Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the webinar. I'm Astha Agrawal, your presenter for today. And I'm a solution engineer for MuleSoft at Salesforce. In today's webinar, we will focus on how RCG industry is modernizing the processes, doing supply chain optimizations and automations and improving operational efficiencies with AI. We will also look at how MuleSoft solution will help have next-generation consumer experiences and delivering these initiatives and driving unprecedented growth, but before we move forward, a quick reminder: As we know, Salesforce is a publicly traded company; and customers should take their purchasing decisions on products and services that are currently available. We also believe that thank yous are not for the last but for the first, so we thank you for joining us today and learning more about our technology. Our customers and partners are critical to everything we do, and we thank you. So let's start looking at how RCG industry is overall changing. What are the challenges that are being brought to the table while we are seeing those changes? Let's start looking at those key challenges that are there in front of RCG as an industry. I'll build out this slide for you to list some of those key challenges that is there within the industry. Consumers today are more informed, connected and empowered than ever before. They expect personalized, seamless experiences across all touch points, be it online, in store or through mobile devices. And these expectations are constantly evolving due to advancement in technologies, social media influences and exposure to global trends. They want personalized experiences. For example, the B2B partners and vendors have started following the electronic data interchange or the EDI standards. And they expect the retailers and consumer good companies to allow these EDI standards. We have also seen that RCG organizations rely on complex interconnected global supply chains that are vulnerable to disruptions. These disruptions can lead to delays, talk-outs, increased costs and difficulties in meeting customer demand. The challenge is to maintain supply chain resiliency and agility and also ensuring continuity of operations while minimizing the impact of disruptions. We have seen organizations are also facing constant pressures from their competitions. This is from both established players as well as new market entrants. This includes both digital and direct-to-consumer brands. And we have also seen that organizations are often struggling with high operational costs due to inefficiencies in processes, legacy systems and fragmented supply chains. And managing these costs has become even more challenging as businesses are scaling or expanding into new markets. That could be because of geo preferences, cultural preferences, regulatory requirements and so on. There are a lot of inefficient operations such as manual workflows, poor inventory management and disconnected systems. This leads to wasted resources, increased expenses and slower response times, so then how are the organizations in RCG navigating through these challenges? Let's look at it. And we have seen that organizations are bringing in a new mindset. And they are setting up a shift in the mindset and they're boldly reimagining their businesses to respond to these challenges. Some of the key pillars that are driving or powering this exciting transformation is something that I'll list forward. They're building a continuous journey and experiences for consumers, where organizations are deploying a unified digital platform that integrate everything from top-floor operations to consumer and customer engagement. The seamless experience streamlines communications, enhances visibility and empowers these organizations to deliver exceptional customer journeys. We have also seen that supply chain automations and data-driven agility is also helping these organizations. As we know, information is the new fuel that drives modern RCG. Organizations are leveraging data insights across their entire Mule chain or the value chain, be it from demand forecasting, to supply chain optimizations, to customer insights. This real-time intelligence empowers them to react instantly to market shifts and also do personalizations and delivering unparalleled agility in a dynamic market. We have also seen that, be it AI-powered efficiencies or new market expansions, by embracing these AI or the artificial intelligence, organizations in RCG industry are optimizing every step of their processes. And this translates to cost savings, reduced waste and unprecedented level of operational efficiency. All of these are fundamentally changing how the businesses have been creating the value for their customers, for their internal employees also. All of these pillars that we have been seeing on the screens require data to be unlocked from those core, siloed applications, right? Data has now become the most significant asset in any organization that any organization possess. That data becomes the most significant asset, but is it this easy? The answer, sadly, is no. Connecting data isn't that easy. If you look at any high-volume transaction that is complex and need complex IT ecosystem to manage, it is full of critical processes such as supply chain, logistics, inventory management, analytics, AI initiatives, and you name it, but for each of these critical processes, there are multiple systems also. And on top of it, if we add a new process that comes, it has its own system. In fact, the number that you see on the screen, an average company today has those many number of different application. And these application being used to track and store bits and pieces of your data. This can be your product data, customer data and asset data. It could be your web and mobile engagement data. It could be your ML data. It could be data in your external data lakes and warehouses and so many more places. So what happens as a result that the IT team needs to write a specific custom code and point-to-point solutions to connect to these systems. And therefore, they are usually too overwhelmed to think about any digital strategy whatsoever or any program that is needed for the organization. Now what that leads into is IT becoming slow and rigid. These point-to-point integrations are often brittle, time consuming, and lacks built-in governance and security controls, which makes it really difficult not only to innovate, but also it makes it difficult to go faster time to market. This also puts integration and data strategy as an afterthought, which is creating a very huge risk for the businesses, so then how can you bring together all of your customer, product and all sorts of data at scale? First, you need to unlock your data, the integration piece that you see on the screen. You need to unlock your data from anywhere and make it discoverable. Now this data can include on-premises data, hybrid data, cloud data, data in any format, any shape, be it structured, unstructured data. Now once you have extracted your data or once you have unlocked your data and make it discoverable, the next step is to secure the data, the API management piece that you see on the screen. You secure all your data with API policies. The API policies will be specific to your industry and company practices, and that can be applied across every API, any API in your digital ecosystem. Once you have unlocked your data and made it discoverable, once you have secured your data, next step that you see on the automation flavor and the AI side of it, you need to automate and orchestrate the data across any system. Be it AI models, bots, processes, you have to create those intelligent experiences for your customers and your employees. And this is what we call the full life cycle of a building block. Now different point solutions exist across integration, API management and automation and some capabilities across AI also, but what we are seeing in the industry and in the market is converging to enable organization to manage its entire full life cycle more seamlessly. And this is the key to achieving the agility, as we need to adapt and compete in today's market. And that's why MuleSoft bring together integration, automation and API management all in a single unified platform to transform all of their IT assets into AI-powered experiences. This uses our market-leading platform and proven methodology, and here is how it works. On the bottom layer, on the right side, what you see is it all starts with a secure and versatile foundation that works anywhere your business requires, be it in public or private cloud, in any geo, with the compliance standards that you need. On the next to it, you see monitoring, security and insights that is being given by the platform in a single pane of glass. Not just that, platform also helps you to get started faster. You see that Anypoint Exchange. That is where the platform comes with the prebuilt APIs and the connectors which will help you get started not from a blank canvas, rather, from some prebuilt assets that is available. On the top layer -- on the next layer, from bottom, you see that we also provide tools for your teams to connect and automate any system from pro code to low code. This includes robust [ capabilities ], composers, RPAs, IDPs and so on. IDPs are there to help you unlock the unstructured data. Flow orchestrations orchestrate the complex multiuser workflows. And you will also see that there is an Einstein icon, right? We have built AI and generative prompting into several of these tools to help you move much faster with the AI-capable solutions. To speed up the development even more, if you look at the other layer, you will see that there are out-of-the-box Salesforce solutions and industry accelerators; and B2B EDI tools, likes of partner management. On the top layer, you'll see an API management capability also. Now this capability is also the part of the same platform which will help you to have governance and control on any API, with supervision, so that you ensure that the right policies are intact at the right time. On the right-hand side, you also see an API Experience Hub. That is the API ecosystem that you can create which increases the API discoverability and consumptions both internally and externally. All of this creates the industry's leading end-to-end integration, automation and API management platform. That is not something that just we are seeing. That is being validated across by our customers and analysts, that MuleSoft is a trusted solutions in the market across multiple technology categories. Our vision and product have been validated by all of these different charts that you see on the screen, be it we being the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPaaS, API management, low-code application platform for 9 years or be it being identified as strong performer in Forrester's DPA Wave report. All of this brings all of these technologies together on a unified platform so that you can build great customer experiences. Now let's start looking a bit deeper into that. How are we solving these operational challenges, inefficiencies, disruptions that is there in the RCG industry that we have discussed in the earlier slides, and make all of this vision that we have been talking about a reality? So let's first talk about how you can connect all of your disparate systems with integration and automation. We call it as modern composability. Modern composability on MuleSoft platforms enables organizations to rapidly adapt to changing technologies and standards by eliminating any sprawl and reducing the cost. That's what MuleSoft do for you. It does break down those complex integrations into smaller composable elements and provide a framework to orchestrate them. Organizations can easily combine and customize the pieces they need to meet any requirement on them. The platform also combines the traditional technologies and standards, likes of EDI and REST, with newer ones like RPA, IDP and process automations. What you see on the screens are the 3 layers, system layer, process layer and experience layer. That's how you break down those complex integrations into the smaller composable elements. By unifying all of the technologies that we have onto a single platform, organizations are empowered to design, modify and optimize their integration workflows with greater agility across multiple business units and functions. If I show it even in a different kind of a layout, you will see that. Let's say, with the modern composability, you started off with a customer mobile app, where you have used some of the prebuilt connectors to connect to your CRM systems. You have used the finance and order APIs. And you have created those, consolidated those into a one-stop shop for your customer mobile app. Next project comes up and it needs those operations dashboards and legacy system access. What you do is you unlock those additional financial data from legacy systems, where, let's say, there is no support for API-based integrations, using RPA bots. That's why that RPA bot element there. You also unlock additional order data from, let's say, a homegrown OMS system by building an API using Anypoint platform. What you see is these APIs are combined with the APIs from the project 1 so that you have enough data to fuel your employee operations dashboards. If you go next and extend these to a project 3 which is an EDI, let's say, partner portal or a B2B EDI partner portal project, you extend the solution that is being offered by MuleSoft to your business partner using our EDI solutions to create, let's say, that order API, to create those EDI transactions API. And you start driving your reusability. Your business teams are building those process flows that can tap into those data which was logged into the platform earlier. What you'll see here is that all of these 3 projects are reusing those building blocks, right? You see that we have seen customers were able to achieve 30% of reduction in integration costs when it comes to building these integrations on MuleSoft platform. And that's not all. You also have the automation capabilities to extract the information, of course, from the legacy systems, even from unstructured documents; or building a business flow, orchestration flows, so on the slide that you will see that there is building flows easily. There is an RPA. There is an IDP. There are builders available, which offers you an end-to-end automation capability so that you get the capability and ability to automate and manage all of your end-to-end processes across people and systems to solve for operational inefficiencies that you have [Audio Gap] We understood the automation end-to-end capabilities of MuleSoft. That's not all that MuleSoft provides. MuleSoft provides you security and governance capabilities also. MuleSoft universal API management vision and solution is here to help you discover, govern and manage all of your APIs. We say universal because you can do that for any API regardless of where they are built or hosted. When customers talk with us about managing their APIs, they share that the challenge isn't in developing the APIs or standard, but it's ensuring those standards are followed consistently across their company. With universal API management, customers can secure, govern and scale every API, be it Mule, non-Mule APIs, LLM APIs, or any external-facing APIs exposed to suppliers, distributors, vendors, B2B customers, or internal-facing APIs. No matter where they are running, MuleSoft's universal API management will be able to have the security and governance being applied to it there, but the question is do we start from scratch. Or how do we start? The quick answer would be no. You don't start from scratch or you don't start from a blank canvas. There are over 300-plus connectors and assets, and those are not even all listed here on the screen. There are around more than 300 plus, where you see there are multiple templates, accelerators, connectors already being built. And MuleSoft is helping you to connect your RCG ecosystems to deliver the digital transformation initiatives that you are working on. What it does is it enables you to build your integrations in API much faster and enables the faster time to market. We have seen MuleSoft accelerators for a lot of ERPs that are getting used by our RCG customers, which is offering them prebuilt specifications and templates so that they can address their RCG use case right out of the pocket. You don't start from scratch. You have faster time to market. And you create efficient integrations across your organizations. Now we have been talking about integrations, but is it a specific type of integration pattern that MuleSoft is supporting? The answer is no. MuleSoft is there to support all sorts of integration patterns and not just APIs. MuleSoft is a comprehensive platform that supports a wide range of integration patterns essential for the RCG sector, be it the API-based integrations where APIs are being offered as single interface to access the data from multiple systems or be it the event-driven architecture-based integration patterns where it enables you to immediately respond to any critical event that could have happened by doing an event-driven architecture design. It also enables you to have B2B EDI integration streamlines the businesses communications. It also ensures by B2B EDI integrations, that it ensures compatibility with partners using specific, industry-specific, formats, and we will look at it. You also see that there are publish and subscribe patterns, shortened as pub-sub pattern. You use it actually, let's say for an example, to broadcast inventory updates to multiple systems to ensure all of your stakeholders have up-to-date informations. Apart from it, you also have RPA capabilities available where you can automate, let's say, order processing and inventory updates. You reduce errors and processing time using different integration patterns that you have. You also have capabilities for file and batch integrations as well. Usually, file and batch integrations are being used to handle large volume of data. All of these integrations patterns help have data consolidations, reconciliations, a lot of integration that you would like to run across your organization. And how is MuleSoft doing it? If you look at this slide, where we are enabling companies to integrate any system or data source and automate any platform. We are doing it by, let's say, connecting data such as order, product, customer data in and out of your channels, to run your business effectively at scale. Next, it also enables you to onboard external partners and vendors such as commerce platforms or POS systems seamlessly. You don't spend time designing new APIs for each vendor or partner you onboard. Our low-code configuration-driven experience helps you operationalize partners integrations in days versus weeks before. We focus on the end goals that you would have, which is getting products into consumers' hands quickly and getting first-party data in your system securely. We have seen customers getting value out of MuleSoft by creating a transparent and efficient supply chain by having those different MuleSoft touch point integrations. We have also seen retailers helping and getting the view of the real-time inventory reliably by integrating sales order and product information in real time. This improves customer and employee user experiences and eliminate that manual employee reporting otherwise. And it's not just on papers. We have been doing it for industry leaders across RCG. You are seeing some of the logos, but there's many more to it. Industry leaders rely on MuleSoft to accelerate their speed of innovation and drive key business outcomes, whether the project ahead of you is around headless commerce that you see there, whether it is around the omnichannel experience, whether it is around the single customer view, whether it is around this differentiated or personalized customer experiences or new market expansion. All of these are being provenly implemented and being done in some of these logos that are listed there and many of them that we cannot put in due to the space in the slide that you will see. MuleSoft enables you to deliver these initiatives faster, starting with the first project and accelerating with every project after that. By building a foundation of composability and reusability, it makes a robust technology partner ecosystem as well as MuleSoft will help you have to connect to any system in your retail and consumer goods landscape, from ERPs of the world to order management to CRMs. Let's double click and look at some of the industry use cases. And there could be many more to it. Some of the key RCG use cases and where MuleSoft is helping deliver these use cases. Some of them are supply chain automations, omnichannel customer experience, new market expansions and B2B automations. Let's discuss each of them briefly. Let's, first, start by looking at the supply 360 use case. Let's talk about how achieving a supply 360 and automating your supply chain is essential today. The key to deliver this is by gaining a clear and comprehensive view of all the relevant data to your supply chain. This includes both internal data and partner data from suppliers, vendors and customers. MuleSoft integration and automation are critical in addressing these challenges. Let's take an example. Imagine the future of your business operations for a moment. Your demand and supply planning teams have access to real-time data from all your partners, suppliers, vendors, customers and production unit. This real-time data accessibility is allowing them to be more accurate and taking timely decisions, right? To make this illustrative example a reality, your organization needs full visibility into back-end systems across your production units and your broader ecosystems. MuleSoft composable architecture facilitates this by connecting these systems of records, make it available but to any application that requires data. One of the standard features of MuleSoft is its low-code product, which improves developers' delivery speed by as much as 50%. This accelerated development process enables quicker time to value. Additionally, automation can help streamline your supply chain processes, make them more efficient. By automating routine tasks, you free up your team to focus on more strategic and innovative activities that drive business values. Automation also reduces the risk of human error. And integration will give you more and more efficient processes, which are essentially crucial in supply chain management where even a small error can have significant impact. Let's look at the second process or the use case, omnichannel customer experience. In order to create a seamless omnichannel experience, you need to think of turning to new approaches like composable architecture that we were talking in some slides back. In order to make this in reality, we understand that, in order to deliver exceptional experiences and drive customer loyalty, you need to have real-time access to informations in order to deliver new projects faster. MuleSoft's composable architecture allows you to quickly do that. If you see in these 3 points, as we were saying, that we do offer over 300-plus connectors, assets and accelerators that can help you quickly get started with your internal and external systems, let's say, by connecting to your CRM systems, your ERP softwares, your supply chain management tools and other business-critical applications. Second, you can easily and securely integrate new partners and channels by leveraging the discoverable and reusable assets built on platform. And finally, you can reuse and compose automation to drive task automations, completions and collaborations across team, systems and applications. With the unified Customer 360 view powered by MuleSoft, RCGs organizations can be more agile and innovative. The ability to quickly access and act on comprehensive customer data enables faster decision-making and accelerates time to market for new products and services. This also gives you agility which is crucial to stay competitive and meet evolving customer expectations, as we were talking in the very first challenge slides, right? This entire omnichannel customer experiences also prepares you to have those new market expansions being captured, go vivid to -- into multiple geos, grow cross-geos, grow across different regulatory requirements as well. Next use case and the last use case is about the B2B automation for partner ecosystem. Now B2B integration is vital for enterprise customers, particularly managing warehouses and supply chain workflows. It ensures efficient order-to-cash processes, impacting core ERPs and billing systems. Historically, integrating with B2B partners was a complex task often requiring separate solutions. However, with advancements in integration platform, this has evolved into a more streamlined and integral capability. MuleSoft Partner Manager is a cloud-native, low-code B2B integration platform designed to simplify and enhance B2B integrations. It supports both traditional EDI and modern APIs, making it a versatile tool for enterprises. In today's digital landscape, be it RCG industry, it's essential to integrate B2B transactions with various modern cloud-based applications. MuleSoft's Partner Manager is a part of our unified platform called as Anypoint platform and it enables connectivity with any system, application or data source. It supports multiple data format, including EDI, X12, EDIFACT, XML, CSV, and multiple transport protocols such as AS2, SFTP and HTTP, as you see on the screen. What it also does is it eases and accelerates partner onboarding. The low-code experience of Partner Manager simplifies the B2B integrations and enables multiple line of businesses to actively participate in the process. Not just that, it also helps you in operational management. Visibility and traceability are critical in supply chain management. And Partner Manager provides you that comprehensive visibility of business transactions. Whether transactions are exchanged via EDI or API, Partner Manager offers a single pane of glass visibility, ensuring that all communications are easily tracked and managed. That brings me to the end of the slides, where I would like to wrap up our today's discussion where we have explored several topics that are reshaping the landscape of modern business operations in RCG. Let's first summarize the significant benefits our RCG customers have experienced with the MuleSoft platform. With MuleSoft's single unified platform for integration, automation and API management, RCG companies have been -- have seen substantial improvements in their delivery speed and agility. In a survey we conducted with our customers, and you see on the top, they have reported up to 78%. And that's pretty good percentage there, faster delivery of APIs and integrations once they onboarded to MuleSoft. This accelerated delivery has enabled these RCG companies to respond more swiftly to those market demands, to those operational challenges and changes. And it has in turn enhanced their overall productivity. As we were talking about that single management pane which is being offered by MuleSoft, it has provided our customers a holistic visibility into all the deployments in one place. MuleSoft composable architecture is a game changer for RCG organizations. Customers are leveraging that composable architecture. And by leveraging our secure, productized, easily discoverable and consumable APIs and integrations, our customers have achieved up to 51% reusability across their organizations. And that number, you see on the screen. This reusability not only reduces the development time and cost but also ensures consistency and reliability in operations. Another piece and another summary that we have got from our customer in RCG industry, right. Across security and governance, we have seen that MuleSoft enhance security and governance by reducing the impact of security breaches that were there without MuleSoft, by lowering the cost to maintain these critical aspects and meet the compliance standards with industry practices. In conclusion, MuleSoft's platform offers RCG companies a comprehensive solution that significantly improve delivery speed and agility, provides holistic visibility, enhances reusability and ensures robust security and governance. These benefits that I have listed on the slides collectively enable RCG customers and companies to operate more efficiently, respond quickly to changes and maintain high standards of security and compliance. That would be it, for today, from me. It was a pleasure to be here. It was an opportunity for me to talk to all of you about our technology and our platform. Thank you for listening patiently all throughout. Thank you for joining today's webinar. We hope this discussion has given you some insights into how MuleSoft can support your RCG needs. We hope you continue your journey with us. Please reach out to us at any point in time. We would encourage you to also visit the resource section here on our website and where you can find any industry-specific white papers, webinars, demos and so much more. You can also visit Anypoint Exchange, where you can find those out-of-the-box assets, connectors, accelerators that we have been talking about. Now we are opening up the floor for any questions that you might have, any discussion, any comments, any suggestions that you want to bring to us. Please feel free to put them into the section. Any questions are appreciated. Thank you so much again for your entire active listening, so far. Any questions are welcome now. Thank you.