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Even MuleSoft, a leader in integration, had its own challenges integrating with the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem. MuleSoft’s product is complicated and requires deep technical understanding, which made the sales process a little more difficult than Salesforce was used to and required a little reorganization across the company. Then there was the difficulty of sewing together the amount of acquisitions Salesforce has made over the years, including Tableau and Slack, with MuleSoft’s own business.

In a conversation with Protocol, Hayward discussed why Salesforce bought MuleSoft, how Salesforce uses MuleSoft to integrate its own systems and the advice it has for Tableau and Slack.

The following interview has been edited and compressed for clarity.

Why did Salesforce want MuleSoft? What did MuleSoft give to Salesforce that it did not already have?

If you were to look at Salesforce as it became more and more into multicloud distributions of CRM, there were two main reasons. I think for a while CRM may exist as a patch on top of the body, but not necessarily part of the central nervous system. When it came to sales, we were engaged and interacted with other systems, but these systems were supportive and not the core of what you had to do. [But] when you start coming into service, where you now get into the back end and need to understand [supply and inventory] or when you get into e-commerce, integrating into ERP and back-end, you really can not do e-commerce effectively as a veneer on top of the customer, it gets right into the central nervous system of customer data.

So when you start integrating all of these experiences, integration becomes a pretty critical success factor in delivering what a customer now expects to be completely seamless and fully connected. [360-degree view]. I think that was really the main reason. As we expanded in the market for CRM, this became both a requirement, but without capacity internally, a bit of a threat, because we had to leave it to the customer at the end of the day and not participate in one of these critical success factors.

Also, if you look across the customer landscape – we were acquired just over four years ago – this was probably the largest single customer request, because getting data out of back-end systems and integrating those systems to have this very moderate engagement layer in Salesforce, it was difficult, and that was often the reason why these initiatives were either delayed or in some cases failed.

Salesforce always listens to its customers, [and] The customer said, “Look, we need this opportunity, it’s one of the biggest success factors for our program.” So that was really the reason for the acquisition, and it has been very successful. I think we do more of what we call connected Customer 360 deals than we did pre-purchases, where a customer like AT&T buys a whole result and asks us to come in and not just provide the application layer, but all the underlying connection unlocks this data also.

How much does Salesforce use MuleSoft internally in Salesforce for integrations?

Pretty much. First, we’re adopted in Salesforce, so we call that initiative Salesforce on Salesforce. We assumed that an employee’s introductory experience took weeks to now literally take a couple of hours to prepare an employee, give them all the assets they need and so on. So we actually use it internally, as our customers do externally, to connect our own capabilities across people, partners [and] customers.

CEO Brent HaywardPhoto: MuleSoft

But certainly one of our biggest initiatives since the acquisition… is to connect to Customer 360. It has taken a lot of work to continue to produce that connection. It was already strong when we were acquired, but because we can now do joint product management and joint engineering work, we can come up with things we call accelerators: things that take the trade cloud and allow you to connect to most common back-end systems, whether it is SAP or NetSuite or others. It can do about 80% of that work right out of the box, and then still leave it flexible enough for a customer to change it for their specific process. We have over 17 accelerators that we have launched in just the last two years, and they are across almost all clouds. So we do them horizontally, but more and more we do them vertically. So our accelerator for healthcare and life sciences means that patient care, hospital systems and insurance providers can all connect to some pretty hairy back-end systems like Cerner and Epic, and do so using standard out-of-the-box components, which then save the thousands and thousands of development hours.

One thing that is talked about a lot in the industry is hyperautomation. MuleSoft has some new automation and integration features that it has just released. What is hyper-automation for MuleSoft and Salesforce, and why is it important for where business enterprises are headed?

It is certainly a new concept, or at least the last 18 months to two years. But I think it is actually a very logical amalgamation of many possibilities that we have seen in recent years.

IT has used the word integration for years. We think of integration as both the core connection I talked about, but also modern integration as a full life cycle API administration. Our customers use the word automation because it mostly concerns how they think about the result. IT thinks about integrating data and integrating systems and processes, that’s their version of automation. Business users largely think about the automation of work or work tasks, the process flows required to take repetitive steps out of the job.

I think there’s a convergence going on right now, and that’s why we’re seeing this ubercategory of hyperautomation come up, and a lot of it is driven by industry. It is difficult to find an RPA company that does not also expand to things like iPaaS or expand to integration code with low code / no code. And that’s because there [are] only logical limits to solve automation problems with only RPA, just like there [are] logical limitations by solving automation problems with only heavy, high-code development products.

When you look at the underlying drivers for hyperautomation, you really need to be able to integrate in order to automate: We have a strong strength. You must be able to use full life cycle API administration to be able to automate, that is another strength of ours. We were No. 1 in both of these markets.

What our customers said was two things: One, we really want to expand these opportunities to our business audience. It comes from somewhere: “I do not think we are going to evolve out of the automation challenge, it is going to require more than just the 20 million developers available in the world, it is going to require us to push into the 22 million Trailblazers across Salesforce, maybe a billion plus knowledge workers and actually give them the tools they need without code to be able to do some of this easy automation and some of this easy integration. ”

A lot of this is about people, and a lot of this is about the last mile of connection. The purists in technology want everything to be a beautifully designed API or microservice that can be reused and called. We want that too, and part of what we do for our customers is to make them more compatible, reusable, speed up development [and] reduce the amount of maintenance. But the reality is that there are so many different systems – the average company has over 900 systems – but only 27% of them are actually integrated. So that means there are a lot of systems downstream that IT never gets to. So can we offer the tools to also extract some of the data and make it reusable and make it a building block for more composable processes?

What was the process for MuleSoft to become part of Salesforce, because integrations are really challenging with acquisitions?

This is my third. I would say that this has been the most successful. I think there are three keys: The first is culture. Luckily, [at] Salesforce has a policy that states that if it is not a cultural fit, we may not share similar values, we just do not move forward. We tend to buy the whole company: we want the people, we have the technology, we want to scale. So we were incredibly in line day one when it comes to our values ​​and what we were trying to build. We tried to build a sustainable business that would be here long after many of us were gone. What was nice was when you have the same values, you start to appreciate that they achieved things on a scale that we hoped to achieve, and so it gave us a bit of a guide post. So culture is No. 1.

I think the other is that we worked very hard to have a very narrow but specific scope the first couple of years. Our scope was actually twofold; we had a clear plan. One was, how do we get this into the hands of almost 10,000 extra sellers, because from a distribution perspective, it was just an incredible opportunity to get it out there. And then you connect it with… if we see a massive distribution, it is best that we hit the scale part of our proposition. So we spent a lot of time and energy scaling distribution, and then scaling the service to ensure that it can stay up to the same level of trust and scale that we were known to pre-purchase.

And then there has usually been more of an adjustment in our go-to market. In the last year – and it’s not without shock along the way as you scale 30 and 40% a year, and I talked about employee growth – it’s probably one of the biggest challenges to continue to turn on, activate and get these new productive people.

But we also coordinated by industry. And I think that was very important. I think the language of the Salesforce customer is now by industry. And we went from mostly geographically based, north south, east, west of the United States [and] country level in Europe, to much more an industry focus. I’m glad we did, although it’s painful to go through such major reorganisations in a distribution organization of 1,500 to 2,000 people. But it has really done two things. One, it has allowed us to speak the customer’s language. We gave a horizontal ability; now we can provide that opportunity very specifically for financial services or production or downstream oil treatment or travel transportation. Second, it’s the same language our Salesforce colleagues speak. So it’s letting us serve the customer, whether it’s from helping them understand our products all the way through the long tail of success and delivery and best practices. It helps us all to adapt our expertise around that industry proposal.

The short thing about it is, I think we had a very good battle plan, and they do not always go perfectly, but you take good potential, good cultural leadership and a very good battle plan, and I think we have so far had a pretty good result. We are still called the most successful acquisition in Salesforce’s history. And we have learned a lot. I talk a lot with Tableau and I talk a lot with Slack about how we can also benefit from what we learned after 12 months and 24 [months before them]respectively.

You mentioned passing on some lessons to Tableau and Slack. What are some of the things you learned that you shared with them?

The biggest for me was no matter what you think when it comes to scale, double [it] – Double your wildest idea when it comes to scale. I did not have to do much with [Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield] because Stewart already sold, with Slack, almost consumer technology. They exploded when it comes to users. Tableau also had a large user base, but only the volume of adoption and consumption, it was in a way that, plan for scale, it will happen. It was probably the biggest.

So on the other hand, employee scale planning. Although all three of us were reasonably large companies – we had a quarter of a million dollars in turnover at the time, well over 1,000 employees, and I think both Tableau and Slack were above these brands as well – it is an organization of 75,000 people, 25 billion dollars. And so you need to be able to make sure that we not only scale our processes and technology, but we are also able to provide coverage and capacity, and that requires a lot of hiring. Any best hiring plan you’ve ever had: Tear it up. I mean, in the last six quarters we have on average had a larger quarterly employment than this year combined.