Salesforce’s return to large-scale acquisitions follows a period of restraint triggered by activist investor pressure in 2023, which emphasised profitability over aggressive growth.
The cloud software company, Salesforce has announced its plans to acquire cloud data management company Informatica in a deal valued at approximately $8 billion, marking a major strategic move to solidify its position in the competitive enterprise AI landscape.
The acquisition represents Salesforce’s most significant purchase since it acquired Slack Technologies for $27.7 billion in 2021.
Under the terms of the agreement, Salesforce will pay $25 per share in cash for Informatica’s outstanding Class A and Class B-1 common stock—a roughly 30% premium over Informatica’s share price before news of the renewed talks emerged last week.
Informatica shareholders representing about 63% of the voting power have already approved the deal, which is expected to close early in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027.
Informatica offers a suite of tools for data integration, governance, privacy, quality, metadata management, and master data management (MDM). These capabilities will be integrated into Salesforce’s broader platform to support the company’s push into agentic AI-powered systems that can act autonomously across business functions.
The acquisition is seen as a pivotal step in Salesforce’s strategy to offer enterprise clients AI solutions that are secure, reliable, and scalable.
By embedding Informatica’s technology within Salesforce’s ecosystem—including its Data Cloud, MuleSoft, Tableau, and the emerging Agentforce platform—the company aims to build a unified system that allows AI agents to act on enterprise data with full contextual awareness, regulatory compliance, and governance.
Agentforce, Salesforce’s virtual AI representative product, has already secured over 1,000 paid enterprise deals. The addition of Informatica’s tools is expected to enhance the product’s ability to automate routine workflows in areas like customer service and recruitment without human supervision.
Salesforce’s return to large-scale acquisitions follows a period of restraint triggered by activist investor pressure in 2023, which emphasised profitability over aggressive growth. The firm’s leadership has described this acquisition as a methodical and strategic investment in the future of AI-powered enterprise services.
Informatica’s technology will also enhance Salesforce’s Data Cloud by improving clarity and trust in enterprise data, a growing necessity as generative AI becomes more deeply embedded into business processes.
In parallel, Tableau’s analytics will gain from richer metadata context, and MuleSoft’s API ecosystem will benefit from better data standardisation and quality control.
The deal is expected to strengthen Salesforce’s position in a data enterprise market that analysts estimate is worth over $150 billion. As more AI capabilities are bundled into enterprise software offerings, Salesforce appears poised to compete more aggressively with rivals offering comprehensive data-to-AI platforms.
Informatica, which went public again in 2021, has seen its stock decline significantly over the past year amid heightened competition. The deal valued the company at a time when its market cap had fallen to about $7.2 billion, down from a peak of $11.5 billion.
