complete cloud setup gives a lot of flexibility. Customer need not worry about their environment or servers. The complete cloud setup has a 99.99% uptime. So, there is no downtime. I would recommend a complete cloud setup. Overall, I would rate MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager an eight and a half out of ten. That one and a half points will be dedicated because of some of the missing features, which I have seen from other API managers.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Integrator