Did you know that integrating MuleSoft with Data Cloud can unlock actionable insights across your business? By combining these powerful tools, you can extend Data Cloud’s out-of-the-box connectivity, maximize its impact, and fuel your Agentforce Agents with the knowledge needed to deliver exceptional employee and customer experiences. In this blog, we’ll explore how MuleSoft enhances Data Cloud, focusing on data ingestion and activation. Let’s dive into each one in detail.
4 ways MuleSoft powers Data Cloud
Let’s go over the four key ways MuleSoft powers Data Cloud. We will discuss the following in more detail:
- Ingesting data from on-premise systems
- Ingesting data from transactional systems
- Ingesting unstructured data
- Activating data and insights across external systems
1. On-premise systems
One of the primary ways MuleSoft enhances Data Cloud is by enabling data ingestion from on-premise systems, which is any application operating within a company’s physical infrastructure or behind a firewall. Examples of on-premise systems include core banking systems, electronic medical record systems (EMRs), internal databases, or mainframe systems. These systems contain valuable insights, but integrating their data with cloud-based applications can be challenging.
MuleSoft addresses this by enabling connectivity to any on-premise system, and streaming data to Data Cloud, enhancing the richness of data available in Data Cloud.
2. Transactional systems
Another significant way MuleSoft facilitates data access for Data Cloud is through integration with transactional systems, which are applications that store core business data generated from daily operations. Examples include HR platforms, point of sales solutions, e-commerce applications, and ERPs. These systems produce high volumes of frequently updated data, often containing sensitive information such as customer and billing details. Given the sensitivity and volume of this data, additional control over the ingestion process is crucial.
MuleSoft provides enhanced control by enabling pre-processing of transactional data before it reaches Data Cloud, ensuring essential data is successfully ingested with features like queuing, error handling, filtering, access control, security, auditing, and traceability.
3. Unstructured data
MuleSoft also plays a key role in ingesting unstructured data in Data Cloud, which includes documents, knowledge sources, images, and receipts. Unstructured data comprises about 80% of enterprise data, making it a significant source of organizational information and insights. Despite its volume and importance, it has traditionally been challenging to manage automatically due to its varied formats and difficulty in analysis.
With MuleSoft and Data Cloud, you can unlock and unify unstructured data, making it accessible for use across AI applications within Salesforce. Specific MuleSoft solutions include:
- Intelligent Document Processing (IDP): Allows users to extract and classify data from a wide range of document formats, including PDFs and images, using optical character recognition (OCR) so that they can be embedded into workflows and ingested into Data Cloud
- MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud: Includes pre-built integrations to connect unstructured data from external knowledge repositories including Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Confluence, and Sitemaps into Data Cloud. This extends Data Cloud’s ability to ingest unstructured data into its Vector Database, enriching the organizational knowledge available to ground AI prompts for more accurate, relevant responses
4. Activation
After generating insights in Data Cloud, the next step is to take action on them. MuleSoft facilitates updates and actions across any external system by responding to data events from Data Cloud. Whether sending notifications or adjusting inventory levels, MuleSoft ensures that these actions are carried out securely and efficiently.
MuleSoft offers several ways to help you take action on the segments and insights generated. Developers can create integration applications that distribute updates and coordinate actions across any downstream system. Admins can build automations using out-of-the-box connectors that respond to data events, updating records both within and beyond Salesforce. Admins can also enable Agentforce Agents to take action on their behalf through automation flows and MuleSoft APIs.
By leveraging these four methods, you can fully harness the power of MuleSoft and Data Cloud to drive your business forward.
Examples of MuleSoft and Data Cloud in action
Now that we’ve covered the ways MuleSoft enhances Data Cloud, let’s look at two example use cases that demonstrate how users can bring MuleSoft and Data Cloud together to improve operational efficiency, unlock new business insights, and personalize customer experiences.
Ingesting on-premise data for personalized investment opportunities
In this example, a fictional retail bank, Cumulus Bank, aims to offer personalized investment opportunities to its customers. To power this experience, Cumulus needs a 360-degree view of all of their customers. This full perspective is key to creating tailored financial offers that align with each individual’s needs and preferences.
- The challenge: Cumulus Bank’s customers’ financial data is siloed in difficult-to-access, on-premise systems, making it hard to retrieve and unify the data required to build enriched customer profiles.
- How MuleSoft can help: MuleSoft enables Cumulus Bank to unlock data from their on-premise systems and integrate it seamlessly with Data Cloud. Using Data Cloud’s native connectors, the bank can also connect its customer profile data available in Financial Services Cloud.
- How MuleSoft and Data Cloud come together: After harmonizing customer profile, banking, and transactional data streams, Data Cloud uncovers a segment of customers with deposits greater than $10,000. To automatically send personalized offers whenever transactions greater than that amount are detected, Cumulus Bank creates a Data Cloud triggered flow in Flow Builder.
- Result: By integrating MuleSoft and Data Cloud, Cumulus Bank gains deeper insights into customers with enriched profiles, enabling personalized investment opportunities.
Ingesting unstructured data for efficient case resolution
In this example, a fictional automotive company, Electron Motors, aims to empower its AI Agents with quick access to organizational knowledge to resolve cases efficiently. Quick case resolution is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
- The challenge: Electron Motors’ organizational knowledge is scattered across various folders, documents, and internal web pages, making it difficult for service agents to find the information they need quickly.
- How MuleSoft can help: MuleSoft connects unstructured data from various knowledge repositories to Data Cloud using pre-built integrations with MuleSoft Direct. This allows Electron Motors to use unstructured data to ground AI prompts across Salesforce for more relevant and accurate responses.
- How MuleSoft and Data Cloud come together: A service agent interacting with Agentforce can ask for help troubleshooting a customer’s issue with their new electric vehicle. Agentforce can search Data Cloud’s Vector Database for relevant context across structured and unstructured data, thanks to MuleSoft, and immediately return a detailed response outlining a resolution.
- Result: By integrating MuleSoft and Data Cloud, Electron Motors ensures service agents have fast, reliable access to organizational knowledge, accelerating case resolution times and improving customer service efficiency.
How to get started with MuleSoft and Data Cloud: Community insights
We’ve discussed how combining MuleSoft and Data Cloud can maximize value and unlock new use cases. Now, let’s dive into some practical tips and advice from our community experts, Rahul Pahuja, VP of Client Engagement at Argano, and Melissa Shepard, Managing Architect at Maple Digital.
When should customers use MuleSoft to integrate with Data Cloud?
Melissa advises, “The biggest indications of when I would consider using MuleSoft are when there isn’t an out-of-the-box (OOTB) connector for your system or when you need to perform complex logic that the connector doesn’t support. This includes tasks such as filtering, pre-processing, or applying additional business logic. Additionally, MuleSoft offers advanced capabilities for activating data back to other systems, making it a versatile tool for various integration needs.”
Use cases where MuleSoft and Data Cloud come together effectively
Rahul shares, “I’ve seen MuleSoft and Data Cloud be particularly effective in M&A scenarios, where they help unify and harmonize customer bases, driving ROI and time to value. These tools are also foundational for leveraging the power of Agentforce.”
Melissa adds, “There are many older, legacy systems out there. Oftentimes, you need to get that data into newer cloud-based systems like Salesforce. MuleSoft is a great way to connect to those systems. For example, you might have an on-prem ERP system that holds your product and order data, and you need to combine that with customer data from Salesforce. You can bring that together in Data Cloud.”
What opportunities for MuleSoft and Data Cloud are you most excited about?
Rahul is particularly excited about the opportunities to leverage AI within the Salesforce platform. He explains, “If you’re looking to leverage AI within the Salesforce platform, you need access to enterprise data, and that’s where MuleSoft and Data Cloud come together really well. Whether you’re in sales, service, marketing, or commerce, there are a lot of opportunities.”
What advice would you give to customers just getting started with MuleSoft and Data Cloud?
Melissa recommends, “Start with Trailhead resources to learn about Data Cloud and MuleSoft. There are also certifications for both platforms. You can get a free 5-day trial org with Data Cloud to play around with it, and you can create a MuleSoft trial org. Get hands-on, learn the products, and get used to them before you start to implement them. Really understand what you want to do with them, and test some things out.”
Rahul advises, “Start with building a catalog of high-value use cases. There are tons of opportunities to remove manual work and gain operational efficiencies. The combination of MuleSoft and Data Cloud provides a lot of rich capabilities that reduce the barrier to entry for leveraging AI within Salesforce. Zero-copy capabilities with Data Cloud provide the opportunity to tap into your enterprise data in a low-friction way. MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud is really powerful, allowing you to ingest your knowledge articles that are sitting on shared drives and repositories in the enterprise, and start building prompts to create a chat-like experience on the platform.”
Connecting systems, actioning data, and more – all possible with Mule
From improving operational efficiency by optimizing data flows and automating processes; uncovering new segments and deeper insights into customers; and developing personalized customer experiences that help your business gain a competitive edge, we’ve learned how MuleSoft paves the way for successful Data Cloud implementation. We also want to extend a special thanks to Rahul Pahuja and Melissa Shepard for their insights.
