Hot on the heels of raising $128 million in a record round of funding, MuleSoft Inc. is rolling out a major upgrade to its cloud connectivity platform that promises to help organizations make more out of the data coming off the new services they’re hooking up to their networks. The launch represents a new strategy towards trying to stand out in an hot market.

Rival Apigee Inc. is moving down a similar path, but whereas it’s focusing on expanding to more parts of the network, MuleSoft is expanding to more parts of the organization.

Dubbed Weave, the data manipulation module introduced with the new release of its platform targets analysts with a language for controlling the flow of information from one service to another. It’s based on the lightweight JSON format favored by developers for disseminating transmissions but can handle a broad spectrum of operations despite its simplicity, according to the company.

That includes most everything from simple actions such as reorganizing information into the structure used by the receipt application to merging multiple datasets, which is functionality that has historically only been available in dedicated software. The ability to carry out all that work directly in the native interface instead of shuffling files back and forth from a separate tool can provide a significant productivity boost.

That encompasses not only the time saved from using Weave’s relatively easy syntax but also, and perhaps more importantly, the fact that transformations created in the module are not coupled particularly tightly with any one application. That makes it easier to adapt the code for changes to the underlying services, which is one of the main issues with the traditional hard-coded approach.

MuleSoft users can check their Weave-powered integrations for bugs before rolling out to production using a new testing tool added in conjunction with the new release that is similarly built directly into the platform. Rounding out the update is the addition of access controls for ensuring that each worker can only access the data flows that they’re involved in developing, which is imperative in large organizations that may have dozens of teams working on different projects with varying levels of sensitivity.

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