A view of the Salesforce West entrance on Mission Street.
Image by: Bjorn Bakstad, ©2018 Getty Images
Salesforce announced on Tuesday that they had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MuleSoft, valuing the integration software company at $6.5 billion.
Customer relationship heavyweight Salesforce will pay $44.89 for each MuleSoft share, which is a 36% premium on MuleSoft's closing share price as of Monday. Each share of MuleSoft will equal $36.00 in cash and 0.0711 shares of Salesforce common stock.
MuleSoft provides a hybrid integration platform that is aimed at connecting the vast array of applications, data, and devices within the enterprise. According to MuleSoft, companies spend an average of $400 billion a year connecting their systems. Leveraging APIs and integrations, MuleSoft enables organizations to build application networks across any cloud or on-premise.
In the deal, Salesforce acquires more than 1,200 new customers and announced plans to use MuleSoft to power their Integration Cloud, which will surface any data in the organization across legacy systems, cloud apps, or other devices.
In a statement, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff commented on the deal by saying, “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.”
With the announcement, it looks like Salesforce is throwing their hat into the integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) ring. We’ll see how competitors, like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, respond in this intensifying integration race.
The deal is expected to close by July 2018.
