MuleSoft CEO to CRN: time for partners to skill up

MuleSoft chief executive Greg Schott wants the company’s partners to hit the books, predicting a wave of Salesforce customers with more complex requirements than the company has sent its channel’s way in the past.

The new wave of customers will come because MuleSoft is now formally part of Salesforce, after the acquisition deal concluded in May 2018. Nothing has changed since for MuleSoft’s channel, Schott told CRN Australia.

“I don’t really see anything changing other than the scale of it,” he said, but added, “We have higher expectations now for the way we will work together.”

That means he expects partners to employ more architects and invest more in training.

“We will deliver a tremendous amount of business,” Schott said. “We are looking to the system integrators to get ahead of it and have people trained up.”

MuleSoft will help: it’s created a “partner surge” program and invested in more training resources.

“We’re doubling down on that investment now,” he said.

One reason for doing so is that MuleSoft typically sold to the IT department. Salesforce, Schott said sells to the CEO. As MuleSoft and Salesforce sell together, the channel will need skills to work with both.

Partners will also soon have new product to play with. Schott outlined a plan to add security and analytics services to its core API-connection offerings.

“We have gone from a place 10 years ago when nobody knew what an API was to a place where the market understands that APIs matter and they are talking about them at the CEO level.

“But I still think the market has not yet wrapped its head around the concept of an application network. Software is eating the world but everyone is getting indigestion.”

MuleSoft’s plan is therefore “to help people visualize, analyse and understand all the flows of data that go through their enterprise,” Schott said.

Doing so will let users better understand the data flowing across API-enabled links between applications and organisations. It will also give MuleSoft new offerings he hopes the channel will appreciate.