Informatica - Salesforce's Precious; one Platform to Govern all Data

The news

On May 27, 2025, Salesforce announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica for about $8bn.

According to the press release, “bringing together Informatica’s cloud-native capabilities — including its extensive data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and MDM — with the Salesforce platform will unlock new capabilities for Salesforce’s enterprise data stack, delivering a complete solution to the challenges of AI at scale”.

The acquisition is planned to enhance Salesforce’ data foundation which is critical for deploying agentic AI. “The combination of Informatica’s rich data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services with the Salesforce platform will establish a unified architecture for agentic AI — enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across the modern enterprise”.

The bigger picture

For agentic AI systems – or agents in general – to operate efficiently, it needs two things: data and data.

Data from a vendor’s own systems as well as data from external systems that can get harmonized and accessed/used by the software agents. SAP during its annual Sapphire event just made exactly this point by showcasing how its Joule family of agents can use data from SAP and non-SAP applications.

As there is no vendor to rule them all (thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien for this inspiration) there is an importance on again two things: (zero copy) data integration and data management including its governance. These seemingly not-so-sexy capabilities are sorely lacked by many application vendors but, again, thanks to AI, increasingly necessary. Again, AI, especially autonomous AI systems, cannot be truly reliable, let alone trustworthy, without a solid platform of very well understood data. This is also evidenced by one of the core messages of the press release. Informatica shall “strengthen Data Cloud’s leadership as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), ensuring data from across the organization is not just unified but clear, trusted, and actionable”.

My point of view and analysis

Usually, one says that the third time is the charm. Salesforce did it in a second attempt, after failing in April 2024. The good news for Salesforce is that the wait saved the company around $3bn.

In my eyes, this acquisition closes a few gaps in the Salesforce software stack. Salesforce gains Informatica’s capabilities in data integration, data quality, metadata and masterdata management. And yes, I deliberately include integration, although Salesforce’s emphasis probably lies in the other topics. After all, strong data management and data governance are key preconditions for being able to run software agents. It simply needs a strong data platform. So far, Salesforce, in spite of promoting its own data cloud, wasn’t really there. So, this is a very good match for Salesforce, also considering that Informatica is considered a leader in many competencies, including Data and Analytics Governance, Data Quality, and, yes, integration.

Why is integration important? After all, Salesforce has Mulesoft. However, I see Mulesoft as somewhat clunky compared to Informatica’s more real time integration capabilities. The Informatica platform simply is more complete, which in the light of agentic software being in the need to access data from different sources in a consistent way, is paramount.

As for Informatica, the company certainly has lost some of its mojo, as evidenced by a significant decline in growth and at best moderate profitability. These are caused by several factors that I rather leave to people who are more qualified than I am. But one thing is for sure. Informatica can surely benefit from the well-oiled marketing machine that Salesforce is.

So, overall, this is a good acquisition for both sides. Salesforce gets something that it was sorely lacking – an own strong data management and -governance platform with increased integration capabilities as a bonus. Informatica gets a new lease of life.

What is remaining is the hard work of finishing Informatica’s cloud transformation and the deep integration of its capabilities into the Salesforce stack.

Congratulations to both for this merger that, I am sure, was in the making for a long time.

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