Updated with acquisition announcement:

Salesforce.com Inc. today said it’s buying publicly held enterprise software integration firm MuleSoft Inc. for $6.5 billion.

It’s the biggest acquisition ever for Salesforce, the maker of online customer relationship management and related software, indicating the cloud giant sees a great deal of strategic value in MuleSoft.

Salesforce said it will pay $44.89 per share for MuleSoft, a 36 percent premium over Monday’s closing price. The deal values each MuleSoft share at $36 in cash plus 0.0711 shares of Salesforce common stock, the companies said.

The deal was leaked to sources cited by Reuters earlier today, sending the stock up by 27 percent on the day. The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of July.

MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform enables companies to build application programming interfaces for their internal systems so that they can be connected with other infrastructure. A retailer, for example, could pull data from point-of-sale terminals into the analytics service used by the marketing department to ease the development of new promotions.

MuleSoft also offers features for maintaining APIs after they’re deployed. Anypoint enables companies to set limits on what parts of a system a user may access, set request caps and monitor activity to ensure that everything works as expected. 

The provider is a longtime Salesforce partner and provides a dedicated collection of resources for integrating with the cloud giant’s services. By acquiring MuleSoft, the cloud giant will be much better-positioned to extend its reach in the traditional enterprise. Many organizations have legacy applications that can potentially benefit from integrating with external services such as Salesforce, but are kept in relative isolation because of the difficulty of manually implementing APIs.

Another reason for the premium acquisition price is MuleSoft’s strong growth. The company closed the fourth quarter of 2017 with revenues of $88.7 million, an impressive 60 percent jump over the prior year’s closing quarter. It boasts more than 1,000 customers including household names such as McDonald’s Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Coca-Cola Co.

The acquisition is something of a surprise because MuleSoft only went public almost exactly a year ago.

Image: Salesforce