Salesforce introduces Integration Cloud on heels of Mulesoft acquisition

Salesforce hasn’t wasted any time turning the MuleSoft acquisition into a product of its own, announcing the Salesforce Integration Cloud this morning.

While in reality it’s too soon to really take advantage of the MuleSoft product set, the company is laying the groundwork for the eventual integration into the Salesforce family with this announcement, which really showcases why Salesforce was so interested in them that they were willing to fork over $6.5 billion.

The company has decided to put their shiny new bauble front and center in the Integration Cloud announcement, so that when they are in the fold, they will have a place for them to hit the ground running

The Integration Cloud itself consists of three broad pieces: The Integration Platform, which will eventually be based on MuleSoft; Integration Builder, a tool that lets you bring together a complete picture of a customer from Salesforce tools, as well as across other enterprise data repositories and finally Integration Experiences, which is designed to help brands build customized experiences based on all the information you’ve learned from the other tools.

For now, it involves a few pieces that are independent of MuleSoft including a workflow tool called Lightning Flow, a new service that is designed to let Salesforce customers build workflows using the customer data in Salesforce CRM.

It also includes a dash of Einstein, Salesforce’s catch-all brand for the intelligence layer that underlies the platform, to build Einstein intelligence into any app.

Salesforce also threw in some Trailhead education components to help customers understand how to best make use of these tools.

But make no mistake, this is a typical Salesforce launch. It is probably earlier than it should be, but it puts the idea of integration out there in the minds of its customers and lays a foundation for a much deeper set of products and services down the road when MuleSoft is more fully integrated into the Salesforce toolset.

For now, it’s important to understand that this deal is about using data to fuel the various pieces of the Salesforce platform and provide the Einstein intelligence layer with information from across the enterprise wherever it happens to live, whether that’s in Salesforce, another cloud application or some on-prem legacy systems.

This should sound familiar to folks attending the Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas, since it’s eerily similar to what Adobe announced on stage yesterday at the Summit keynote. Adobe is calling it a customer experience system of record, but the end game is pretty much the same, bringing together data about a customer from a variety of sources, building a single view of that customer, and then turning that insight into a customized experience.

That they chose to make this announcement during the Adobe Summit, where Adobe has announced some data integration components of its own, could be a coincidence, but probably not.