Salesforce said it will acquire Informatica for $8 billion, or $25 a share, in a deal that will give it a neutral data integration and management platform to connect Agentforce across systems.
The two companies were in talks a year ago, but couldn't agree on a price. Salesforce will fund the Informatica purchase with cash and new debt.
Salesforce said Informatica, which recently announced tighter integration with Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake and others, will power its agentic AI vision across enterprises. Informatica brings a data catalog, integration, governance and metadata management.
What Informatica also brings to Salesforce is a neutral platform. CxOs have said that Agentforce is viewed as more of a Salesforce-specific AI agent play instead of a horizontal solution across third-party systems.
Informatica will also bring revenue to Salesforce. Informatica recently projected 2025 revenue of $1.67 billion to $1.72 billion, or growth of 4.6% at the midpoint. Salesforce said Informatica will boost non-GAAP earnings and free cash flow in the second year after the deal closes.
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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the combination of Data Cloud, MuleSoft and Tableau with Informatica will "enable autonomous agents to deliver smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes for every company."
Here's what Salesforce bought:
According to Salesforce, Informatica will do the following:
- Strengthen Data Cloud as a customer data platform (CDP).
- Given Agentforce the ability to interpret and act on a wide range of enterprise data.
- Augment Customer 360.
- Bring data quality, integration and governance for the data used by MuleSoft APIs.
- Provide context for Tableau insights.
- Bolster Salesforce's industry offerings.
Once the deal closes, Salesforce said it will "rapidly integrate Informatica’s technology stack — including data integration, quality, governance, and unified metadata for Agentforce, and a single data pipeline with MDM on Data Cloud." When integrated, Informatica will be embedded into Salesforce's system of understanding.
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In addition, Salesforce said it will support Informatica's ecosystem and data management products.
Salesforce will talk about the deal more on its first quarter earnings call on Wednesday. In the meantime, here are some questions to ponder.
- How will Data Cloud and Informatica be sold individually? Will there be a conflict?
- Will Informatica's mojo as a neutral party in data management erode as part of Salesforce? A neutral vendor in your stack is great, but also a pipe dream
- How quickly can Informatica be integrated into Salesforce's platform?
- And customers will look for alternatives to Informatica as they are already digesting Agentforce and pricing changes?
- How will Informatica's CLAIRE AI agent efforts be affected in the deal?
Constellation Research’s take
Constellation Research CEO R “Ray” Wang said:
“The bottom line is that MuleSoft was not enough. Salesforce showed why Data Cloud was important for AI. But how do you get the data into Data Cloud? A data integration company and iPaaS vendor would have to do the trick. But which one? Informatica has been on the block before and it’s old, legacy, but it has a ton of customers and some great data management tools. But it’s not the future and this what makes the difference between at $10B acquisition vs a $8B acquisition. However, Boomi would have been the smarter buy - brand new tech, an agentic framework ready to go, fast growing company, and a rock star CEO.”
The bigger question in the long run is whether the Informatica deal positions Salesforce to manage and orchestrate agents beyond its platform.
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Liz Miller, an analyst at Constellation Research, said:
"Top of mind for everyone will be the question: "Is this the $8 billion missing piece to shift Agentforce from a dominant promise to a dominant reality for Salesforce customers?" What Informatica brings to the table is data integration capacity, metadata integration and serious data provenance, lineage and governance to stitch all of Salesforce's recent data innovations together.
For Salesforce customers the question will always come down to what additional value will Informatica bring to my current business goals? Does this seismically change the trajectory that my data and my processes and my outcomes are on?
The moves to watch will revolve, as they often do with Salesforce, around price. In recent weeks Salesforce has worked to simplify and streamline Agentforce pricing and there has been a long history of fine-tuning Data Cloud's consumption pricing. Time will tell if Salesforce's customers can shoulder another layer of data related costs."
