Docker inks partnership with MuleSoft as Salesforce takes a strategic stake
Docker and MuleSoft have announced a broad deal to sell products together and integrate their platforms. As part of it, Docker is getting an investment from Salesforce, the CRM giant that acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion last spring.
Salesforce is not disclosing the size of the stake it’s taking in Docker, but it is strategic: it will see its new MuleSoft working with Docker to connect containerized applications to multiple data sources across an organization. Putting the two companies together, you can connect these containerized applications to multiple data sources in a modern way, even with legacy applications.
The partnership is happening on multiple levels and includes technical integration to help customers more easily use the two toolsets together. It also includes a sales agreement to invite each company’s sales team when it makes sense, and to work with systems integrators and ISVs, who help companies put these kind of complex solutions to work inside large organizations.
Docker chief product officer Scott Johnston said it was really about bringing together two companies whose missions were aligned with what they were hearing from customers. That involves tapping into some broad trends around getting more out of their legacy applications and a growing desire to take an API-driven approach to developer productivity, while getting additional value out of their existing data sources. “Both companies have been working separately on these challenges for the last several years, and it just made sense as we listen to the market and listen to customers that we joined forces,” Johnston told TechCrunch.
Uri Sarid, MuleSoft’s CTO, agrees that customers have been using both products and it called for a more formal arrangement. “We have joint customers and the partnership will be fortifying that. So that’s a great motion, but we believe in acceleration. And so if there are things that we can do, and we now have plans for what we will do to make that even faster, to make that even more natural and built-in, we can accelerate the motion to this. Before, you had to think about these two concerns separately, and we are working on interoperability that makes you not have to think about them separately,” he explained.
This announcement comes at a time of massive consolidation in the enterprise. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen IBM buying Red Hat for $34 billion, SAP acquiring Qualtrics for $8 billion and Vista Equity Partners scooping up Apptio for $1.94 billion. Salesforce acquired MuleSoft earlier this year in its own mega deal in an effort to bridge the gap between data in the cloud and on-prem.
The final piece of today’s announcement is that investment from Salesforce Ventures. Johnston would not say how much the investment was for, but did say it was about aligning the two partners.
Docker had raised almost $273 million before today’s announcement. It’s possible it could be looking for a way to exit, and with the trend toward enterprise consolidation, Salesforce’s investment may be a way to test the waters for just that. If it seems like an odd match, remember that Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010 for $212 million.