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Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

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Re: Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

#11

Post by oicu812 »

This seems strange to me since Salesforce already has an ownership stake in the chief competitor to MuleSoft, Informatica Cloud. Salesforce was one of the four companies that took Informatica private [1] three years ago but it seemed like Salesforce was still treating Informatica, MuleSoft and the other cloud data integration solutions equally. Now if Salesforce fully owns MuleSoft, I expect them to prefer it over the other solutions.

It seems like they are cutting their own throat in a bid to gain more data integration revenue, except the other companies will reduce their partnership with Salesforce so the total revenue decreases over time.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/07/informatica_buyout_...

Re: Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

#13

Post by murukesh_s »

rrggrr wrote: post #2

Makes me wonder if we will see a Zapier IPO soon. It's a crowded space, integration as a service, and in need of consolidation. Zapier doesn't have MuleSofts enterprise street cred because IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there.

" It's a crowded space" - Never thought it's that crowded. Wondering who are the major players there..?

Re: Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

#14

Post by toomuchtodo »

murukesh_s wrote: post #13
rrggrr wrote: post #2

Makes me wonder if we will see a Zapier IPO soon. It's a crowded space, integration as a service, and in need of consolidation. Zapier doesn't have MuleSofts enterprise street cred because IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there.

" It's a crowded space" - Never thought it's that crowded. Wondering who are the major players there..?

Mulesoft, Zapier, Microsoft Flow, Automate.io, Tray.io, Integromat, Workato, PieSync, Dsync, OneSaas, Skyvia

Defining "major" is hard, I think. You either select a few big providers for integrations, or you go long tail with hundreds. I think there won't be winner take all, as there are a lot of integration dollars to go around (enterprise, SMB, freelance/individual users, etc), and each integration system has their own moat (Microsoft Flow gets access to everyone using Office cloud products, for example).

Re: Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

#15

Post by bobx11 »

oicu812 wrote: post #11

This seems strange to me since Salesforce already has an ownership stake in the chief competitor to MuleSoft, Informatica Cloud. Salesforce was one of the four companies that took Informatica private [1] three years ago but it seemed like Salesforce was still treating Informatica, MuleSoft and the other cloud data integration solutions equally. Now if Salesforce fully owns MuleSoft, I expect them to prefer it over th…

Seems more likely that they want the database connections than the revenue. Everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem is writing Integrations into other platforms and if they make it easier to ingest data in Salesforce and keep you there it will be more sticky.

Re: Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

#17

Post by mbesto »

rrggrr wrote: post #2

Makes me wonder if we will see a Zapier IPO soon. It's a crowded space, integration as a service, and in need of consolidation. Zapier doesn't have MuleSofts enterprise street cred because IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there.

> IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there

Two very different product sets. Zapier falls over as soon as you want to bring in customized data structures/flows/etc, which frankly every enterprise biz does. It also doesn't integrate with the big on-premise stuff (SAP/Oracle/etc) in a customizable/graceful way.

This is, by the way, not a bad thing.

Re: Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

#18

Post by surbas »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14
murukesh_s wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" It's a crowded space" - Never thought it's that crowded. Wondering who are the major players there..?

Mulesoft, Zapier, Microsoft Flow, Automate.io, Tray.io, Integromat, Workato, PieSync, Dsync, OneSaas, Skyvia Defining "major" is hard, I think. You either select a few big providers for integrations, or you go long tail with hundreds. I think there won't be winner take all, as there are a lot of integration dollars to go around (enterprise, SMB, freelance/individual users, etc), and each integration system has their…

Few more: Dell Boomi, Segment.io, Pandium, Infomatica...

Re: Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

#19

Post by ben_jones »

bobx11 wrote: post #15
oicu812 wrote: post #11

This seems strange to me since Salesforce already has an ownership stake in the chief competitor to MuleSoft, Informatica Cloud. Salesforce was one of the four companies that took Informatica private [1] three years ago but it seemed like Salesforce was still treating Informatica, MuleSoft and the other cloud data integration solutions equally. Now if Salesforce fully owns MuleSoft, I expect them to prefer it over th…

Seems more likely that they want the database connections than the revenue. Everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem is writing Integrations into other platforms and if they make it easier to ingest data in Salesforce and keep you there it will be more sticky.

As someone who just finished a custom caching solution for Salesforce-backed data I couldn't agree more. There are a number of solutions out there that attempt to mirror salesforce to i.e. Postgres, but they are expensive. Plenty of people want to leave Salesforce but are caught in by the cost of exfiltration.

That said Salesforce isn't THAT bad. There are plenty of edge cases, dark spots in documentation, shitty pricing tiers, BUT there's also a lot of cool stuff you can do with it and most of the cool stuff is incredibly well geared for solving common business problems.

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