Matt Aslett's Analyst Perspectives

I have previously explained how increased enterprise focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic AI is a forcing function for enterprises to take long-overdue steps to improve data management and data governance. Data is integral to AI: large volumes of data are required to train models, while data freshness is important for inferencing in interactive applications and data quality is fundamental to ensuring that the output of agentic and generative AI (GenAI) initiatives can be relied upon. Poor data management can therefore be an impediment to AI. While AI-ready data is clean, well-organized and compliant with regulatory standards, too many enterprises find themselves struggling with data that is fragmented, inconsistent and not easily accessible. As such, even if enterprises have proven the value of AI with small-scale initiatives, we see many choosing to take one step back to take two steps forward by pausing to improve data management and data governance with a view to subsequently accelerate large-scale strategic adoption of AI. This is the backdrop to the recent announcement that Salesforce has inked a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica for approximately $8 billion. Salesforce was founded in 1999 with an initial focus on sales and customer service software delivered as-a-service. The company now offers a suite of software that addresses sales, service, marketing, commerce and customer relationship management (CRM), as well as associated data management, integration and AI, and has been at the forefront of promoting the use of agentic AI to automate and accelerate business processes. In addition to internal research and development, Salesforce has made numerous acquisitions to expand its portfolio, including Slack for collaboration, Tableau for analytics and MuleSoft for application and data integration and the management of application programming interfaces. The breadth and depth of Salesforce’s portfolio is highlighted by the company having been evaluated in no fewer than 32 different ISG Buyers Guide reports in 2024, including those focused on enterprise applications as well as analytics, data and AI. Informatica was founded in 1993 and helped establish the market for extract, transformation and load tooling before expanding its focus to address wider data integration and data management challenges. Informatica has evolved its product portfolio to address subscription-based licensing and cloud-based consumption in recent years with its Intelligent Data Management Cloud driven by its CLAIRE AI capabilities. However, as I recently explained, a substantial proportion of the company’s revenue remains driven by on-premises deployment. Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud addresses data integration, data cataloging and metadata management, data engineering, application integration, data quality and observability, master data management (MDM), data sharing and data governance. The company was rated as Exemplary in 11 different ISG Buyers Guide reports addressing these product areas in 2024, in addition to Product Experience Management, Product Information Management, and PIM for Manufacturing in 2025. Acquiring Informatica will significantly enhance Salesforce’s capabilities for data management and governance. Given the scale of Salesforce’s agentic AI ambitions, the potential for Informatica to provide a data foundation to complement Salesforce’s agentic AI capabilities was naturally front and center of the acquisition announcement. Agentic AI requires data infrastructure and operations capabilities that are agile and adaptive to technology and business change, as well as automated and active to reduce manual processes and drive business impact and are also part of the agentic process. Salesforce already offers Data Cloud to enable its customers to unify and integrate data in support of its applications and Agentforce AI platform, but the depth and breadth of Informatica’s portfolio adds capabilities for taking advantage of non-Salesforce data, as well data governance, data quality, data lineage, data privacy and MDM capabilities that will be essential in enhancing trust in agentic AI models and applications. In our ISG Market Lens study on GenAI, 39% of participants cited data privacy and security among the biggest inhibitors to adopting AI. While the product portfolios are largely complementary, the acquisition will not be without its challenges. The two companies are primarily targeting two distinct sets of users with different requirements, and Informatica remains in the process of transitioning its customer base away from on-premises deployment and traditional software licensing to subscription licensing and as-a-service consumption. As such, we anticipate that Informatica will continue to operate independently for a considerable period post-acquisition. The complementary nature of the product portfolios suggests opportunities for cross-selling. This is theoretically true, but it will not be easy. I am confident that the proportion of the combined customer base that has not already made substantial investments in both enterprise software and data management is small. Any cross-selling opportunities will therefore likely involve complex migration projects from alternative products. There is also some overlap between the Informatica and MuleSoft product lines, although in announcing the deal, Salesforce pointed to the potential for Informatica’s data quality, integration, cataloging and governance capabilities to complement MuleSoft’s application integration and API management capabilities. We assert that by 2027, more than one-half of enterprises will use governance tools to ensure their agentic AI and GenAI efforts are in compliance with regulations and internal policies. The theoretical logic of combining Salesforce and Informatica’s portfolios is therefore clear. As with any acquisition of this scale, execution will have a significant role to play in making those theoretical benefits a reality. There will be a lot of work to be done to integrate the people, products and cultures of Salesforce and Informatica. As such, it will be some time before we begin to see the results. Indeed, it will be a long time before Salesforce can even get started on its integration effort. The deal is currently expected to close early in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027, which begins February 1, 2026. The two companies will continue to operate as standalone entities until then. As such, I recommend that enterprises continue to include both Salesforce and Informatica in their evaluations of providers for analytics, data and AI products for the foreseeable future. Regards, Matt Aslett

Matt Aslett's Analyst Perspectives

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