About seven years in the past, I used to be on an initiative to discover low-code. Once I noticed Salesforce’s low-code product in demos, my impression was that the product was solely appropriate for consumers with a powerful Salesforce CRM focus — a feeder to drive extra income into Salesforce’s flagship product. When Salesforce acquired MuleSoft, many fearful that it could flip MuleSoft into an analogous appendage of Salesforce CRM. Whereas that may have been good for Salesforce shareholders, it could not have been good for MuleSoft prospects.
Surprisingly, this by no means transpired. Though they pursued synergies between mother or father and baby corporations akin to API Group Supervisor, MuleSoft’s path has remained interesting to consumers missing a Salesforce-centric focus. My expertise at Salesforce’s TDX 2025 convention makes me consider that there might lastly be a pivot to extra deeply merge MuleSoft into the broader Salesforce ecosystem, and this time, it might be a very good factor.
AppGen Encourages Utility Distributors To Rethink Their Methods
Earlier than explaining why this can be good, we must always first deal with the place software program goes. The power of in the present day’s generative AI instruments to generate code snippets will evolve into the flexibility to generate complete purposes (an idea Forrester refers to as utility era, or AppGen). The arrival of AppGen is inflicting bigger tech distributors akin to Salesforce to more and more incorporate capabilities like pure language prompting, visible low-code fashions, domain-specific languages, and built-in lower-level code era for customized parts and extensions. AppGen threatens smaller app-centric distributors that can’t present these capabilities.
One buys purposes in the present day as a result of they provide greatest practices and area data. Though distributors attempt to make their purposes versatile, you’re nonetheless restricted to the appliance’s means of doing issues. What in case you might generate a bespoke utility with a big language mannequin that incorporates those self same greatest practices and area data? This can trigger utility distributors to rethink their methods.
MuleSoft And Salesforce’s Platform Pivot
Right this moment, Salesforce has a few of the parts of a future AppGen improvement platform: Apex is for professional code and Circulate for low-code; Salesforce Knowledge Cloud brings collectively the group’s knowledge with zero copy; Agentforce offers rising AI agent capabilities; Einstein offers generative AI for compressing the software program improvement lifecycle; and MuleSoft is there to hyperlink the whole lot collectively inside and out of doors of the Salesforce platform. I’m not going to touch upon the standard of all these since, as an analyst, I solely cowl MuleSoft. (My fellow analysts consider different parts, akin to in The Forrester Wave™: Knowledge Lakehouses, Q2 2024, and The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Improvement Platforms For Skilled Builders, Q2 2023.) No matter their present strengths or weaknesses, nevertheless, Salesforce has many items wanted to construct a future platform for producing purposes.
There have been a number of bulletins main as much as and through TDX 2025. For MuleSoft, the principle factor was integrating it with different Salesforce platform merchandise. A brand new connector brings Agentforce’s brokers into MuleSoft integrations. Matter Middle and API Catalog let Agentforce brokers use MuleSoft APIs as instruments. MuleSoft for Circulate lets citizen builders in Circulate extra simply eat MuleSoft APIs.
What I didn’t discover was a heavy push towards Salesforce’s purposes. After all, that is still the corporate’s bread and butter, and TDX ’25 is extra oriented towards builders than Dreamforce. Nonetheless, my impression is that Salesforce seeks to maneuver past its core and create a next-generation platform for constructing customized purposes of any kind.
MuleSoft is lastly pivoting towards extra Salesforce centricity however not in the best way many initially feared. As a substitute of being a feeder to Salesforce CRM purposes, it’s changing into a help pillar of a broader software program improvement platform whereas nonetheless remaining a viable product for organizations that haven’t purchased into that broader platform. When AppGen arises as a disruptor to utility distributors, Salesforce might be ready to answer that disruption.
