Last November, Marc Benioff declared his company would generate $20 billion in revenue by 2022. The declaration by Salesforce’s chief executive came after the company successfully beat analyst expectations in its Q4 earnings, where it revealed it had also passed a revenue milestone of $10 billion for the fiscal year. The growth was attributed to more global brands signing on for the Customer Relationship Management platform.
Targeting an additional $10 billion gain in revenue is no small feat. Still, there are plenty of opportunities for Salesforce to target, not only by sector but also by companies that prefer a multi-cloud strategy. While we have come to expect Salesforce to launch a new product each year that’ll allow its customers to remain technologically advanced in the world of sales and marketing, perhaps the most significant initiative flying under the radar is an effort to modernize legacy systems to work with Salesforce’s massive platform, which is why MuleSoft was acquired for $6.5 billion.
“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,” Benioff said.
For 12 years, MuleSoft served as middleware, facilitating integrations between applications, data, and services. Among its many capabilities, it included an API hub, which contained more than 13,000 feeds and was likely viewed as an integral resource for developers to make enterprise systems work more closely with each other. MuleSoft also has the capability to connect systems in the cloud with on-premise ones, making it logical why Salesforce decided to make MuleSoft the centerpiece of its brand-new Integration Cloud.
No Systems Left Behind
There’s no denying that Salesforce is advancing rapidly, with each quarter generating more and more revenue. Every year at the company’s Dreamforce conference, it reveals the next round of innovation to improve how businesses can be more in lock-step with their customers, such as the launch of its Einstein AI solution, an offering around the Internet of Things, the release of a streamlined solution called Salesforce1, and more. This is great for existing customers or those that are “hip to the ways” of modern business, but for those stuck using legacy systems that just haven’t scaled as fast, it leaves them wanting.
MuleSoft is no stranger to Salesforce, having been one of its biggest partners for years. But now that it’s powering the Integration Cloud, Salesforce can help administrators and developers find ways to sync their data across their on-premise systems and tie it back to Salesforce capabilities such as Marketing Cloud, Einstein, and Analytics. Salesforce can even integrate with thousands of third-party apps through the AppExchange.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Salesforce president Keith Block explained the acquisition decision:
As we were listening to CEOs, the whole notion of integration and data kept coming up over and over again. They are so frustrated that they can’t unlock data from their legacy systems. That is the strategic nature of why we are acquiring MuleSoft. We believe that it is a very important piece of the puzzle to satisfy the needs of our customers and a necessary piece to drive their transformation.
But after these companies are up to speed with Salesforce’s capabilities, what will jumpstart their innovation? It’ll likely reside within Salesforce’s AppExchange and Trailhead programs, each designed to encourage developers and customers to familiarize themselves with the platform.
The First One’s Free
No, integrating with Salesforce via MuleSoft isn’t going to be free. However, Salesforce likely hopes this will happen: The company loops the data from its legacy system into Salesforce, realizes its capabilities, and wants to weaponize the information further. Because each company is different, it’s impossible to identify each specific need for them all, so there’s a marketplace for third-party developers to produce possible solutions.
For as long as MuleSoft has existed, Salesforce AppExchange has been the business world’s version of Apple’s iTunes. More than 3,000 apps are available for download, and new Salesforce customers may find this appealing as a treasure trove of capabilities that they didn’t previously have access to—which they likely haven’t.
Even with Salesforce developing at full steam, it hasn’t forgotten about the AppExchange. The company has invested in improving the apps’ quality and personalizing them so Salesforce customers can discover helpful tools and those they may not know exist. In the long run, new businesses will likely be able to do more with their data, meaning more experiments and marketing services can be offered to their customers.
Even if a company doesn’t want to use the total weight of Salesforce’s platform — maybe they already have a marketing solution — the ability to extend their data from legacy platforms into third-party apps via AppExchange is available. So there’s great potential there, and the more data sources Salesforce opens up for developers, the more an ever-diverse set of applications will flourish.
The Trailblazers Will Inherit the Cloud
As Salesforce’s Senior Vice President of Developer Relations, Sarah Franklin has noticed a problem: With more than 3 million people building apps, there are disproportionately many solutions compared to needs. “How do you educate developers at scale with a company that’s a fast innovator in all of the technologies coming out?,” she asked in 2016.
This is why Salesforce created Trailhead three years ago. It is an online course to increase the number of skilled workers adept at using and building around the platform. It’s no surprise that Salesforce has become an economic sector unto itself. Still, thanks to MuleSoft’s support, it could eventually lead developers and administrators working primarily on legacy systems to understand Salesforce better and improve their integrations.
Being a so-called “trailblazer” is almost being an evangelist for Salesforce, but without being an employee. For most customers, what Salesforce offers with its suite of cloud products will be sufficient. However, being able to customize their experience may be critical for others. A better understanding of the bones of Salesforce can help developers and administrators realize what they lack in their own companies. So, if that’s the case, are there APIs available through Salesforce or MuleSoft that they can leverage to create a custom application that could help other businesses with a similar problem?
Benioff didn’t specifically say where the $20 billion in revenue would come from, so it could be through app development, propelled by people’s better understanding of what Salesforce can do. This is the benefit Trailhead brings. It’s not just for beginners or those with intermediate exposure to the platform — it’s a continuing education service for those looking to find ways to tap into MuleSoft’s API to modernize their legacy systems. There will likely be courses on that, as well as how to use AppExchange apps to weaponize data further, or maybe specific use cases that will appeal to those in untapped markets will find interesting.
Over the next few years, it wouldn’t surprise me if Salesforce devoted more resources and development catered towards businesses with legacy systems and improving education to potential end users. This type of outreach could be necessary for Salesforce’s ability to surpass or fail to achieve its milestones.
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