BARC Perspective: Salesforce To Acquire Informatica

What happened?

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica, an enterprise AI-powered cloud data management company, for approximately $8 billion in cash. The deal (the complete transaction) is expected to be closed around Q1 2026. This marks Salesforce’s fourth major acquisition following its $6.5 billion purchase of Mulesoft in 2018, the $15.7 billion purchase of Tableau in 2019 and its acquisition of Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021.

Why is it important?

An important, independent giant in data management is going to be acquired. Acquisition rumors have circulated around Informatica from time to time over the years, intensifying in the past year before finally materializing with Salesforce’s successful bid. Finally, Informatica is sold.

This acquisition represents a critical strategic move in the AI and data management landscape. As businesses increasingly rely on artificial intelligence capabilities, the quality and management of underlying data becomes paramount. Informatica brings robust enterprise-grade data integration, quality and governance capabilities that are essential for AI initiatives. For Salesforce, which positions itself as the “#1 AI CRM,” this acquisition fills a crucial gap in its data infrastructure stack. The deal consolidates two major players and market leaders in their respective segments, potentially reshaping how companies approach customer data management and AI-driven insights.

This might be a forerunner of a wave of mergers or strategic partnerships to combine applications, AI models and data management / governance capabilities.

Informatica is a recognized leader in cloud data management, known for its capabilities in data integration, governance, quality and master data management. The communicated rationale behind the acquisition is to build an agentic AI platform where Informatica solutions provide the metadata (a key ingredient), data management functionality and important pieces of the data layer. Conversely, Salesforce offers high-quality customer and sales data, alongside expertise in building cloud-native, customer-facing applications, increasingly with AI at their core.

What is interesting about it?

Several dynamics make this deal noteworthy. First, the acquisition comes after failed negotiations in 2024, during which Informatica’s stock plummeted by up to 59%, making it a more attractive target. The timing is particularly strategic, occurring just before Salesforce’s earnings announcement, suggesting confidence in the deal’s value creation potential.

Finally, private equity firm Permira, which owns nearly half of Informatica, stands to benefit significantly from this exit after taking the company private in 2015 for $5.3 billion.

The timing of this sale appears strategic given current market uncertainties:

• Informatica’s recent financial performance suggests growth projections that may not meet shareholder expectations.
• The market faces significant uncertainty regarding the future direction of the data management sector (more below).
• Informatica has recently prioritized annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth in preparation for acquisition, achieving 6% year-over-year growth through competitive pricing compared to industry peers.

Focus on agentic AI

Salesforce frames the rationale behind the acquisition entirely around agentic AI capabilities. Adding Informatica’s capabilities to Salesforce’s portfolio could create a unified agentic AI offering. Salesforce’s business application platform, enhanced with Informatica’s governed data foundation, addresses many current AI implementation challenges and could genuinely compete with AI offerings, for example, by cloud hyperscalers, but especially by business application giants.

However, there is more to it than just agentic AI. Agents are exciting and they are certainly a good framing for the communication of this deal, but it is going to be a long road until AI agents provide meaningful impact and autonomy on an enterprise scale. Simultaneously, the acquisition strengthens Salesforce’s existing business model by delivering immediate value to current customers. Included wisely, Informatica’s capabilities can help to make Einstein Analytics smarter with additional data points from outside Salesforce and improve customer churn analysis or lead scoring. Integrating a data integration tool might also give the possibility to speed up the implementation times for customers that migrate from other CRMs to Salesforce.

Synergies beyond managing customer data?

Salesforce’s move to acquire Informatica is akin to buying an entire supermarket while primarily needing ingredients from the customer data aisle. Informatica boasts a formidable arsenal, managing data across the enterprise spectrum – from operations and finance to supply chains. Salesforce, renowned for its CRM prowess, has traditionally focused on customer-centric data. A pivotal question emerges: Can Salesforce transcend its customer data nucleus to harness the full expanse of enterprise insights Informatica offers?

Beyond the data domain challenge, Informatica brings an extensive toolkit of data management functionality – from integration and governance to quality management and master data solutions. It remains to be seen whether Salesforce can effectively utilize this comprehensive suite of capabilities or if significant portions of this premium acquisition will remain underutilized, representing a costly case of over-engineering for its specific needs.

Sales/customer synergies

The partnership between Salesforce and Informatica opens access to new customers. Salesforce serves 150,000 clients, including a high share of SMB customers, while Informatica focuses on 5,000 mostly enterprise customers. With Salesforce, Informatica can reach a broader market. In regulated sectors especially, the combination may support the development of AI applications based on governed data due to Informatica’s strong customer base in these industries. Additionally, Salesforce’s operational focus could help reposition Informatica as a key data management vendor, as data decisions are increasingly shifting from IT to business teams due to growing automation and AI involvement.

Background and technological implications

Software vendors that offer comprehensive suites for data management – like Informatica – face mounting pressure from two sides:

• hyperscalers, who embed foundational data management capabilities into their cloud platforms, and
• ecosystem-oriented players like Snowflake and Databricks, who champion modular, best-of-breed strategies together with their technology partners.

Additionally, a new wave of transformation is on the horizon. Agentic AI is poised to reshape the entire data integration and management lifecycle by automating tasks like schema mapping, data pipeline design and performance optimization – tasks that have traditionally required manual engineering. While this shift may unfold gradually, its long-term implications are clear: traditional, developer-centric toolsets will likely be disrupted within the coming decade.

But agentic AI will not only affect how data management tasks can be automated – operational processes are a much bigger target. That is exactly the point where Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica becomes strategically relevant. As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, put it, “Together, Salesforce and Informatica will create the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry.”

This shift highlights how the competitive field is evolving: Leading tech firms have entered a new phase of competition – one defined by their ability to embed intelligent agents into the heart of operational processes. And as we show in the outlook at the end, Salesforce is not the only leading tech firm that positions itself to be the right platform for agents because of its expertise in digital transformation of business processes.

Such a robust agentic strategy depends on the seamless integration of three layers: Applications, models and data.

Salesforce already brings strength not only in the cloud-native application layer through its CRM heritage and Mulesoft integration capabilities: Its recent pivot towards agentic AI through the innovative Agentforce program is beginning to impact businesses and help them to gradually build expertise in embedding intelligent agents into operational workflows.

As the model layer becomes increasingly commoditized, competitive differentiation is shifting to the ability to build intelligent applications and agents that can act on diverse enterprise data with precision and context. Salesforce’s move positions it strongly in this regard.

On the data side, Informatica enhances Salesforce’s capabilities with enterprise-grade metadata management, cataloging, data quality and governance. To be clear, this acquisition does not suddenly give Salesforce direct access to enterprise data itself. Rather, it gives Salesforce the tools to understand, integrate and govern that data – with metadata-oriented capabilities (understand and govern) now proving just as critical as traditional data integration (integrate) for enterprise AI success – laying the foundation for agentic functionality. Salesforce will need to invest a lot of time and resources to integrate the pieces it controls now, which will probably take years rather than months.

This challenge is complicated by two facts:

• In 2018, Salesforce acquired Mulesoft, a software vendor also known for building data pipelines between different pieces of the enterprise technology puzzle.
• In critical agentic AI areas – unstructured data, vector/graph technology and model governance – Informatica either has no track record or is just starting to build capabilities.

Potential benefits for customers

The acquisition may offer substantial benefits for customers across both platforms. Enhanced AI capabilities might emerge from combining Salesforce’s customer relationship management with Informatica’s advanced data processing, metadata and governance tools.

• Existing Salesforce customers can expect more seamless data integration across their entire tech stack, enabling better business intelligence and decision-making but also building AI agents.
• Existing Salesforce customers will most likely benefit from the acquisition beyond that. They will get new possibilities to leverage metadata that is presented and curated in Informatica’s data catalog, data governance and data marketplace offerings. Metadata is a crucial component to successfully build reliable and compliant AI agents.
• The unified platform should reduce the complexity of managing multiple vendor relationships and potentially lower total cost of ownership through bundled solutions specifically for shared customers.
• Improved data quality and governance features will help organizations better comply with regulatory requirements and maintain data integrity. This might also benefit SMBs – typically not Informatica’s core customer base but a significant part of Salesforce’s target market.
• Innovation acceleration is likely as the combined entity can invest more resources in R&D, potentially delivering advanced features faster than either company could independently, especially around agentic AI as well as customer and sales data.

Potential challenges for customers

The acquisition presents several significant concerns that could impact customers across both platforms. Strategic uncertainties around product positioning and vendor relationships create risks for long-term technology investments.

• Existing Informatica customers face uncertainty about their platform’s future direction and independence. We will address this concern in more detail in the paragraph below.
• Informatica’s multi-cloud neutrality faces potential erosion. Historically positioned as the “Switzerland of data” with equitable partnerships across major cloud providers, this strategic advantage may be at risk under the ownership of Salesforce. While Salesforce advocates for cloud flexibility and maintains no proprietary data center infrastructure, its expanding software portfolio increasingly competes with hyperscaler services, relegating cloud providers to mere infrastructure roles. This competitive dynamic could strain Informatica’s critical partnerships with hyperscalers and cloud data platforms, ultimately increasing the risk that customers will lose the multi-cloud optionality they depend on for their data strategies.
• Market positioning changes might diminish Informatica’s value proposition as an independent, vendor-neutral data management platform.
• The combined end-to-end solution from data integration to delivering agents to the user could pose a risk of vendor lock-in, making customers increasingly dependent on Salesforce’s ecosystem.
• Pricing and licensing strategies may evolve as part of the integration process, which could be a consideration for standalone Informatica customers. Given Informatica’s recent competitive pricing approaches, there are questions about how licensing models might adapt to align with Salesforce’s broader business strategy.

Salesforce’s track record of acquisition

Informatica is a recognized leader in cloud data management, known for its capabilities in data integration, governance, quality and master data management. If Salesforce tries to fully integrate Informatica into its platform stack – as it previously aimed for with Tableau – there is a real risk that Informatica’s tools will become increasingly tailored to Salesforce-centric use cases.

This shift could diminish their relevance and perceived innovation for standalone Informatica customers, particularly those operating in multi-cloud or heterogeneous environments. The concern is that Informatica’s broader market influence could gradually decline, opening the way for data competitors to poach customers.

A further point of concern is talent and leadership retention. Salesforce’s past acquisitions, notably Tableau, saw significant executive departures post-integration, leading to shifts in product direction and customer engagement. There is apprehension that a similar pattern could unfold with Informatica, which could in the worst case lead to diluting its distinctive culture and slowing innovation. These worries are amplified by Salesforce’s track record of struggling to deeply and effectively integrate major acquisitions such as Slack and MuleSoft – efforts that often fell short of their promised synergies and left users with fragmented experiences.

A critical consideration for existing Informatica customers will be whether Salesforce preserves Informatica’s platform-agnostic positioning and vendor-neutral value proposition that current customers rely on for their data strategies.

Strategic outlook

Salesforce’s $8 billion acquisition of Informatica represents a pivotal bet on agentic AI as the next transformative wave in enterprise technology. This deal positions Salesforce as a comprehensive data-to-insights platform provider, directly challenging hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, but also operational technology giants like Oracle, SAP and IBM by creating an end-to-end AI-enabled customer experience ecosystem within a single platform.

The timing reflects an early but bold wager on agentic AI’s potential, demonstrating Salesforce’s conviction that operational and analytical technologies will converge like never before. However, this positioning carries inherent risks, as practical enterprise benefits of agentic AI remain largely unproven while traditional data & analytics continues to be more business-critical for most organizations.

The competitive response from the vendors named above is already underway. This acquisition forces major players to accelerate their platform integration strategies or risk losing ground in the enterprise AI race. However, as we are still early in this transformation, it will be interesting to watch closely how the different players deliver not only technology-wise but also how this translates into tangible business benefits such as increased productivity.

Integration Reality Check

Salesforce’s $60 billion acquisition track record over the past decade has produced mixed results. Industry analysts have noted inconsistent delivery on integration promises, with the Tableau acquisition serving as a cautionary precedent where standalone customers experienced pricing challenges and reduced product focus. The first meaningful synergies are anticipated within the next year, though complete integration will require significantly longer given the complexity of merging Informatica’s sophisticated data management capabilities with Salesforce’s CRM platform.

Critical risk factors

The most significant risk involves alienating existing customer bases, particularly Informatica’s enterprise clients who rely on the platform’s independence and vendor-neutral positioning. Informatica’s strong collaborative relationships with hyperscale cloud providers and leading cloud data platforms have been central to its value proposition in the past. How Salesforce manages these partnerships, given its competitive positioning against these same hyperscalers, will significantly impact customers’ multi-cloud strategies and data gravity considerations.

Market implications

This acquisition could accelerate a fundamental shift toward integrated platform solutions in enterprise software, supplemented by best-of-breed point solutions, potentially making software suites only a viable solution for enterprise customers. It signals the growing importance of data infrastructure in the AI era and its success or failure will influence whether other technology giants decide to continue with similar large-scale consolidation strategies. Meanwhile, competitors in the field of data management suites (e.g., Boomi, Precisely and Qlik) stand ready to capitalize on any customer uncertainty or perceived deprioritization during the integration process.

Bottom line

This deal is Salesforce’s boldest move to date at fusing (meta)data-driven intelligence with CRM and an agentic AI vision, picking up a ready-made network of 5,000 customers and over 200 native data integration connectors together with leading data management functionality. But it turns on three execution pivots. Success will depend on:

• extending Informatica’s core strengths while delivering meaningful integration benefits,
• maintaining critical partner relationships, and
• demonstrating tangible productivity gains from agentic AI capabilities in a timely manner.