Salesforce Pulls Trigger On $6.5 Billion MuleSoft Acquisition

Salesforce agreed Tuesday to purchase popular cloud-based integration and API management vendor MuleSoft for $6.5 billion.

MuleSoft, which went public last March, offers the promise of natively connecting apps built on the CRM leader's development platforms with enterprise solutions from other vendors, Salesforce partners told CRN.

MuleSoft shares shot up Tuesday after Reuters reported it was in the late stages of talks with the company. Both MuleSoft and Salesforce are based in San Francisco. Later in the day, the companies announced that both boards had approved a deal.

[Related: Salesforce Looks To Extend Commerce Cloud To Businesses With CloudCraze Acquisition]

Salesforce is a MuleSoft customer, along with the likes of Accenture, Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Tesla. The developer's Anypoint Platform supports service-oriented architecture, Software-as-a-Service integration, and API management to enable customers to secure the flow of data between all systems in the enterprise.

"Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will enable customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise across all public and private clouds and data sources—radically enhancing innovation," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a prepared statement.

Greg Schott, MuleSoft Chairman and CEO, said, "with the full power of Salesforce behind us, we have a tremendous opportunity to realize our vision of the application network even faster and at scale."

MuleSoft says its Integration Platform-as-a-Service empowers developers to integrate and orchestrate apps and services across enterprise data centers and cloud environments, connecting nearly every technology in a standardized way.

Most large Salesforce deployments for enterprise customers involve some form of integration solution, and there's an abundance of products on the market.

Making it easier for technology partners building apps on Salesforce development platforms to connect outside solutions could attract more customers to the Salesforce ecosystem, Ron Zapar, CEO of Re-Quest, a Naperville, Ill.-based Salesforce partner, told CRN after news surfaced that the deal was being considered.

’Since Salesforce provides a select set of cloud-based business functionality, having the ability to easily integrate their cloud platforms with a wide variety of on-premise and cloud-based ERPs eliminates barriers to entry for many companies looking to implement their CRM solutions on Salesforce and integrate them with their existing solutions," Zapar told CRN.

The deal comes a week after Salesforce agreed to purchase one of its prominent technology partners, CloudCraze, to bolster its Commerce Cloud.