The API deployed by MuleSoft is now reused by more than 10 MIT departments and what took 6 weeks to build, has now saved more than 1 year of duplicate development effort. Discover how MuleSoft’s management with MIT is a representation of Epidata’s mission. (*)
Epidata is present in several countries around the world and has extensive experience in developing innovative projects with corporate clients. For these reasons, the partnership with MuleSoft seeks to jointly drive innovation in workspaces and academic sectors, providing clients with state-of-the-art solutions that allow them to adapt to the challenges of security, scalability and technological transformation of work in the software era. Within this framework, the management of MuleSoft with MIT is an example of how Epidata reflects its mission through the activity of its partners.
Mulesoft with MIT: context
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) prides itself on its long history of innovation. A few years back they realized a lot of university processes like registering for housing, paying tuition, and checking grades were not innovative at all.
When MIT began exploring how to translate these services into new web and mobile channels and decentralize access from Information Services & Technology, they feared opening their financial and student systems to outside requests would introduce significant risk. That’s where they realized they needed an API strategy.
Information Services & Technology now provides a reusable set of APIs available to students, faculty, staff, and affiliates through their self-service MIT Developer Connection portal. The idea is to open up MIT’s institutional data in a way that’s easily consumable yet governed – fostering the next wave of innovation out of MIT’s Cambridge campus and beyond.
Introduction of MIT
MIT set out on an ambitious 2020 IT vision to transform IT and deliver a world-class student experience. However, MIT’s Central IT team found that the constraints of meeting “keep the lights on” IT meant that it did not have the capacity to meet new initiatives such as a “cloud-first” systems modernization initiative.
The Goal
In order to deliver the 2020 vision given these resource constraints, MIT’s Information Services & Technology team sought to first transform itself, from a delivery channel for the 11,000+ students and 1,000+ faculty that rely on its services, to an enabler that would allow university departments and IT teams to self-serve. The goal was to expand Information Services & Technology delivery capacity by distributing IT delivery capability to other teams through building a set of reusable APIs.
MuleSoft’s Intervention
Through partnering with MuleSoft and adopting MuleSoft’s API-led connectivity approach, MIT has built out a microservices architecture exposing 8 public APIs (such as Courses, Classrooms, and People). The reuse of the APIs has driven significant productivity increases. For example, the People API provides basic directory information about students, staff, and MIT affiliates. This API is now reused by more than 10 MIT departments and what took 6 weeks to build, has now saved more than 1 year of duplicate development effort. This has freed up the IT team to move resources from ‘Keep the lights on IT’ to delivering on the innovative new projects that comprise the Project 2020 vision.
* Source: adapted from Mulesoft (2022): https://mulesoftpartners.bloomfire.com/
About Epidata
Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.
Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and HelpSystems. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.
Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.
