The News

On March 20, 2018 Salesforce announced the signature of a definitive agreement to acquire Mulesoft for a whopping 6.5 billion USD – whopping because the 2017 Mulesoft revenues have been at just $296.5 Million, albeit with a $1 billion target for 2021. The press release states that “together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will accelerate customers’ digital transformations, enabling them to unlock data across legacy systems, cloud apps, and devices to make smarter, faster decisions and create highly differentiated, connected, customer experiences.” Mulesoft is recognized by Gartner as a leader in the 2017 Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service Quadrant.

The Bigger Picture

As I have stated repeatedly before, most recently here, the enterprise software market is engaged in something that can be called a platform war. There are a few big players and some emergent players in the enterprise software market, and then we have a number of companies that come from the infrastructure side of the house. Business applications get commoditized. Therefore the platform becomes crucial in a battle for dominance. And it is not a given that there will be a dominance. Looking at the 4 big software vendors, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP, they all have different legacies, strengths and weaknesses. They share one weakness, which is that their core business is in a mainly saturated enterprise market. All of them want and need to play their strengths, while mitigating their weaknesses in order to become the dominant player. Looking at Salesforce, one of its key strengths is the brand. Right or wrong, pretty much the first name that comes to mind when thinking CRM is … Salesforce. And sure, Salesforce builds good, sometimes even great, software, based on a strong business model. And where there is a need, the company is strong enough to buy leading players, like ten days ago Cloudcraze and now Mulesoft. There are some weaknesses or risks, though:

• Salesforce focuses on CRM, which might end up being a corner
• It is hard for enterprise level companies to scale down to become more attractive to SMBs. Salesforce addresses this e.g. with Salesforce Essentials. Mulesoft can play a role here, too.
• While Salesforce is profitable, it is not that profitable with an EPS of $0.26 according to the FY 2017 annual report. With a relatively high price point this is a risk factor. Salesforce battles this by staying a thought leader, delivering best-of-breed applications, and now strengthening its integration ability.
• The many acquisitions need integration, so do seamlessly connected processes that digitally transforming companies require and demand. Here Mulesoft comes into the picture.
• Last but not least, Salesforce is challenged getting at sufficient data to feed advanced machine learning models. Here Mulesoft will again play a role

My PoV and Analysis

This acquisition is a defensive move – a strong one, but still a defensive one. It fortifies the position while enabling Salesforce to address some of its challenges that I laid out above. For Salesforce it is necessary, even mandatory, to be able to seamlessly integrate into the application systems of other vendors. CRM and the plethora of applications around, is not and never will be the core application any company on this planet runs. It is important, yes, but an ERP is more important. Salesforce is not an ERP company. Salesforce is closer to the saturated enterprise end of the market than to the underserved SMB end of the market. Salesforce does not have the wide and powerful access to data that the core competition has. And data nowadays is truly King. Salesforce has strong, very strong, competition. Salesforce is clearly aware of all this. And then it cannot be denied that currently there is a need to connect applications that live in different clouds. Besides becoming the default plumbing between applications that are built on the Salesforce platform(s) and acquired applications that are not, Mulesoft can become the foundation for a platform of platforms that bolsters the claim of ease of integration. The first three challenges above can clearly get addressed by Mulesoft. How big an opportunity (or threat, if this was a competitive bid) Salesforce sees can get estimated by the price the company is willing to pay. But the main reason for the acquisition seems to be around the word data. In the words of Benioff: “Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will enable customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise, across all public and privat clouds and data sources …”. This statement clearly not only addresses first party data but also third party data and hints into connecting to social media. Identity, profiles, and of course consents, are a main topic here. Will we see a CIAM acquisition next? The company is clearly playing a combination of ‘best of integration’ with ‘best of breed’ game. The integration part ring fences the application part, while making them more attractive with its ability to dig into data. And oh, it also helps with the price point. Really, a strong move. Strong enough? Time will tell.

The leading in-app support company Helpshift just released a seamless integration with the Salesforce Service Cloud. This integration is now available on AppExchange. Here a copy of the press release for your convenience, followed by my analysis:     Helpshift Announces New Integration Capabilities for Its Customers on the Salesforce AppExchange, the World's Leading Enterprise Apps Marketplace SAN FRANCISCO – (BUSINESS WIRE) – MAY 25, 2017 – Helpshift today announced an integration with new capabilities available on the Salesforce AppExchange. This integration is meant to improve the mobile user experience by enabling service agents to deliver support to app users directly from within their Salesforce Service Cloud Dashboard - In-app! When a customer contacts support from inside the Helpshift-enabled app, a Salesforce case is created that the agent responds to, creating an in-app conversation. Customers get notified via banners, notifications and badges, enabling them to continue at their pace. "Organizations are seeing an explosion in demand for mobile solutions from their customers," said Esteban Kolsky, president of thinkJar, a customer strategies advisory firm, "and they quickly realize they can't offer outdated and incomplete solutions without real time data. Direct integration with systems of record are at the core of their strategies to support this trend." Built on the Salesforce Platform, the Helpshift integration is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Enterprises can benefit in the following ways: In-app Messaging: Helpshift’s new integration capabilities allow existing Salesforce customers to provide support to mobile customers, which extends their ability to reach mobile customers where it matters: Directly in the app, and supported by the smartphones’ powerful notification mechanisms. Enhanced Knowledge Capabilities: Helpshift’s FAQs optimized for the native mobile app experience are combined with the Salesforce Knowledge Base. They appear inside the Salesforce Knowledge Base through a one-time mapping and can be maintained directly in Salesforce. Automatic synchronization ensures that the FAQs are always up-to-date in the mobile app. Agent Management: Support for mobile customers can be delivered from inside the Salesforce Dashboard. Cases are directly created in the Salesforce Service Cloud when a Helpshift customer initiates a conversation. There is no need to switch to Helpshift. No tab change, no context switch, no training is required; the process remains unchanged for the agents, ensuring zero disruption and high efficiency. Data Management: Customer data and metadata from Helpshift is available to Salesforce agents as part of the case in the Salesforce Service Cloud. “As mobile becomes the primary medium customers use to connect with brands, the ability to provide customer support through all touch points is vital to creating deeper engagement and brand loyalty,” said Abinash Tripathy, Founder and CEO at Helpshift. “The enterprise no longer has to choose between uprooting their entire customer support structure and meeting customers where they spend most of their time - on mobile devices. Now the enterprise can provide a support experience for mobile customers and support agents can meet their needs quickly while continuing to do what they were doing within the Salesforce Platform. Everyone wins.” “Everyone and everything is getting smarter and more connected than ever before, and companies are looking to transform the way they connect with customers, partners and employees,” said Kori O’Brien, SVP, ISV Sales, Salesforce. “By leveraging the power of the Salesforce Platform, Helpshift provides customers with an exciting new way to receive support experience across mobile touch points.” Salesforce, AppExchange and others are among the trademarks of Salesforce.com, inc. About Salesforce AppExchange Salesforce AppExchange is the world’s leading enterprise apps marketplace that empowers companies to sell, service, market and engage in entirely new ways. With 3,500 partner apps and more than 4 million customer installs, it is the most comprehensive source of cloud, mobile, social, IoT, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies for businesses. About Helpshift: Helpshift bridges the disconnect between conventional customer service channels like email and phone support, and a growing consumer base that lives in a mobile-first world. As consumers do more on their mobile phones and have a strong preference for messaging as their primary mode of communication, Helpshift’s customer service platform provides instant answers and messaging right within the mobile app. The Helpshift SDK also easily integrates with third party tools and allows for highly-personalized support and user segmentation. Through this highly-streamlined support system, companies can resolve issues more efficiently, boosting customer satisfaction in the process. Companies such as Viacom, Virgin Media, Microsoft, Western Union, Flipboard, WordPress, and thousands of other industry-leading brands, startups, and developers use the Helpshift platform to provide in-app support. Helpshift is installed on 2 Billion devices worldwide, and serves 400+ million mobile customers monthly. To date, Helpshift has raised more than $38.2 Million and is backed by Cisco Investments, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, True Ventures, and Visionnaire Ventures. To learn more about Helpshift, visit https://www.helpshift.com/and follow @helpshift on Twitter.   The integration enables Salesforce Service Cloud customers who run Helpshift to power their mobile in-app support to leverage the capabilities of Helpshift right from the Salesforce dashboard. The Helpshift FAQs get mapped to and managed from the Salesforce knowledge base and are deployed to the mobile devices, including changes that happen over time. Conversely, a Salesforce case is created for a mobile user who initiates a chat from within the Helpshift powered mobile app. This case contains all relevant data and meta data from the end user’s phone for efficient processing by the service agent through a configurable mapping between Helpshift data and the fields of the Salesforce case object. The service agents work on this case as they would on any other case, using the Salesforce screens and workflows they are used to. No additional training to deal with another system is required; nor is it necessary to do a context switch between the two service back ends. Replies sent from the Salesforce Service Cloud appear in the in-app chat, thus contributing to a high user experience.

My Take

This is an important step out of CustServ Hell towards CustServ Heaven. Beyond all hype and rave of bots the conversational UI, messaging, is the single most important development in current interaction design. This is especially true for mobile users who exhibit little patience with apps that do not work and then do not let them find help immediately. Mobile users, too, do not want to change from their application to the phone (application) in order to get support. They want to be able to efficiently search an FAQ – even without connectivity – and contact support from within the app if they do not get the answer they need from there. They want it now – and then at their pace. This is nothing short of a paradigm shift as it flips the support model from company defined to customer defined. The next step will be voice, in combination with speech-to-text capabilities, in addition to text. Not many companies can address this paradigm shift at the moment. For both, Salesforce and Helpshift the benefits are immediately visible. The Salesforce eco-system gets the solution to an issue that needs resolution. Helpshift is an early, if not the first, provider of this solution within the thriving eco-system of the leader. For both, Helpshift- and Salesforce customers this is very good news, as this integration allows them to run their customer engagement centers more efficiently by avoiding a second, independent, back end with its own user interface and own set of customer master data. Instead there is a seamless integration that allows for great and non-disruptive user experience as the service agents do not need to change their workflows nor are they forced to change from one application to another. This tremendously benefits joint Helpshift- and Salesforce customers, too. Additionally, these companies enjoy the security of their investments staying protected while they have their feet in the doorway to where future leads us: A mobile first world. Those who talk of AI-first are looking inside out instead of outside in. To me, combining best-of-breed capabilities like those of a leading provider of in-app support, that Helpshift is, with the undisputed leader of Customer Engagement Center solutions proverbially fits like peanut butter and jelly (or like bread and butter, as we Germans would say). What I am waiting for now, is getting this solution integrated into other leading customer service solutions, starting with Microsoft Dynamics, SAP CEC, Pegasystems, Oracle, but also looking at SugarCRM and Zoho, and possibly further competitors in the tier 1 and tier 2 race of solutions. As this is an API-based integration, I am confident, that this will happen, very confident actually.

Last week Freshdesk announced the acquisition of Bengaluru based SaaS data integration company Pipemonk, the seventh acquisition since mid of 2015. Pipemonk has been launched in 2014 and since has implemented integrations between many leading e-commerce-, accounting-, CRM-, Marketing-, and Billing applications, including Amazon, Shopify, Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Stripe. So far Freshdesk was not on their list. Pipemonk’s promise and objective is to deliver easy-to-setup, pre-built bi-directional integrations between SaaS applications. On their web site they reported to have more than 2,000 customers acquired in the short life span, with a seed capital of only 2 million dollar. So one can say that they delivered successfully. Freshdesk itself has its roots in customer service and since increased its portfolio to include help desk (hotline), a sales application (Freshsales), chat (Freshchat) and social testimonials using acquisitions and own developments.

My Take

I think that this was an important step for Freshdesk. It enables Freshdesk to easily expand its reach to integrate with a raft of SaaS applications in different business domains, prebuilt or custom. Further, I was wondering for a while whether and how Freshdesk would go on integrating their own application stack, which as per my understanding so far consists of different, only lightly (if at all) integrated applications – although my understanding may be wrong. Assuming that Freshdesk intends to continue their aggressive growth trajectory with this acquisition the team also has the foundation to integrate new and newly acquired functionality fast, based upon an established architecture. Overall, congratulations to both teams!

Brick-and-mortar retail businesses face a combination of ever-increasing customer expectations, customers being “educated” to expect and receive promotions, and of course an ever increasing competition in the market place for their customers’ share of mind and share of wallet. On top of all this they need to realize that they do not control the communication to their customers anymore, let alone being capable of controlling the communication in between their customers. As many bloggers, including myself, and analysts already stated, the advent of extremely user friendly and ubiquitous mobile devices and web applications essentially decoupled retailers from communications between their customers and even led to their marketing messages becoming part of the “background noise” for lots of consumers – just something one filters out when it comes to getting serious information. Of course there are exceptions, especially considering that retail businesses reacted to this threat. For retailers it is about being where the customers are. This started with setting up transactional web sites (web shops) to drive additional sales, using more and different ways to address customers, e.g. setting up and participating in communities, building fan pages on Facebook, Twitter streams, keeping in touch with exciting new services like Groupon, building capabilities to monitor and participate in discussions in forums, creating loyalty programs, and so on. Quite some of the challenges facing retailers have the potential of being disruptive to their business models. Take Groupon as an example: Groupon is the successful implementation of a scheme that shifts the power balance drastically to the buyer (consumer) side; the scheme is similar to the earlier development of retailer purchase organizations that intended to counter the power of their suppliers (e.g. the expert group). Another example is yourbus, a German startup company that organizes long distance bus services, if the demand is high enough. Yourbus has the potential to really hurt the German railway. Another main challenge is that fending off possibly disruptive attacks and staying in the minds of customers is a costly exercise – and retailers often run on slim margins. This means that activities need to be organized and efficient while making sure that the customer experience is consistent across all channels or touch points, like radio, TV, store, point of sale, web site, general marketing collateral, and, yes, of course, Facebook, blog sites, Twitter, and so on and so forth. The key word here is consistent; the experience does not need to be the same, actually cannot be the same; just imagine the differences between radio and TV, or between Facebook and Twitter. The current buzzword for achieving and maintaining this consistency is customer experience management. There are a lot of good approaches towards keeping in the minds of customers. There are interesting reactions to Groupon, e.g. Wal-Mart’s CrowdSaver on Facebook or Uniqlo’s Lucky Counter that does the same via tweets on Twitter – offering a discount if enough positive voices are there. Social commerce and F-Commerce (e-commerce via Facebook) are definitely on the current hip list. The need to integrate topics like CRM, loyalty, mobile, e-commerce is definitely there. What currently inhibits retailers (and other companies) from more effectively pursuing this necessary integration is lacking integration into back end systems. Gartner identified more than 100 vendors with Social CRM offerings in their first Magic Quadrant on Social CRM that dates June 2010. In the same research they assessed that only in 2011 social CRM suites will emerge, which then will be rapidly evolving. I do not say that there is nothing out there – that would not be true. Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Sage, RightNow technologies and Netsuite, also SugarCRM, they all have some or the other functionality, but there is no real breadth yet. Of course this list of vendors is not complete. Let us focus in on SAP as an example. I do not single out SAP here; it is just that I know SAP a little more. SAP has all the necessary technologies, including an engine that is capable of measuring sentiments and StreamWork, a highly interesting tool. But neither SAP nor its partners do have a compelling integrated social CRM solution yet. There is SAP consulting themselves with their Social Media Cockpit, which effectively does some integration of CRM and Twitter as a marketing and service support tool. SAP consulting, too, has an add-on to CRM that extends loyalty management to Facebook. Then there is movento who have a Social CRM add-on that provides information about business partners from online communities directly in CRM. And CIBER is one of few companies bringing an integrated solution to organizations managing consumer marketing across multiple websites, having more a process than a product view. So, what are avid retailers doing in these times? The market even now offers tools and technologies to support most important business processes that involve the social web, from (community) platforms via monitoring and listening tools, towards more business process orientated tools that support marketing, sales and service processes. Today retailers pick and choose the tools that best support their social CRM strategies. They implement them as spot solutions, in silos, and increasingly also with custom integration into business systems. Tomorrow we will see that they also have the option to choose pre-integrated software. This post is a re-post of the original post on blog.ciber.com with the permission of the author.