The Skills Gap No One is Talking about

Part 4 of the Series: IT Leader’s Required Reading – Breaking Down Gartner’s Take on MuleSoft

It’s not just the architecture. It’s who you need to operate it.

Gartner’s latest report on MuleSoft reveals a cost few IT leaders plan for: talent. Beneath the promise of API-led maturity lies a platform that demands a deep bench of Java-certified developers, MuleSoft specialists, and integration architects. Most teams don’t have them—and can’t afford to wait while they’re hired, trained, and certified.

This final post in the series explores why legacy integration platforms like MuleSoft stall without niche technical expertise – and how Workato avoids the skills trap with an intuitive development experience—offering a single platform that stretches from low-code to pro-code, so more of your IT team can build, adapt, and scale automation.

Why Skill Shortages Derail MuleSoft Projects

While MuleSoft was once considered a best-in-class platform for API management, the demands of today’s integration landscape have evolved – and the platform hasn’t kept pace. What was once a strength has become a constraint and comes with a heavy operational tax:

• Specialized talent requirements. Developers need Java fluency, MuleSoft certification, and experience managing complex, multi-layered APIs.
• Long ramp times. Gartner notes that most organizations migrating to MuleSoft must “invest in upskilling their users” just to get started
• Rigid implementations and runaway partner costs. Even organizations with strong internal teams often rely on outside firms just to get projects off the ground – because overcoming MuleSoft’s complexity requires both certified developers and specialist partners. The result? Soaring professional services costs layered on top of already expensive internal resources.
• High-cost maintenance. Beyond partner dependencies and over-engineered architectures, the real cost is in talent. Specialized developers with deep skills are stuck maintaining brittle integrations – handling version upgrades, patching broken flows, and rewriting APIs – rather than driving innovation. It’s not just inefficient; it’s demoralizing. Instead of solving meaningful problems, your most capable engineers are relegated to being integration janitors.

Workato: Built to Empower More of IT

Workato takes a more pragmatic approach. Rather than demanding a new class of specialist, Workato allows broader IT roles—system admins, integration leads, and platform engineers—to contribute directly to automation initiatives.

• Accessibility doesn’t mean low-control. Workato recipes give IT full governance while accelerating delivery through intuitive interfaces.
• Low-code doesn’t mean simple. While Workato’s front end is intuitive and visual, it’s not limited. Developers can go as deep as needed—injecting custom logic, handling exceptions, or building modular recipe functions. The power is there when you need it, but hidden when you don’t—so teams can move fast without being forced into complexity from the start
• Built for collaboration. Teams can design and deploy automations together, with shared visibility into workflows and integrations.
• Reusable components, fewer rebuilds. With modular recipe functions and prebuilt connectors, IT teams can move faster—without reinventing the wheel.

This isn’t about letting “anyone automate.” It’s about extending reach and improving how IT works with the business. With Workato, more of your IT organization can contribute within a governed, enterprise-grade framework – while business teams stay close to the process. Because everyone’s working in a shared, accessible environment, the nuance doesn’t get lost in translation. Instead of nine-month handoffs, IT and business teams speak the same language from day one – leading to faster builds, tighter feedback loops, and better solutions.

Real World Proof: How Canva Scaled Integration Without Growing Headcount

Take Canva. As one of the world’s fastest-growing software companies, it needed a way to scale automations across GTM and finance teams—without creating a bottleneck in IT.

With Workato, Canva now runs over 110+ automations across Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk, and more. Crucially, these workflows were built in close partnership with IT, using Workato to expand the surface area of who could build, maintain, and evolve integrations—with governance and best practices in place.

The result? Faster delivery, fewer escalations, and better alignment between business needs and IT capacity. And more importantly—measurable business impact:

• Replaced over 8,000 hours of manual work annually
• Closed 100+ vendor assessments in 1–2 months, eliminating 75 hours of manual labor
• Increased number of trust builders from 4 to 40
• Reduced expense reimbursement times from two weeks to just two days

See how Canva drives innovation at scale with Workato’s automation and orchestration.
Read the Story

More Value, Less Overhead

In a time when IT budgets are under pressure, reducing technical bottlenecks is no longer optional – it’s an operational imperative.

As explored in Workato’s blog on Accelerating Profitability, enterprises can no longer afford to spend months coding custom point-to-point integrations or managing legacy middleware. Integration must drive business value – fast.

Here’s how Workato compares to legacy platforms like MuleSoft:

Capability	MuleSoft	Workato
Time to Deploy	Months-long implementation requiring certified developers	Deploy in weeks using existing IT team
Required Skill Set	Java, MuleSoft certification	Generalist IT, platform engineers, operations
Delivery Speed	Slowed by specialization and architecture overhead	2-5x faster project delivery
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)	High—due to partner fees, specialist headcount, and rebuild costs	30-50% lower TCO on average
Flexibility	Tightly coupled, version-sensitive code	Decoupled recipes that don’t break with updates
Team Utilization	Narrow team bandwidth (specialists only)	Broader IT engagement (governed collaboration)

Workato customers don’t just move faster—they do more with the team they already have. No additional headcount. No brittle architecture to maintain. Just clean, scalable automations aligned to the real-world pace of enterprise change.

The Bottom Line: Skills Aren’t Just a Resourcing Problem. They’re a Strategy Problem.

The real cost of legacy platforms like MuleSoft isn’t just in licenses or partner fees—it’s in the specialized headcount they require. When integration is gated behind certified Java experts, delivery slows, backlogs grow, and IT becomes a bottleneck instead of a business driver.

Workato offers a fundamentally different approach: one that empowers more of your IT team to contribute—without compromising control. By choosing a platform that fits the talent you have today, eliminates unnecessary architectural overhead, and enables faster time-to-value, you can accelerate delivery, reduce costs, and scale automation across the enterprise. As Canva’s results show, the future of integration isn’t about hiring more specialists—it’s about unlocking more impact from the team you already have.

Key takeaways:

• Architect for future growth. Avoid platforms that require niche skillsets which can quickly become bottlenecks.
• Reduce architectural overhead. Smarter design, composability, and reusability leads to faster delivery and easier maintenance.
• Scale impact, not headcount. Empower more of IT to contribute and drive results faster.

If your integration strategy depends on hard-to-hire skills, it’s not just slow it’s fragile

📘 Further Reading

• Gartner: How to Maximize Value from MuleSoft Deployments
• Accelerating Profitability: The Imperative of Enterprise Agility, Responsiveness, and Time-to-Market

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Explore the Full Series:

IT Leader’s Required Reading – Breaking Down Gartner’s Take on MuleSoft

• Part 1: Rethinking MuleSoft’s API-Led Model: Costly Overhead or Strategic Advantage? – Why MuleSoft’s API-led model isn’t right for every integration
• Part 2: Architecture Without Restraint: How Undisciplined API Architecture Leads to Ballooning Costs – Why undisciplined use of architecture leads to high costs for the organization
• Part 3: Why MuleSoft’s Reuse-First Model Rarely Pays Off – Why chasing reuse is often a distraction from real outcomes
• Part 4: The Skills Gap No One Talks About – How talent shortages quietly derail projects