After balking at a rumored $11 billion acquisition of Informatica last summer, Salesforce entered an agreement to acquire the data management company for $8 billion Tuesday.
Informatica's data management tools and Intelligent Data Management Cloud will combine with Salesforce's Data Cloud, MuleSoft and Tableau to enable more scalable AI automations, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement.
Informatica's advanced catalog and metadata capabilities will make Salesforce AI agents more autonomous and trustworthy, added Steve Fisher, president and chief technology officer at Salesforce.
Salesforce said the deal will close early in its fiscal year 2027, which begins in February 2026. This is the CRM giant's second planned acquisition this month, as it also entered an agreement to acquire Convergence.ai's agentic web tools.
Informatica is known as best-of-breed for master data management, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir.
Everybody's going to need data from outside CRM to effectively run AI agents.
Rebecca WettemannFounder, Valoir
At a product roadmap session during its user conference earlier this month, Informatica said it planned to add agentic AI to its Claire lineup of generative AI tools. Informatica has also long built integrations between its tools and the Salesforce platform.
Salesforce Data Cloud underpins Agentforce, the company's autonomous AI platform. Informatica's data management tools will add capabilities to Data Cloud.
"[Informatica] adds data governance. It adds agent orchestration," Wettemann said. "Everybody's going to need data from outside CRM to effectively run AI agents, whether it's availability to promise [delivery] with supply chain and ERP data, or it's understanding things like 'Does this customer pay their bills on time?'"
Salesforce (San Francisco headquarters shown here) is back to its acquisitive ways after taking some time off.
In April, it was widely reported that Salesforce and Informatica engaged in acquisition talks, but Salesforce walked away because the deal was priced too high. Share prices are down this year, with Informatica sliding from a peak near $40 at that time to below $25, the price at which Salesforce agreed to purchase the company.
While it might be tempting to view the acquisition of Informatica as somewhat redundant with pieces of MuleSoft -- acquired in 2018 for $6.5 billion -- that would be oversimplifying things, Wettemann said.
Informatica's data management tools act like "the cross-cloud Switzerland of data," she said. It gives Salesforce users access to a host of sophisticated tools that can enable Salesforce AI agents to maintain privacy and data access rules as they crawl an organization's data stores for information to automate business processes.
"It's not the first time that Salesforce has gone aggressive in a particular area where it was developing organically, and then bought something to fill in the edges," Wettemann said. "They did it for analytics with Tableau. They did it for collaboration with Slack."
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
