Various Salesforce products have become usage based, rather than seat based. Including here are Einstein AI, Data Cloud and MuleSoft. Of course, for a long time, we've also had emails and SMS in Marketing Cloud. For all these consumption-based products, part of the skill of being a partner to our customers is optimising their usage. Part of being an internal team at a customer on architecture is considering usage, not just technical topics.
Let's take MuleSoft as an example. It now looks at two primary levers: number of flows and number of messages.
Flows are measured as a high watermark: the number of active flows (there's a couple of definitions of this) which really measures the breadth of the solution. So, its key to only have flows active that really are active, and it's easy to leave some of these behind through work, development. Need to have a continual waste disposal system to ensure flows are clean.
Messages are more activity based: usage of the flows that you have defined. So, think as the flows as the wires in an electricity grid, and the messages is the electricity passing through those wires. This is a drawdown effect on the budget until it runs out, and then overages are charged.
Data Cloud is a slightly more complex set of levers, with identity resolution being one of the most expensive processes. It makes sense for all this to be usage based: I have no issue with it, it just requires an active mindset.
So where does this leave customers? They need to ensure either by themselves, or via their partner (like OSF!) the usage is being monitored and there are health checks and routines to ensure everything is really in use and usage is not being wasted (for instance on rejected calls or similar).
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