Salesforce Doubles Down on Data

A Strategic Data & AI Move

On May 27, 2025, Salesforce announced it would acquire Informatica for $25 per share in cash, valuing the deal at $8 billion and reflecting a 30 percent premium to its recent trading price. Marc Benioff called the move a foundation for “the most complete, agent-ready data platform.” The acquisition gives Salesforce a full data management suite, including integration, governance, metadata, and MDM, fully embedded into its platform. The goal is to power AI agents and analytics with trusted, unified enterprise data.

Founded in 1993, Informatica is a pioneer in enterprise data integration, probably best known for its tools in ETL, data quality, governance, and master data management. Or simply tools to help companies move, clean, organize, and control their data. After going public in 1999, it was taken private in 2015 by Permira and CPPIB to modernize for the cloud, then re-listed in 2021. At its peak, Informatica reached a ~$10B market cap, but by early 2025, it had declined to ~$6B as growth slowed. Salesforce is acquiring the company for ~$8B (net of its existing stake), with the deal expected to close by early 2026.

The Data Stack Land Grab

Salesforce’s Informatica buy is likely understood as part of a land grab for the modern data stack, a competitive positioning to own the pipes, storage, and presentation of enterprise data in the AI era. Over the past few years, Salesforce has been no stranger to strategic M&A and has steadily assembled key pieces of the data stack through major acquisitions, effectively building an in-house ecosystem to rival those of platform competitors like Microsoft, Oracle, and emerging data cloud players. Below is a selection of Salesforce’s major M&A deals:

Mulesoft (Integrations), 2018, $6.5B - API integration & connectivity

“Integration cloud” connecting Salesforce to disparate enterprise apps and hybrid cloud environments. Enabled customers to link on-prem and cloud systems, feeding Salesforce’s Customer 360 with external data.

Tableau (Analytics), 2019, $15.7B (all-stock) - Business intelligence & data visualization

Leading self-service BI platform for analytics and visualization. Filled a major gap by allowing Salesforce users to analyze and visualize data (beyond CRM reports), strengthening Salesforce’s Customer 360 and analytics capabilities (against Microsoft Power BI).

Slack (Collaboration), 2021, $27.7B - Team collaboration & workflow

Enterprise messaging platform with ~$900M revenue at acquisition. Provided a user interface layer for collaboration and workflow (“Slack-first Customer 360”), embedding Salesforce data and alerts into everyday work conversations. Intended to increase user engagement and serve as an interface for notifications, AI alerts, and agent interactions.

Informatica (Data mgmt.), 2025, $8.0B - Data integration, quality, MDM, governance

Comprehensive data management suite (ETL, data catalog, MDM, data quality) spanning multi-cloud and on-prem data. Will unify and clean data across sources into Salesforce’s Data Cloud, ensuring trustworthy data for all Salesforce apps and AI/analytics. Brings 5,000+ enterprise customers and ~$1.66B in ARR in an adjacent market.

Salesforce’s strategy here is clear: own the core layers of the data stack that enterprises need for digital transformation and AI, rather than relying on third-party integrations. Prior to this deal, Salesforce offered applications (CRM, Service, Marketing) and had added integration (MuleSoft), analytics (Tableau), and collaboration (Slack) to its arsenal. What was missing was a best-in-class data management and integration layer to ingest, unify, and govern data at scale, precisely the role Informatica will fill. As one analysis put it, Salesforce is effectively uniting its operational CRM data with Informatica’s data plumbing to create an end-to-end “AI-data platform”. This positions Salesforce to compete more directly with platforms like Microsoft, which offers its own full-stack (Azure data services + Power BI + Dynamics 365 + Teams), and with Snowflake or Databricks, which have become titans of the modern data stack but lack Salesforce’s application layer and business user interface.

Importantly, Informatica gives Salesforce a stronger play in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Informatica’s tools are cloud-agnostic and connect to AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem databases, and more. Acquiring Informatica means Salesforce can sit at the center of a customer’s entire data estate - not just Salesforce’s proprietary data. This is a defensive move, too: independent data integration vendors (Informatica, Talend, etc.) have been neutral players in feeding data to Snowflake, Azure, or others. Now that Salesforce owns Informatica, it could tilt the balance. Salesforce insists it will continue investing in Informatica’s multi-cloud support and partner ecosystem, but over time Salesforce can ensure Data Cloud becomes the preferred destination for customer data unified by Informatica. In essence, Salesforce is grabbing land in the data layer that every AI-enabled enterprise will need, hoping to become the default “system of record + system of intelligence” for customer data.

Another lens on this land grab is revenue diversification and scale. Informatica generates approximately $1.64 billion in annual revenue (FY2024), with a significant portion recurring, and serves over 5,000 customers, including numerous Fortune 500 companies. Salesforce is effectively expanding its total addressable market by entering the data infrastructure business in a big way. It’s reminiscent of how Adobe acquired Marketo and Magento to broaden beyond content into marketing and e-commerce data, or how IBM built its stack via dozens of data tool acquisitions. With this deal, Salesforce can now sell to CIOs and data engineers, not just sales and marketing departments, by offering a complete data stack solution (integration + storage + analysis + AI + engagement). Notably, Informatica’s cloud subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew 34% year-over-year to $827M in 2024, indicating strong demand for its cloud-native services even as its overall growth was modest (total revenue up ~2.8% in 2024). Salesforce likely sees upside in accelerating that cloud growth further through its distribution engine.

An Infrastructure Play: Fueling Einstein GPT and Agentforce

Beyond the land grab, the Informatica deal is fundamentally an AI infrastructure play. If generative AI is the new electricity of enterprise software, then data is the wiring and plumbing that makes it usable. Salesforce has been touting its Einstein GPT (generative AI features across its apps) and the concept of Agentforce (autonomous AI agents acting on Salesforce data). To make these AI copilots and agents truly effective, Salesforce needs clean, well-structured, and context-rich data flowing through its systems. Informatica provides exactly that plumbing:

In summary, Informatica gives Salesforce the data plumbing and purification system that turns its generative AI vision into a practical reality. Clean, governed data is the bedrock of AI success - without it, AI features can hallucinate, misinform, or violate compliance. With it, Salesforce can deliver AI copilots and agents that enterprise customers actually trust. This deal underscores a broader truth in the AI race: winners will be those who control not just AI algorithms, but the quality of data feeding those algorithms. As one SaaStr analysis succinctly put it, Salesforce paid $8B in large part for “AI infrastructure credibility - clean data is the foundation for reliable AI agents”.

Financials and Valuation: Discipline in a Frothy Market

From a financial perspective, Salesforce appears to be exercising relative price discipline with the Informatica acquisition – a notable shift from some of its past deals. At $8.0B for ~$1.64B in trailing revenue, Salesforce is paying roughly 4.8x revenue (or about 5× ARR) for Informatica. This is a far cry from the double-digit multiples Salesforce shelled out for Tableau and Slack during the 2019–2021 boom. For example, the $15.7B Tableau deal equated to about 13x Tableau’s annual revenue (~$1.4B), and the $27.7B Slack deal was roughly 30x Slack’s ~$900M revenue at the time. Even MuleSoft in 2018 went for ~16–20× forward sales by most estimates. In contrast, Informatica at <5× sales reflects the new reality of 2025: software valuations have normalized as growth rates cooled and interest rates rose (the “COVID premium evaporated,” as SaaStr noted).

Why the lower multiple? First, Informatica’s growth has been modest recently – only ~2.8% revenue growth in FY2024, as the legacy on-prem business shrank while cloud ARR grew. Salesforce is effectively betting that it can accelerate Informatica’s growth again by integrating it into Salesforce’s go-to-market and bundling it with AI offerings. Second, the market in 2024–2025 has been tough on all mid-cap enterprise software stocks, which presented Salesforce a window to buy below Informatica’s peak valuation. Indeed, $25/share is about 9% below Informatica’s 2021 IPO price ($27.55) and ~20% below its all-time high, despite the company’s transition to SaaS and improved profitability. Salesforce essentially saved over $2B versus what Informatica might have cost a year prior, thanks to that 59% drop from the 2024 failed talks to now. This lends credence to Salesforce CFO Robin Washington’s comment that the deal was pursued with “financial discipline” under Salesforce’s “responsible M&A framework”.

One wildcard is how Salesforce accounts for and integrates the high-margin maintenance revenue from Informatica’s legacy on-prem customers. This revenue has been flat or declining, but very profitable, something the previous PE owners managed carefully. Salesforce might choose to continue servicing those customers on existing terms (a steady cash cow) while upselling them to cloud versions and AI features over time. The revenue synergy potential is also notable: Salesforce can bundle Informatica’s capabilities into its products (potentially boosting Salesforce product prices or Data Cloud adoption) and vice versa. For instance, a Salesforce customer using Einstein AI might now be pitched on an Informatica data quality add-on to improve their AI results.

Like with most strategic M&A, investor reaction to the deal will ultimately hinge on execution. In the past, Salesforce’s big acquisitions sometimes raised eyebrows on price, e.g., Salesforce’s stock dipped 5% when Tableau was announced and similarly for Slack, but those deals were seen as long-term strategic wins. This time, the price tag is more digestible, the acquired company is more mature and directly tied to the red-hot AI narrative, which investors are enthusiastic about. Early commentary suggests the strategic fit is strong: Salesforce is buying a mature business with a unique asset (enterprise data management platform) that fills a gap in its portfolio and is immediately relevant to AI, the biggest theme in tech. As one article put it, “Salesforce’s offer fell below Informatica’s market price at the time [in 2024 talks]” but now they are acquiring it after the valuation reset, indicating Salesforce drove a hard bargain. The deal is expected to close in Salesforce’s FY2027, and how smoothly integration goes (and how quickly AI-driven growth materializes) will determine if this $8B bet truly pays off.

The Takeaway

If Salesforce executes well, this combined entity could set a new standard for what the “enterprise data stack” means: not a warehouse or a CRM, but a seamlessly integrated fabric that connects data from every source to every insight and action, with native AI at its core. The risks are non-trivial, of course, but the rationale is compelling. In the words of a Salesforce insider, this move “delivers a complete, end-to-end platform” for connecting, managing, and unifying data across any environment, exactly what’s needed to make AI truly transformative.