Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B

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.

This reminds me of when Oracle purchased BEA for their Weblogic platform 10 years ago. Oracle destroyed that product and company. Importantly it didn&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>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.

Makes me wonder if we will see a Zapier IPO soon. It&#x27;s a crowded space, integration as a service, and in need of consolidation. Zapier doesn&#x27;t have MuleSofts enterprise street cred because IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there.

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.<p>1. But there are other message middleware in place, brokers like Kafka, Tibco etc. Is an ESB really needed ? What is the actual benefit ?<p>2. Do web developers really benefit from using Mule&#x27;s API design software ? Are there other powerful and free alternatives (technically Mule Community is free but lacks funcationality) or better tools ?<p>3. What do you lose out if you towards the Mule-way (ESB, API first strategy) ?

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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;informatica_buyout_closes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;informatica_buyout_...</a>

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<p>On an average about 5- 10% sales was coming via these channels for the companies listed above.<p>Nice strategic move by Salesforce.

I think that MuleSoft is a really great business, although I wouldn&#x27;t use it personally just due to not being in the right industry.<p>For back-office environment with tons of point 2 point integrations, it just seems to make sense.<p>Business model is good. Once you&#x27;re in, going out is really tough. This is exactly like the SFDC app cloud.

BTW, somewhat relevant (since MuleSoft had&#x2F;has an Enterprise Service Bus - an ESB, as I remember from checking the company out some time earlier):<p>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.

What will happen to there API Management System?

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appexchange.salesforce.com&#x2F;appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000DpzWaEAJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appexchange.salesforce.com&#x2F;appxListingDetail?listing...</a>

salesforce offers its api on swagger&#x2F;openapi format and MuleSoft was promoting RAML. hope MuleSoft starts offering openapi tools in its new avatar.

$MULE is up 22% on this news.