INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A year and a half after getting acquired by Salesforce for $6.5 billion, MuleSoft is beginning to resemble a Salesforce company — using
its language and its methodologies to describe new products and services
This week at Dreamforce, as the company mega customer conference begins in San Francisco, MuleSoft announced a slew of new services as it
integrates more deeply into the Salesforce family of products.
MuleSoft creates APIs to connect different systems together
This could be quite useful for Salesforce as a bridge between older software that may be on-prem or in the cloud
It allows Salesforce and its customers to access data wherever it lives, even from different parts of the Salesforce ecosystem
itself.
MuleSoft made a number of announcements designed to simplify that process and put it in the hands of more customers
For starters, it announcing Accelerators, which are pre-defined integrations that let companies connect more easily to other systems
Not surprisingly, two of the first ones connect data from external products and services to Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Commerce
Cloud.
&What we&ve done is we&ve pre-built integrations to common back-end systems like ServiceNow and JIRA in Service Cloud, and we
prebuilt those integrations, and then automatically connected that data and services through a Salesforce Lightning component directly in
the Service console,& Lindsey Irvine, chief marketing officer at MuleSoft, explained.
What this does is allow the agent to get a more
complete view of the customer by getting not just the data that stored in Salesforce, but in other systems as well.
The company also wants
to put these kinds of integration skills in the hands of more Salesforce customers, so they have designed a set of courses in Trailhead, the
company training platform, with the goal of helping 100,000 Salesforce admins, developers, integration architects and line of business users
develop expertise around creating and managing these kinds of integrations.
The company is also putting resources into creating the API
Community Manager, a place where people involved in building and managing these integrations can get help from a community of users, all
built on Salesforce products and services, says Mark Dao, chief product officer at MuleSoft.
&We&re leveraging Community Cloud, Service
Cloud and Marketing Cloud to create a true developer experience platform
And what interesting is that it targeting both the business users — in other words, business development teams and marketing teams — as
well as external developers,& he said
He added that the fact this is working with business users as well as the integration experts is something new, and the goal is to drive
increased usage of APIs using MuleSoft inside Salesforce customer organizations.
Finally, the company announced Flow Designer, a new tool
fueled by Einstein AI, which helps automate the creation of workflows and integrations between systems in a more automated fashion without
requiring coding skills.
MuleSoft Flow Designer requires no coding (Screenshot: MuleSoft)
Dao says this is about putting MuleSoft in reach
&It about enabling use cases for less technical users in the context of the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
This really requires a new way of thinking around creating integrations, and we&ve been making Flow Designer simpler and simpler, and
removing that technical layer from those users,& he said.
API Community Manager is available now
Accelerators will be available by the end of the year and Flow Designer updates will be available Q2 2020, according to the company.
These
and other features are all designed to take some of the complexity out of using MuleSoft to help connect various systems across the
organization, including both Salesforce and external programs, to make use of data wherever it lives
MuleSoft does requires a fair bit of technical skill, so if the company is able to simplify integration tasks, it could help put it in the
hands of more users.
Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5 billion
