{"id":894347,"date":"2018-03-23T11:43:58","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T18:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chiefmartec.com\/?p=2786"},"modified":"2018-03-23T11:45:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T18:45:55","slug":"salesforce-to-acquire-mulesoft-because-hey-its-a-world-of-infinite-cloud-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/salesforce-to-acquire-mulesoft-because-hey-its-a-world-of-infinite-cloud-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Salesforce to acquire Mulesoft because, hey, it\u2019s a world of infinite cloud services"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, Mulesoft announced it was being acquired by Salesforce<\/a> for $6.5 billion. That\u2019s a pretty heft premium \u2014 a 21.6X multiple \u2014 given that the company had less than $300 million in revenue<\/a> for 2017.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a strategic bet. So what\u2019s the strategy?<\/p>\n

Although I\u2019ve sworn off the game of making predictions<\/a>, I do feel this validates one of the 5 big disruptions to marketing that I\u2019ve been clamoring about for the past two years: the rise of microservices & APIs<\/strong><\/a> across marketing and other business services (that\u2019s the 2018 update, here\u2019s the original 2016 post<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Which is kind of a techy way of describing the explosion of marketing technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Essentially, we\u2019re moving to a world of \u201cinfinite\u201d software services running in the cloud that interact with each other in highly flexible configurations. I say \u201cinfinite\u201d because digital business is always adding one more \u2014 n + 1<\/em> \u2014 cloud component into its operations. It\u2019s the Inductive Theorem<\/a> for the cloud.<\/p>\n

Even if old services go away \u2014 and they do \u2014 new ones arrive to take their place. And the old ones don\u2019t seem to go away as fast as the new ones arrive. Mary Meeker\u2019s State of the Internet report last year revealed that the average enterprise uses over 1,000 different cloud services<\/strong><\/a>. It may sound anomalous at first, but this is not an anomaly. This is the new normal.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d be tempted to call this \u201ccloud creep,\u201d but that implies it\u2019s a negative phenomenon. While it certainly has its challenges \u2014 such as data management \u2014 it also has benefits too: far greater agility than the monolithic IT systems of previous decades.<\/p>\n

As the number of cloud services adopted by a company grows, the \u201csize\u201d of each service \u2014 the scope of what it does, its purpose \u2014 tends to shrink. We have more and more specialist services across the marketing technology landscape. Hence the name \u201cmicroservices\u201d \u2014 which used to be just exposed to developers, but increasingly play a role in the design of business workflow. (As a techy note: the serverless computing<\/a> movement is going to accelerate both of these trends, further shrinking the size of services and multiplying the number of them out there.)<\/p>\n

Why do companies keeping building and adopting more? Agility.<\/p>\n

Moving away from monolithic systems, which can take months or years to change, to a loose affiliation of multiple cloud services that can now be dynamically added or reconfigured in a matter of days or weeks (or sometimes even minutes!) dramatically accelerates the clockspeed of digital business<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

My opinion \u2014 and I should disclaim that as the VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot<\/a> I am surely biased in my viewpoint and that this is also my personal opinion and not necessarily the company\u2019s \u2014 is that this \u201ccloud creep\u201d has been frustrating for many of the major marketing cloud vendors. The early strategy that many of them pursued, attempting to consolidate everything into one mega-suite, has continually been foiled by an ever-expanding landscape of new, small, fast-moving, innovative SaaS ventures.<\/p>\n

In fact, the rise of iPaaS<\/a> (integration platform-as-a-service) vendors is arguably a reaction to the disconnect between consolidation strategies and fragmentation realities<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"iPaaS<\/a><\/p>\n

While Mulesoft is on the \u201cheavier\u201d end of the spectrum \u2014 their origin is as an enterprise service bus<\/a> (ESB) solution meant to be wielded by IT pros \u2014 they\u2019ve been steadily headed in the direction of democratizing their integration capabilities to support citizen integrators.<\/p>\n

My definition of CITIZEN INTEGRATORS<\/strong> from my post on digital transformation<\/a>: non-technical (or minimally-technical) professionals who use iPaaS and other workflow automation tools to create business processes on-the-fly, intelligently routing data and triggering activities across multiple teams.<\/p>\n

This is the kind of data and workflow automation that marketing operations teams thrive<\/em> on.<\/p>\n

Integration solutions such as iPaaS have become very popular because that take the reality of the fragmentation of infinite cloud services and make it more manageable. Not seamless, but above the threshold of a minimally viable integration for pretty much any service you want to connect to it.<\/p>\n

I look at Salesforce acquiring Mulesoft as an acknowledgement of that reality and a strategic decision to embrace it. And I generally think that\u2019s a smart move.<\/p>\n

\"iPaaS<\/a><\/p>\n

However, as my friend David Raab pointed out, integration isn\u2019t the same as unification<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

While iPaaS solutions solve an important problem of dynamically connecting systems together and exchanging data between them, they\u2019re generally neutral about the data flowing through their pipes.<\/p>\n

They leave things like identity resolution and campaign decisioning to the systems attached as spokes to their hub.<\/p>\n

An iPaaS is not a system of record. It\u2019s a system of transport.<\/p>\n

While that\u2019s workable in a number of scenarios \u2014 especially if you\u2019re comfortable with a more federated approach to data in your marketing stack \u2014 it\u2019s not the only architecture available to marketing today.<\/p>\n

Customer data platforms (CDPs) take the plumbing of iPaaS solutions and seek to be the intelligent repository of all the data that flows through their connections \u2014 maintaining a customer-normalized database at the crossroads.<\/p>\n

I also see similarities in more modern business intelligence and customer intelligence solutions that layer greater insight engines on top of such a centralized data repository.<\/p>\n

Salesforce will naturally benefit from Mulesoft integrations feeding into their CRM. But a CRM isn\u2019t the same as a CDP. A DMP is slightly different too. It will be interesting to see how these related-but-not-the-same technologies compete and\/or converge as they increasingly talk with each other.<\/p>\n

Never a dull moment in the marketing technology space.<\/p>\n

P.S. By the way, if you want to learn more about citizen integrators and CDPs, you\u2019ve got to come to the MarTech conference<\/strong><\/a>, April 23-25 in San Jose.<\/p>\n

One of our keynotes will be an in-depth discussion of this \u201ccitizen technologist\u201d movement \u2014 citizen integrators, citizen developers, citizen data scientists \u2014 and what it means for marketing with the CEO of IFTTT, the CEO of Zapier, the CMO of Tableau, and myself. Have you thought about your team as citizen integrators? Even wilder, have you thought about your customers<\/em> as citizen integrators?<\/p>\n

David Raab will also be presenting a session on Navigating the CDP Landscape<\/strong>, to guide you through the dozens of vendors offering solutions under that label. And if you really<\/em> want to dive into CDPs, he\u2019ll be leading an optional 4-hour workshop on Using CDP to Make the Most of Your Customer Data<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

And, of course, 40+ other sessions on the state-of-the-art at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management. It\u2019s going to be an amazing 3 days \u2014 hope to see you there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, Mulesoft announced it was being acquired by Salesforce for $6.5 billion. That\u2019s a pretty heft premium \u2014 a 21.6X multiple \u2014 given that the company had less than $300 million in revenue for 2017.
\nThat\u2019s a strategic bet. So what\u2019s the strategy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7085,"featured_media":886113,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,117],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7085"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}