What is Mulesoft and Why Did Salesforce Spend Billions to Acquire It?
It was a landmark occasion in the world of enterprise SaaS applications, Salesforce’s acquisition of Mulesoft for about $6.5 billion promises to change the cloud ecosystem—for good. But what is Mulesoft and why did Salesforce spend billions to acquire it? Let’s find out.
Salesforce’s Biggest Acquisition Ever
Salesforce’s acquisition of Mulesoft has been all over the news and rightfully so. It is salesforce’s biggest acquisition to date, with its acquisition of Demandware next in line at a price tag of $2.8 billion, being over double the price, it’s hard to call it a ‘close’ second. This is how big the acquisition of Mulesoft is. If you want to check out the top 6 biggest Salesforce acquisitions and where they are now, check out this article.
But, why did Salesforce feel the need to buy Mulesoft? Mulesoft has an integration product that Salesforce wants to add to its existing suite of products. The product is called ‘Integration Cloud’.
Marc Benioff—the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce spoke the following words about the acquisition:
“Every digital transformation starts and ends with the customer.”
He further added, “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. I am thrilled to welcome MuleSoft to the Salesforce Ohana.”
Introducing the Integration Cloud
The world’s leading integration platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs, Mulesoft helps businesses connect data, applications and devices, both on-premises and in cloud computing environments. Mulesoft has 1200 customers and its enterprise customers include corporate giants like Accenture, Barclays, Mastercard, and Airbus, so you can imagine how powerful the system is.
It is not every day that a company this size gets acquired so when Salesforce acquired Mulesoft, questions were raised about what made Salesforce pay a premium for the acquisition.
Founded in 2006, Mulesoft connects applications and their data—across both public and private cloud—through an integration platform. Salesforce’s interest in Mulesoft’s ‘integration cloud’ began in 2013 when it became an investor in the latter’s series E round of funding. This was followed by two more rounds of investments by Salesforce into Mulesoft, with the second round of investments valued at $1.4 billion.
Shortly after the acquisition, Benioff & Salesforce announced that Mulesoft would become their next cloud, the integration cloud. Salesforce currently has around 7 other clouds including Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, Communities, Platform & IoT.
What is the Problem that the Integration Cloud Solves?
The core customer base for Mulesoft includes organizations that are looking to transition to the cloud and need a robust way to manage all the disparate sources of data across their organization. Mulesoft wants to provide these organizations with a powerful solution for integration.
It wants to handle all of their integrations in a consistent manner and at a large scale. With so many cloud vendors and applications available today, the task at hand is immense and will only get tougher and more demanding as organizations become increasingly reliant on the cloud. Fortunately, Mulesoft has a solution in the form of its ‘integration cloud’.
At Salesforce Ben, we believe that the ‘integration cloud’ by Mulesoft represents the next-generation of application integration. The integration cloud is part of Mulesoft’s Integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Enabling the next generation of integration platforms, iPaaS integrates cloud applications with each other as well as with on-premise and legacy applications.
A cloud integration platform, the integration cloud of Mulesoft enables connectivity to SaaS and cloud services while providing a safe way to access on-premises applications behind a firewall. Not only that, but the platform also allows businesses to integrate cloud-based services with each other as well as with on-premises enterprise applications in a hybrid integration model to solve the problem of cloud silos.
Integration cloud is the next-gen of integration technology and will gradually replace traditional integration platforms. With integration cloud, businesses will have the last essential component needed to realize the benefits of cloud architecture.
