Salesforce is adding another chapter to its growth profile with the purchase of MuleSoft. MuleSoft is one of the world's leading platforms for building application networks and is used by customers to link their business apps, databases, and corporate IT infrastructure into a unified system. Talking about Salesforce, though it currently leads the global CRM software market, the company likely sensed that its strongest growth potential lies outside its current area of expertise.
Today, companies of all shapes and sizes are moving towards Digital Transformation and Mulesoft helps them seamlessly integrate the next generation technologies into their current IT infrastructure.
Driven by the rationale to improve its product offering, this acquisition will provide Salesforce with Mulesoft's expertise in developing networks that connect applications, data and devices, which it will then use to power its own cloud-based portfolio.
Let’s dive deeper and see how this acquisition will further empower the most powerful CRM player & shape up the API driven economy.
Advantage to Customers
MuleSoft offers a cloud service called Anypoint that allows developers to connect different apps together, so those apps can work together and share data.
Imagine a scenario where an Auto-insurance company, Automobile manufacturer, Retail outlet owner and auto ancillary parts maker - are all using Salesforce (which is almost certain in case of Salesforce which has 150,000 customers from across verticals).
Now imagine if Salesforce gives them mechanism by which they can all leverage each other’s data. So the insurance company just calls an API from the outlet owner to fetch data of how many people purchased a car in the last month and pitch policies to them. And this is just breaking the silo within. There is also the ability to connect to any on-cloud & an on-premise system, thereby assisting users to unite data across different cloud products.
Also lets put into perspective that more data, more actionable data, will give Einstein some additional steam as it struggles in the AI space. While Google, Facebook and Amazon have already taken off in this space, Salesforce can pitch for intelligent customer interactions with this acquisition, thus providing additional benefits to the customers.
Advantage to the Companies
Salesforce, no doubt realised MuleSoft’s potential and hence shelled 16 times the Mulesoft Revenue in 2018. At $6.5 Billion it set a new benchmark in cloud integration space and with access to the elite clientele of Mulesoft like Coca-Cola, Netflix, Cisco, Spotify etc., which has just further sweetened the deal for them.
MuleSoft will continue to build toward the company's vision of the application network with Anypoint Platform, and MuleSoft will power the new Salesforce Integration Cloud, which will enable all enterprises to surface any data—regardless of where it resides—to drive deep and intelligent customer experiences throughout a personalized journey.
Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will accelerate customers' digital transformations, enabling them to unlock data across legacy systems, cloud apps and devices to make smarter, faster decisions and create highly differentiated, connected customer experiences.
Way Ahead
One way Salesforce plans to use MuleSoft’s technology is to embed it in the Salesforce Integration Cloud, a service that lets customers more easily access corporate data wherever it may be stored.
Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will enable customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise across all public and private clouds and data sources - radically enhancing innovation.
Lastly in our view, with all the consolidation done right, Salesforce will soon be positioning itself as a cloud integration platform with some very impressive clients on its list.
CIGNEX being a Registered Partner of Salesforce and MuleSoft’s Select Partner, has an in-depth understanding of both the technologies and can help organizations in their digital transformation journey by enabling them to unlock data across any application or endpoint and connect all information throughout their enterprise, be it in the cloud or data sources.
