Salesforce To Buy Informatica: 5 Things To Know

“If you control the data, you control the workload,” says Bill Karpovich, CEO of Salesforce partner Synaptic.

Salesforce’s announced acquisition plans for data management vendor Informatica is receiving praise by some partners as the customer relationship management company doubles down on data and prepares for software-as-a-service in the era of artificial intelligence agents.

The San Francisco-based CRM and AI vendor confirmed the Informatica deal the day before its latest quarterly earnings report. The acquisition should close in early 2026.

Bill Karpovich, CEO of Baltimore-based Salesforce partner Synaptic, told CRN in an interview that the acquisition reflects Salesforce doubling down on data, even with organic investment in research and development and success in its MuleSoft subsidiary.

Salesforce Buys Informatica

“If you control the data, you control the workload,” Karpovich said. “This really reinforces the portfolio and makes it really clear that the success of AI is going to be largely dependent on the success of your data strategy.”

Salesforce appears to be getting a good deal on Informatica at $25 per share, about 33 percent above share trading before the rumors broke Friday, according to a Tuesday William Blair report. When rumors of a deal emerged last year, Informatica stock traded at $38 a share.

“The deal is being completed roughly 30% below April 2024 levels, which shows some price discipline from Salesforce in our view,” according to the report.

The deal could see cost synergies between 15 percent and 20 percent for Salesforce, according to a Wedbush report Tuesday. The acquisition will boost Salesforce’s ability to leverage data across multiple systems for AI plus create new cross-selling opportunities across the install bases for partners of either vendor.

The vendor’s channel chief revealed to CRN that efforts to grow Salesforce’s partner ecosystem have resulted in reaching about 16,000 partners, 9,000 of them in consulting—more than 30 percent growth in total partners and around 50 percent growth in consulting partners compared with last summer.

Here’s more of what the Informatica deal means to Salesforce, its partners and the AI industry overall.

Salesforce Partners Praise Deal

Karpovich said he looks forward to hearing about how much of the 5,000-plus Informatica customer base is shared with Salesforce compared to how many of the customers are new selling opportunities for the vendor and its partners.

Karpovich told CRN that Salesforce has improved over the years on how it integrates acquisitions into the portfolio, giving partners more of a unified platform angle in customer conversations.

“The more we can simplify and unify and aggregate data assets, then that's going to really play … into building these agentic workflows because they all require quality data,” he said.

Andrew Foerster, vice president of data platforms and solutions at Bozeman, Mont.-based Salesforce partner Atrium, told CRN that the acquisition will make Salesforce the industry’s most robust “AI data factory” by unifying disparate enterprise data.

“This acquisition adds a significant component to the Salesforce platform that every modern data platform needs to unleash trusted, context-rich intelligence directly into every AI agent and customer interaction on the Salesforce platform,” Foerster said in an email to CRN.

Technology artificial intelligence digital ai hand concept on cyber future business tech science innovation futuristic network strategy background virtual data communication learning assistant search.

SaaS In The Agentic AI Era

The Informatica deal comes as vendors, analysts and partners debate what software-as-a-service (SaaS) looks like once agents have reached mass adoption.

Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella–whose vendor competes with Salesforce in customer relationship management software (CRM) with its Dynamics product and competes with Salesforce collaboration subsidiary Slack with Microsoft Teams–has said in interviews that agents will interact with SaaS databases instead of humans.

And ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has suggested that his company is growing in the CRM space perhaps because AI agents allow for faster horizontal advancement of technology platforms, allowing ServiceNow–perhaps better known for help desk tools–to spread into CRM.

Salesforce partner Karpovich told CRN that adding Informatica to the Salesforce portfolio brings the latter into the next era of SaaS. “If you can own that data plane, then your cloud is going to survive and just evolve in terms of how the workflows get done,” he said. “This is a net positive for the ecosystem.”

Part of Salesforce’s pitch on buying Informatica is leveraging the latter’s data catalog, integration, governance, quality and privacy–plus its metadata management and master data management (MDM) services–to build a unified agentic AI architecture for safe, responsible agent use at enterprise scale.

Salesforce Returns To M&A Spree?

The Informatica deal is the fifth “meaningful” transaction since the start of 2024 after a break in acquisitions in 2023, according to William Blair’s Tuesday report.

The break came after a group of activist investors targeted Salesforce and potential successors to Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff–Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield–departed the vendor. Salesforce’s total market value in 2022 went from $250.3 billion at the start of the year to $132.6 billion by year’s end.

The vendor’s return to M&A saw Salesforce buy Spiff for about $400 million in early 2024, Zoomin for about the same amount toward the end of the year, Own for about $2.1 billion around the same time as the Zoomin deal and, finally, Salesforce announced plans to buy Convergence.ai this year for an unknown amount.

While Salesforce has been criticized in the past for buying companies for revenue boosts, the Informatica deal appears to mostly help on data and AI capability advancement, according to the investment firm. Informatica is expected to generate $1.7 billion in revenue in 2025, growing 3 percent year over year. Subscription revenue of $1.2 billion only represents about 10 percent growth year over year.

“Informatica is essentially a way for Salesforce to provide its customers the pipes to get more data into Salesforce (complementing MuleSoft’s API platform) and then better organize the data, so AI agents built on Agentforce are powered by a comprehensive set of enterprise data,” according to the firm.

The Informatica deal could be the start of more M&A as Salesforce’s leadership expands “their breadth, data foundation, and Agentic AI strategy as the company heads into FY26 & beyond,” according to Wedbush.

Informatica brings a base of more than 5,000 customers plus about 2,500 cloud subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR) customers, according to Wedbush.

Legacy Systems Access

Initial investor reaction to the deal was negative–Salesforce shares were still down about 1 percent from when news of a potential deal broke Friday.

But the strategic benefit from owning Informatica and its capabilities in the extract, transform, load (ETL) data integration process is in deeper access to data housed in legacy sources and homegrown systems, according to a Tuesday report by KeyBanc.

“Getting after (this) more legacy data is a job possibly more suited to an ETL vendor, and Salesforce is making a play to speed up this data movement by bringing the technology under its own roof,” according to the report.

Project managers work with Gantt chart tables to plan weekly work and deliverables, schedule software activities, planning, and corporate strategy for finance, operations, sales, and marketing.

Cross-Sell, Up-Sell Potential

Cross-selling has been an important measurement for Salesforce executives on quarterly earnings calls, with the vendor often reporting how many of its cloud products are involved in its top deals.

During the vendor’s most recent quarterly earnings call, executives revealed that the top 100 deals in the quarter averaged six clouds. And the 3,000-plus paid Agentforce customers averaged about four clouds during the quarter.

Deloitte Salesforce specialist leader Dev Prakash pointed out a variety of areas where Salesforce and Informatica overlap in a LinkedIn post after Salesforce confirmed the Informatica deal.

Prakash warned that MuleSoft and Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) overlap in a variety of areas, including data integration, batch processing and data governance–with Informatica more mature in the governance category.

AThe two vendors could also run into technical challenges integrating Salesforce’s Einstein AI and Agentforce AI agent building platform with Informatica’s Claire AI engine.

Informatica has also historically been platform agnostic, managing data across cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

“Salesforce's stated intention to ‘seamlessly embed’ Informatica into its ecosystem raises critical questions,” Prakash said. “Will Informatica's tools become so tightly coupled with Salesforce that they lose cross-platform flexibility (and) how will existing customers in healthcare, finance, and other regulated industries react to potential vendor lock-in? … This acquisition represents Salesforce's bold attempt to navigate the rapidly rising AI tide. It's a calculated maneuver to construct a seamless, intelligent data foundation essential for its ambitious ‘agentic AI’ vision.”