Why Informatica Was Too Important for Salesforce to Ignore

Salesforce on Tuesday announced it will acquire data management company Informatica in an $8 billion all-cash transaction, the largest deal the software giant has undertaken since acquiring Slack in 2021. The move comes as Salesforce doubles down on artificial intelligence—not just by expanding what its AI agents can do, but by investing in the one thing that determines whether they can function at all: enterprise data infrastructure.

The acquisition is expected to close in early fiscal 2027, pending regulatory approvals, and will be funded through a combination of cash and new debt. Under the terms, Salesforce will pay $25 per share for Informatica, representing a 30% premium to its May 22 closing price.

While Informatica is far from a household name, its role in the enterprise software stack has become increasingly important. The company’s core product, the Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), helps large organizations manage their data across systems, cataloging it, cleaning it, securing it, and making it usable for everything from compliance reporting to machine learning. It is precisely this functionality that Salesforce now sees as essential to making its AI ambitions real.

“Truly autonomous, trustworthy AI agents need the most comprehensive understanding of their data,” said Steve Fisher, Salesforce’s president and chief technology officer, in the company’s statement. “The combination of Informatica’s advanced catalog and metadata capabilities with our Agentforce platform delivers exactly this.”

Salesforce launched Agentforce earlier this year as a generative AI platform aimed at automating enterprise tasks, everything from screening job candidates to assisting customers in service centers. The company has signed more than 1,000 paid customer deals for Agentforce so far. But its success depends on more than sophisticated AI models. Agents can only make decisions as well as the data they’re given and for many companies, that data remains fragmented, outdated, and difficult to interpret.

That’s the problem Informatica was built to solve.

Founded in 1993, Informatica helps enterprises unify and govern their data across complex environments. Its platform includes tools for data integration, quality, privacy, and compliance, and is used by over 80% of the Fortune 100. At the center of its approach is metadata information about data that tells systems how to interpret it. Informatica’s metadata engine, powered by its proprietary CLAIRE AI, automatically classifies and connects data from different sources, giving enterprises a clearer and more actionable understanding of what they have.

CLAIRE also supports low-code and no-code tools, allowing business users without programming expertise to manage and use data independently. Combined with consumption-based pricing and modular services such as data cataloging and engineering pipelines, Informatica allows for tailored deployments across enterprises of varying maturity.

Salesforce’s own stack, built through years of acquisitions, MuleSoft, Tableau, Slack has historically struggled with exactly that problem. While the company has invested heavily in building its Data Cloud into a centralized platform for customer data, much of its architecture still reflects the complexity of integrating multiple legacy systems. Informatica provides not only the technology, but the maturity and scale to help cleanly connect those layers.

“Together, Salesforce and Informatica will create the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry,” said Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, in the acquisition announcement. “We will enable autonomous agents to deliver smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes for every company.”

This isn’t Salesforce’s first attempt to buy Informatica. The two companies held discussions last year about a potential deal valued closer to $11 billion, but those talks fell apart over disagreements on pricing and terms. At the time, Informatica shares were trading closer to $40. This time around, Salesforce is acquiring the company at a discount—but the strategic intent remains largely the same.

For Salesforce, the timing is critical. After a period of scrutiny from activist investors in 2023 and 2024, Benioff had stepped back from large acquisitions to focus on profitability. But the competitive pressure in enterprise AI has accelerated. Rivals including Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Amazon are moving quickly to build tightly integrated AI platforms, many of them anchored in proprietary data architectures. Salesforce, by contrast, has relied more on partnerships than ownership.

This acquisition changes that.

“Think about it as the toolset to jump-start their data cloud operations,” said Ted Mortonson, technology desk strategist at Baird, speaking to Fortune. “They’re getting control over the pipes and plumbing of data which they didn’t build themselves.”

Salesforce’s plan is to integrate Informatica’s tooling directly into its AI and data stack specifically, Agentforce, Data Cloud, MuleSoft, and Tableau. That integration is expected to give Salesforce customers a more consistent, trustworthy data layer that supports both generative and predictive AI use cases. Informatica’s capabilities in master data management and automated data quality could also help Salesforce address technical debt in older customer deployments, many of which aren’t currently equipped to run advanced AI features.

“Data management software is now most often sold as part of mega-vendor tool kits,” analysts at Scotiabank noted in a research note on the acquisition. “This could help Salesforce close competitive gaps with other large platform providers.”

Informatica CEO Amit Walia called the deal “a powerful next chapter” for the company, adding that the combined platform would “deliver a complete, end-to-end solution with integrated AI-powered data management across any cloud or hybrid environment.” In a post on LinkedIn, Walia emphasized that demand for clean, governed data is only increasing as enterprises look to scale AI responsibly.

Salesforce isn’t alone in that realization. As AI adoption moves beyond experimentation and into mission-critical workflows, companies are beginning to understand that the most advanced models are only as good as the data that feeds them. In that sense, Informatica doesn’t just provide infrastructure but also credibility.

Wall Street’s reaction was cautiously optimistic. Salesforce shares rose more than 1% on Tuesday, closing at $273.68. Informatica’s stock climbed more than 6%. Analysts say the deal gives Salesforce an edge, though some questioned Informatica’s recent underperformance. The company missed earnings expectations in two of the last three quarters, and growth has been slower compared to peers.

Still, the underlying rationale for the acquisition appears sound. As Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, told Fortune, “Informatica is a gold mine of data. Salesforce is acquiring data, the customer base, and the ability to cross-sell. And in the AI revolution, data is king.”

Informatica has missed earnings expectations in recent quarters, and Salesforce’s stock is still down about 16% year-to-date. Some investors remain skeptical of CEO Benioff’s return to big-ticket acquisitions after a recent stretch of cost-cutting under pressure from activist shareholders.

“They have not delivered as a stand-alone company,” Ted Mortonson said of Informatica. “Why now, and why this much?”