About seven years ago, I was on an initiative to explore low-code. When I saw Salesforce’s low-code product in demos, my impression was that the product was only suitable for buyers with a strong Salesforce CRM focus — a feeder to drive more revenue into Salesforce’s flagship product. When Salesforce acquired MuleSoft, many worried that it would turn MuleSoft into a similar appendage of Salesforce CRM. While that might have been good for Salesforce shareholders, it would not have been good for MuleSoft customers.
Surprisingly, this never transpired. Although they pursued synergies between parent and child companies such as API Community Manager, MuleSoft’s direction has remained appealing to buyers lacking a Salesforce-centric focus. My experience at Salesforce’s TDX 2025 conference makes me believe that there may finally be a pivot to more deeply merge MuleSoft into the broader Salesforce ecosystem, and this time, it may be a good thing.
AppGen Encourages Application Vendors To Rethink Their Strategies
Before explaining why this may be good, we should first focus on where software is going. The ability of today’s generative AI tools to generate code snippets will evolve into the ability to generate entire applications (a concept Forrester refers to as application generation, or AppGen). The arrival of AppGen is causing larger tech vendors such as Salesforce to increasingly incorporate capabilities like natural language prompting, visual low-code models, domain-specific languages, and integrated lower-level code generation for custom components and extensions. AppGen threatens smaller app-centric vendors that cannot provide these capabilities.
One buys applications today because they offer best practices and domain knowledge. Although vendors strive to make their applications flexible, you are still limited to the application’s way of doing things. What if you could generate a bespoke application with a large language model that contains those same best practices and domain knowledge? This will cause application vendors to rethink their strategies.
MuleSoft And Salesforce’s Platform Pivot
Today, Salesforce has some of the components of a future AppGen development platform: Apex is for pro code and Flow for low-code; Salesforce Data Cloud brings together the organization’s data with zero copy; Agentforce provides emerging AI agent capabilities; Einstein provides generative AI for compressing the software development lifecycle; and MuleSoft is there to link everything together inside and outside of the Salesforce platform. I’m not going to comment on the quality of all these since, as an analyst, I only cover MuleSoft. (My fellow analysts evaluate other components, such as in The Forrester Wave™: Data Lakehouses, Q2 2024, and The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Development Platforms For Professional Developers, Q2 2023.) Regardless of their current strengths or weaknesses, however, Salesforce has many pieces needed to build a future platform for generating applications.
There were several announcements leading up to and during TDX 2025. For MuleSoft, the main thing was integrating it with other Salesforce platform products. A new connector brings Agentforce’s agents into MuleSoft integrations. Topic Center and API Catalog let Agentforce agents use MuleSoft APIs as tools. MuleSoft for Flow lets citizen developers in Flow more easily consume MuleSoft APIs.
What I did not notice was a heavy push toward Salesforce’s applications. Of course, that remains the company’s bread and butter, and TDX ’25 is more oriented toward developers than Dreamforce. Nonetheless, my impression is that Salesforce seeks to move beyond its core and create a next-generation platform for building custom applications of any sort.
MuleSoft is finally pivoting toward more Salesforce centricity but not in the way many originally feared. Instead of being a feeder to Salesforce CRM applications, it’s becoming a support pillar of a broader software development platform while still remaining a viable product for organizations that have not bought into that broader platform. When AppGen arises as a disruptor to application vendors, Salesforce will be prepared to respond to that disruption.
