Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/salesforce-is-buying-mulesoft-at-enterprise-value-of-6-5-billion/

by tkfx • 8 years ago

219 80 8 years ago

rrggrr3• 8 years ago

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.

johns• 8 years ago

Zapier is doing amazing, but it would be a few more years to IPO. They announced 35M in ARR in January. Probably need to get that over 200 to IPO.

kareemm• 8 years ago

Where did they announce revenue?

rrggrr3• 8 years ago

They're not going to get to 200 unless:

- Better enterprise marketing. - Increase depth of existing integrations. - Add additional Zapier-hosted zaps.

I'm a very happy Zapier user and fan, but my sense is they need to hire a few seasoned senior people to level up. I may be wrong, just my sense.

murukesh_s3• 8 years ago

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

toomuchtodo3• 8 years ago

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).

mbesto• 8 years ago

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.

acct17712• 8 years ago

The last part just sounds like social responsibility/good focus.

rrggrr3• 8 years ago

Not at all true.

1. Zapier is very flexible if you're willing to write a bit of Python code.

2. Zapier integrates with really any API that supports webhooks, and even those that don't via a CLI and custom language support.

I don't work for Zapier (sadly). But I do use the product every day and have customized it to some pretty unique needs.

kbos87• 8 years ago

Have you tried using Zapier? They may be facilitating tens of thousands of integrations, but they are painfully basic integrations.

acct17712• 8 years ago

That essentially nobody else offers to their target market.

At least, from the perspective of their users.

tixocloud• 8 years ago

I worked with both MuleSoft and Zapier and while Zapier is much easier to use, they only have the basic infrastructure in place. There'a lot more complexity (unnecessary or otherwise) that goes in enterprise integration services.

I don't doubt that Zapier can get there but there is still some way to go even on the infrastructure side.

whoisjuan• 8 years ago

One year after their IPO? I don't get this. Why didn't they buy it last year paying a premium over the 17 USD a share of their public offering instead of paying a premium over the current 33 USD (or 40 USD I guess)? I don't understand the rationale behind these deals.

abakker• 8 years ago

The price for a reasonable amount of due diligence, market proof, and disclosure.

philip1209• 8 years ago

Could this be related to the tax law changes?

stock_toaster• 8 years ago

I was wondering that too. Maybe cash repatriation is at work here?

adventured• 8 years ago

That's like asking why didn't Yahoo, Google, Apple, Amazon etc. acquire Netflix after the Qwikster debacle when the stock imploded down to $7.x / share losing ~80% of its value (now $317 / share).

As irrational as it sounds (and it is), companies overwhelmingly prefer to chase strength in acquisitions. It makes everything about it look and sound better. They don't care about the cost difference, it's not their money/value being vaporized. They care about protecting their job, so they want positive optics, something that is perceived to move the needle on value.

ggg9990• 8 years ago

It’s not irrational. Integrating an acquired knowledge work company is a costly and risky effort in terms of management bandwidth, culture clash, and business model alignment. Unless you are buying pure assets, it rarely makes sense to acquire a questionable company and risk poisoning your own. That’s why most acquisitions are of companies too small to jeopardize the acquirer or healthy enough to be a low risk and worth the effort.

nemo44x• 8 years ago

How do you know they didn’t try? Mulesoft doesn’t have to agree to terms of an offer.

It’s not like Salesforce could have even bought a large percentage of the shares when they went on offer. You don’t make 100% of the company available.

Sometimes companies ipo to prove to buyers that they believe their market value is higher than potential buyers think. I can’t speak for Mulesoft but their stock has been mainly excellent and their transition to a public company has been fantastic.

Mulesoft brought a great company to market and Salesforce was willing to pay a 23% premium. Mulesoft thought that was fair - today.

cylinder2• 8 years ago

Question is why would MuleSoft sell itself if they thought they'd be worth more a year later?

thaumasiotes• 8 years ago

MuleSoft did sell itself; that's what an IPO is.

Presumably, there was a reason.

erikb• 8 years ago

It's not like going to the super market. And it depends on more factors than price. E.g. Salesforce's competition status plays a role as well, also whatever the current power struggle between different Salesforce managers, etc.

Usually in a big-enough company the least efficient thing happens instead of the most efficient thing. But the advantage of the big company is that it can play bigger games than your average small company. And if a small company succeeds at playing bigger then you can still buy it. So despite what HR and your manager might tell you, efficiency is not as important for survival.

1290cc2• 8 years ago

Got to spend those profits some how. Salesforce probably calculated that if they include integration with every deal for an additional 15% to 20% they could grow revenue X%.

This is going to be really good for system integrators as Mulesoft is a complex platform that requires hours of consulting. If I was in the Salesforce space I would be signing up to Mulesoft courses and getting my guys all over that.

oicu8124• 8 years ago

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_...

bobx11• 8 years ago

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.

ben_jones• 8 years ago

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.

Avshalom• 8 years ago

Owning Mulesoft and having an ownership stake in IC means they win regardless of who wins.

valuearb2• 8 years ago

Informatica a competitor to Mulesoft? But at my last gig, ba Fortune 500 company, we had both! Are you implying our IS group was a bunch of idiots? Cause I can totally see that.

oicu8124• 8 years ago

At my last gig, another ba Fortune 500 company, we had multiple on-premise data integration tools including Informatica, DataStage, SSIS and an open source ETL tool. Yes, the idiocracy runs deep with this company as well.

spraak• 8 years ago

Buying a competitor isn't so strange, though

oicu8124• 8 years ago

From all the commentary in the press after this deal was officially announced, it seems like no one really understands it but they say it’s about growth and increasing revenue. However, this one article summarized it nicely:

...customers typically want an independent vendor for the type of service Mulesoft provides, since it has to interact with so many different programs from different companies.

“Part of the value of MuleSoft is its true neutrality, and I just kind of think about what happens to that under the umbrella of Salesforce because obviously you guys are a leading applications vendor,” John DiFucci, a Jefferies analyst, said on the call. [1]

In other words, revenue may increase in the short term but in the long term Mulesoft revenue will decrease as customers choose independent data integration solutions. No one wants the old on-premise model of vendor lock-in that Oracle, IBM and others are notorious for pushing.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-buys-mule-pays-ped...

nodesocket• 8 years ago

$MULE is up 22% on this news.

totalZero• 8 years ago

As it should be. The deal spread seems kind of wide, though. I wonder why.

sb8244• 8 years ago

I think that MuleSoft is a really great business, although I wouldn't use it personally just due to not being in the right industry.

For back-office environment with tons of point 2 point integrations, it just seems to make sense.

Business model is good. Once you're in, going out is really tough. This is exactly like the SFDC app cloud.

tootie2• 8 years ago

I'm in the right business and I still don't understand why I'd ever need this kind of software.

rhacker• 8 years ago

I think its one of those things where it could be optional but when you're using it it's like hey it's nice that we have that ability here... that said it's gone a bit beyond it's architectural hey-day now that we have containers and infrastructure as code in general, but it will have it's customer base for years to come.

niftich• 8 years ago

Well, the promise is a kind of drag-and-drop [1], mix-and-match [2], transform these data fields this way, make a decision off of these other data fields, and ship it there kind of integration. Extra points for having a Store for others' components [3], and optionally doing it in the Cloud [4]. Their site has been tailored to convert executive-types on every buzzword, from Microservices [5] to DevOps [6] to Mobile [7].

Whether this works out is entirely dependent on your org: it still requires competent people wiring up things -- much to management's chagrin -- but it can save a fair bit of time. Tradeoffs all around.

Mule basically started off with an ESB [8] that's a glorified reactor queue and a bunch of canned components of varying qualities that either implement an EIP primitive [9], or some domain-specific templated executor (make SQL calls, make API calls, etc). Now there's a whole ecosystem around it: a marketplace of components, an API proxy, management and monitoring layers, and fancy GUIs. The tools are (mostly) solid -- no more and no less than any other big-name commercial tool, but I'd venture to guess a lot of businesses buy this thinking it's going to be The Silver Bullet they're looking for, and it predictably rarely works that way.

[1] https://www.mulesoft.com/platform/studio [2] https://www.mulesoft.com/integration-solutions/dataweave-int... [3] https://www.mulesoft.com/exchange/ [4] https://www.mulesoft.com/platform/saas/cloudhub-ipaas-cloud-... [5] https://www.mulesoft.com/integration-solutions/api/microserv... [6] https://www.mulesoft.com/integration-solutions/api/devops [7] https://www.mulesoft.com/integration-solutions/api/mobility [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13672234#13673158 [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Integration_Pattern...

treis3• 8 years ago

I'm in the right business too, and one of the things I've realized is that it's not about building software developers need. It's about building software that people authorized to spend a lot of money think the enterprise needs. It's dazzling to listen the Mulesoft folks talk about experience APIs and system APIs while dragging and dropping stuff. I can see why people would go for it.

noomerikal• 8 years ago

Modernization efforts for Fortune 500 enterprises with 1000+s of legacy applications still exist.

junto2• 8 years ago

We use Mulesoft a fair bit as a proxy to our various microservices. IT can do the rate limiting and redirection as a front, whilst keeping our microservices hidden behind the DMZ.

We also use it to transform data from different services when we do integrations, especially old school SOAP ones that we don't want to support directly anymore, and have been replaced by simpler to manage and develop REST APIs. Mulesoft is pretty good for that kind of thing.

senthilnayagam• 8 years ago

salesforce offers its api on swagger/openapi format and MuleSoft was promoting RAML. hope MuleSoft starts offering openapi tools in its new avatar.

occams_chainsaw• 8 years ago

The RAML just ends up generating the usual swagger/openapi stuff now

junto2• 8 years ago

Mulesoft have been moving away from RAML I believe, although it is still petty core to their product.

https://blogs.mulesoft.com/dev/api-dev/open-api-raml-better-...

Bombthecat• 8 years ago

What will happen to there API Management System?

Maven9114• 8 years ago

I am still trying to wrap my head around why is Mule needed. There is a large push at several companies because of: Enterprise Service Bus to help integrate applications, REST API design specing and testing (Mule AnyPoint platform), and API gateways for throttling and applying security policies on API consumption.

1. But there are other message middleware in place, brokers like Kafka, Tibco etc. Is an ESB really needed ? What is the actual benefit ?

2. Do web developers really benefit from using Mule's API design software ? Are there other powerful and free alternatives (technically Mule Community is free but lacks funcationality) or better tools ?

3. What do you lose out if you towards the Mule-way (ESB, API first strategy) ?

joneholland• 8 years ago

No modern company is pushing esb anymore. It’s an architectural failure still being pushed by vendors and has been architects.

I use it as a canary to know if a company is technically inept.

Maven9114• 8 years ago

So ESBs is a early 2000s concept but what is so terrible about it, or why is it an architectural failure.

tankerdude• 8 years ago

I’ve worked with MuleSoft and the ESB really isn’t an “ESB”. It’s really about having the ability to write APIs with specific standards.

It allows you to write micro services without pushing up your own instances, use kube8, or anything of that nature.

It internally uses raml as its service definition that is analogous to OpenAPI/Swagger.

Think of a number of good yet annoying things you have to do when interacting with other businesses when writing APIs.

Certs set up, QoS depending on customer, key rotation, API throttling, authentication, authorization, HA, etc. You essentially push up a lambda onto their service and config.

The power isn’t necessarily just that as well, but because they have raml, they publish and support an ecosystem of “connectors” which is mostly just a pretty version of an API and has a UI that allows non devs to do ETL on data although almost no one does that. It allows low level engineers to do it though.

Imagine having an Ubuntu machine(s) doing APIs vs an iPhone using apps. It’s packaged nicely for simple API development rather than spinning everything else up that you can.

Mind you, I’m not saying to go out and use it today as it is not cheap but there really is a business case for it.

Lastly, we integrated a lot with Rabbit to help with work that can be done asynchronously. Otherwise your bill from them would be even more expensive.

Would I use it again? Yes, if the company wanted to have the cheapest engineers or use tech savvy product managers and wanted as little DevOps as possible to maintain their code (again think of it like as nicer lambda). Just remember to fork over $200K a year for the bare minimum for what I would call a production grade set up.

ralphc• 8 years ago

So what is used instead of ESBs today?

vram22• 8 years ago

BTW, somewhat relevant (since MuleSoft had/has an Enterprise Service Bus - an ESB, as I remember from checking the company out some time earlier):

There is an ESB for Python called Zato - zato.io . I had interacted with the creator, Dariusz, earlier, and he seemed dedicated to making it a success, and recently I visited the site again, it seems to have got some traction.

pause_009• 8 years ago

We have found a successful niche for doing simple integrations without all the platform bloat and the best part is that it all runs on the Salesforce platform.

https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listing...

1290cc2• 8 years ago

This reminds me of when Oracle purchased BEA for their Weblogic platform 10 years ago. Oracle destroyed that product and company. Importantly it didn't solve their integration problems as all the best people left within the year as they discovered how hard it was to get anything done in a company of that size.

It does confuse me that Mulesoft, a tool that only the best java developers can get value out of, would be purchased by a company that focuses on ease of use or no software. Salesforce likely has its own internal integration problems and needs an enterprise class platform to integrate its own clouds. In which case Mulesoft would be a good choice. I do not see Mulesoft causing much of a problem for the leaders like Informatica or Boomi. Maybe the Salesforce reps will force Mulesoft down their customers throats but not everyone can manage a java based ESB.

Price wise, its obscene at 22x, so congrats to the mulesoft exec team for getting out while the going was good. I know they were struggling to grow beyond being a 1 product company and many execs/staff were burnt out from staying ahead of Wall St. There has been a lot of attrition from the company over the last year. I know because I hired many of their PMs.

Maybe Salesforce fell for the cool aid of Blockchain, as there was a rumor Mule had some kind of blockchain based tech they were working on.

chamach• 8 years ago

A lot of these companies - Boomi, Informatica, Snaplogic were banking on low end integration to cloud via the salesforce channel. Salesforce will package mule and then out go all these low end integrations channel for these other companies

On an average about 5- 10% sales was coming via these channels for the companies listed above.

Nice strategic move by Salesforce.

Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

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