How Boomi Makes Salesforce’s MuleSoft Acquisition Better

I’ve spent a fair portion of my career working for or with Salesforce. Given that, I think I have more than an average understanding of this company. So, when Salesforce announced its $6.5 billion purchase of MuleSoft earlier this year, it was no surprise that the company decided to invest in integration in a big way.

Without a doubt, integration is a fundamental need for Salesforce. To get the most from Salesforce, organizations must connect this revolutionary CRM cloud platform to other applications and sources of data. Bringing integration capabilities in-house makes a ton of sense for Salesforce.

And overall, integration is a pivotal challenge for most any business today. Digital enterprises must get integration right or face extinction. It’s that simple.

But today’s increasingly dynamic hybrid IT environments are demanding more and more from integration technologies to address an ever-expanding scope of needs.

Code or Speed, Your Choice

Given the growing importance of integration, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has publicly stated that his company purchased MuleSoft to address a very specific aspect of integration. He wants to use MuleSoft to expand Salesforce’s market share in the largest global companies — the Fortune 1000.

MuleSoft is appealing to these companies, because it is set up to address the gnarliest of gnarly integrations that require the most painstaking custom-code and high-touch/high-control development for the world’s most complex IT systems.

That is great for helping Salesforce meet its market expansion plans. But in our experience, the vast majority of Salesforce customers have much different priorities when it comes to integration.

We’ve found that most companies, as well as a lot of business units and other groups within larger companies, are most concerned with speed. They want to get sh*t done…now.

To do that, you need an open and unified integration platform that harnesses true cloud-native capabilities combined with a low-code, high-productivity approach to development. That’s what Dell Boomi offers Salesforce customers.

Our standing as Salesforce’s leading integration partner bears this out. More than 1,500 Salesforce customers use the Boomi integration cloud. That happens to be more than the total number of MuleSoft customers (just over 1,200).

And when we go head-to-head with MuleSoft in deals with Salesforce customers, we usually win. :)

That’s not an indication that MuleSoft doesn’t have good technology for key aspects of integration. It just means it isn’t the best approach for the majority of Salesforce customers who are concerned with different kinds of integration needs.

In my view, there are three key ways that Boomi helps complement the capabilities MuleSoft offers to Salesforce customers.

On-Premise + Cloud-Native

MuleSoft is fundamentally a modern, on-premise enterprise service bus (ESB). Over the past few years, it has added some rudimentary cloud-based options. But as a result, MuleSoft has introduced more complexity into the management of its software by creating multiple versions of the same run-time engine. Most of this management burden falls on the customer.

We get it. It is hard to develop for backwards compatibility and to keep platform variations from multiplying. But complexity increases costs and slows companies down, the two things that an integration cloud platform should not do.

A single-instance, multi-tenant integration cloud like Boomi’s eliminates worries about upgrades, software management or version control. That benefit is fundamental to the core nature of an integration cloud.

By providing a true cloud-native platform, we remove all hardware and software challenges for Salesforce customers, keeping with the same technology strategy that made Salesforce successful as a pioneering SaaS company. And we’ve seen time and time again that these kinds of benefits are the important ones for most Salesforce customers.

Custom Coding + Low-Code

MuleSoft is a pretty good development environment for professional developers. But though MuleSoft has demonstrated its commitment to helping businesses custom code integrations, it has not developed a platform that provides the necessary high-productivity environment for building integrations at today’s pace of business.

MuleSoft is set up primarily to serve integration edge cases while sacrificing the speed needed for the bulk of integration tasks. It does offer an optional drag-and-drop environment, but that is based on Eclipse, a Java development platform. As such, it is by default set up for pro coders.

In its recent Magic Quadrant assessment, Gartner found this to be one of the “Cautions” for MuleSoft, calling out the vendor’s strong focus on integration specialists as a concern for organizations looking for the best iPaaS option. As Gartner notes, “…it is common knowledge that clients get the most out of MuleSoft if they have good technical skills.”

Boomi, on the other hand, has built a low-code approach as the foundation to our development platform. We take care of the tough technical challenges, address the vast bulk of standard integration tasks, and bake best practices into our environment. It’s all to the point of helping companies move faster, at lower cost. For us, this is what an integration cloud should be about.

Boomi streamlines the vast bulk of integration tasks, but we also provide developer extensibility for “last mile” integration tasks efforts might need custom coding. Our philosophy is to ensure our drag-and-drop environment works great for everyone, while clearly segmenting specialized custom coding work in a separate part of our platform.

That same philosophy works as a perfect pairing to MuleSoft. Use Boomi for most of your integration tasks, and turn to MuleSoft for the really tricky stuff. That gives you the best of both worlds.

APIs + Unified Integration

Another reasonable strength of MuleSoft is its API management. If APIs are your main concern, MuleSoft can be an option. But APIs are only a portion of the modern integration puzzle for addressing the challenges of today’s hybrid IT systems.

As we know from listening to our Salesforce customers, just offering some APIs isn’t enough. Core integration — connecting applications to other applications — is where it all starts with an integration cloud.

You also need to manage your data quality and synchronization among applications, as well as help connect and coordinate the exchange of data among partner networks.

Finally, you need something like Boomi Flow to bring people and mobile apps into the integration equation. Only then are you addressing the full scope of integration demands for driving digital transformation.

This again is another case of 1+1=3 for Salesforce customers. With Boomi, you can efficiently cover the broadest scope of your integration needs while using MuleSoft to go deep on APIs, if that is your need.

Finding the Way to the Integration Cloud

Creating a true cloud-native integration platform that is open, unified and delivers high productivity is no easy task. At Boomi, we know this better than anyone. As the pioneer of the iPaaS integration cloud market, we’ve been working on these challenges for more than a decade.

Certainly, Salesforce is just at the beginning of its journey to transform MuleSoft into a true integration cloud that matches its own cloud-native approach. In the meantime, Boomi provides the ideal complement to MuleSoft to help companies get the most from Salesforce. We are happy to be of assistance.