MuleSoft

How MuleSoft is Used With Salesforce

By Lydia Ha

Developments in technology continue to progress and aim to improve human lives through convenience and recreation. In the 21st century, it is safe to say that “data is the new oil.” With everything being digitized, data is key for smooth functionality and happy customers. However, data management can quickly become complex and acts as a double-edged sword, thus it is critical for organizations to have the right tools and services to manage their data effectively.

This article will highlight the issues associated with data silos, and demonstrate how Salesforce and MuleSoft address those issues through transforming data, as well as delivering a seamless customer experience.

What Challenges does MuleSoft Solve, and Why Salesforce?

Masses of raw data are being captured on a daily basis to establish baselines, benchmarks, and goals for organizations. However, most of this data has no value unless properly analyzed.

Whilst the gathering of data has improved, analysis and use of that data still lags behind. Data captured is often retained infinitely, ultimately leading to large deposits of data needing to be analyzed. In addition, there is often no agreed way to analyse data, meaning there is potential for confusion and diverse outcomes of the same data set due to different individuals’ analyses.

So, why Salesforce? Salesforce is the key to handling swathes of customer information with a few clicks. It offers effective tools for data visualization and analysis, in which it can help organizations make decisions and leverage business growth.

Instead of using the traditional Excel reports that are limited and require manual modifications, Salesforce can produce visualizations based on measurable criteria such as payments by month or sales by period. These visualizations are real-time, customizable and interactive for users. They are presented in either report charts and/or dashboards.

The bottom line is that Salesforce is able to view data in real-time and produces real results. It provides a better picture of the organization overall as the insights, causes, and trends are explicitly displayed. Salesforce and its visual data tools also save companies time and money while improving their efficiency.

In addition to native Salesforce reporting, these are some of the popular tools for data visualization in Salesforce:

MuleSoft as an Integration Tool: Core Components

Now that we understand why our data should be in Salesforce, the question becomes how do we get it there, especially when a company uses multiple disparate systems?

Integration, a subject not widely understood, has become the present and future of digital transformation and MuleSoft serves as a catalyst to communicate between applications and services via integration. It offers multiple components and a centralized platform to ensure connectivity and data simplification throughout the business.

Enterprise businesses are heterogeneous, as they are composed of many different systems with their own data structures and requirements. While these systems are used as integrated solutions to drive business processes, they can also create data-related complications due to disparate structures. Data processing, such as migration and synchronization, will be difficult to maintain when there are large amounts of data.

Managing the links between those systems and modifying them without disrupting the entire working ecosystem is an apparent challenge when integrating data. MuleSoft, as a catalyst, provides a tool called Anypoint Platform, which provides accessibility to the essential components in providing integration solutions.

Here is an overview of some core components of MuleSoft as an integration tool:

  • CloudHub: An enterprise-class cloud-based integration platform that allows organizations to utilize Anypoint Connectors to develop integration flows that connect applications and create new APIs, in addition to existing data sources. CloudHub makes it possible to connect with SaaS and on-premises applications and services at cloud speed.
  • Anypoint Connector: A library of reusable extensions that allow MuleSoft to integrate with both legacy and SaaS systems to enable seamless data processes. With access to multiple APIs, businesses can build connectivity and deliver real-time data across the business ecosystem.
  • DataWeave: Powered by the data language and designed to filter, extract, and transform one or more different types of data together to create another data format, such as XML and Java to JSON. DataWeave supports a wide range of file types, including flat and structured data, which provides flexibility that can help the businesses cope with systems using different data formats per process.
  • Database Connectivity: The Database Connector can be downloaded from Anypoint Connectors to establish a connection with almost any relational database and perform SQL queries. This allows the organizations to access the data in the database without writing additional code to bypass the authentications.

Summary: How Salesforce & Mulesoft Work Together

MuleSoft + Salesforce is revolutionary as MuleSoft is capable of creating APIs that can connect to any system, application, and data source. This makes it easier for Salesforce to retrieve real-time data across systems, either in the cloud or on-premises, and produce a unified customer view on a single platform.

During the real-time data retrieval, Salesforce enforces validation rules for the incoming data, whereas MuleSoft applies the necessary transformation, such as field mappings and field conversions, to those data sets. With Salesforce prepping the data beforehand and MuleSoft as the middleware for data translation, they prevent different data interpretations and ensure data transformation is consistent.

Without doubt, when MuleSoft acts as the data link, Salesforce can end data siloing in disparate systems and prioritize the ultimate customer experience value proposition – integrations. Essentially, MuleSoft and Salesforce are the best combination when dealing with complex integrations and helping organizations to build an integrated approach that is scalable and reliable.

The Author

Lydia Ha

Lydia Ha is a MuleSoft Developer at Ad Victoriam Solutions, a Salesforce and MuleSoft Partner, specializing in developing integrated solutions in MuleSoft, and working closely with Salesforce.

Comments:

    Rob Kaplan
    May 05, 2021 3:22 pm
    Thanks Kinsey for this introduction to MuleSoft capabilities. My question: is Kafka an alternative to MuleSoft; and what are the pros/cons of each tool?
    Martin Krchnak
    May 06, 2021 10:49 pm
    Calling Excel capabilities "limited" is very courageous.
    Sher N.
    October 17, 2022 4:06 pm
    No, Kakfa is totally different. Kafka is a messaging system whilst Mulesoft is an API convergence system.

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