[oicu812]

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]

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]

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.

[codeulike]

Salesforce deserve a lot of credit for staying online for 15 years or so while upgrading and expanding the platform every six months, while minimising breakage to customers' customisations. Imagine how most projects would look if you tried that, the developers would usually want to scrap it and re-write after 18 months or so.

[chrisweekly]

Also, massive credit for being a pioneer of SaaS per se. IMHO that's the most profound and impressive aspect to their success and legacy.

[ccmonnett]

I'm looking for one of these 'mirror SFDC (or Zendesk) to Postgres' solutions. No fancy integrations/automated workflows: just back up a Salesforce CRM to Postgres at least every 15 minutes. Fivetran has seemed to be the best fit for this simple use case. Is there an alternative you recommend?

[valuearb]

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.

[oicu812]

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.

[oicu812]

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...

[Avshalom]

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

[spraak]

Buying a competitor isn't so strange, though