Confirming recent reports, Salesforce Inc. today announced plans to buy Informatica Inc. in an $8 billion deal.

The acquisition price includes Salesforce’s existing stake in Informatica. The latter company’s investors are set to receive $25 per share. According to Salesforce, stockholders with 63% of the voting power in Informatica have committed to approving the deal. 

Word of the acquisition first emerged last April. At the time, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Salesforce had offered to buy Informatica for about $10 billion. The cloud giant reportedly shelved the offer shortly thereafter, but restarted acquisition discussions earlier this year.

“The price is way better than the original $10 billion Salesforce was willing to pay,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at theCUBE Research. “And Informatica did a good job when they went private in improving its margin profile — so Salesforce will be able to make this acquisition accretive in the near future.”

Informatica sells one of the industry’s most popular ETL, or extract/transform/load, platforms. Companies use the software to move data between applications. One of the tasks that the platform can ease is the process of loading records from third-party systems into Salesforce.

“Salesforce and Informatica have had a well-established partnership that enables their joint customers to synchronize data across various applications seamlessly,” said SiliconANGLE founder and co-CEO John Furrier. “The collaboration, now acquisition, helps in integrating Salesforce with third-party applications using Informatica’s robust data management platform.”

Informatica provides its core ETL feature set alongside other capabilities. Companies can use the company’s platform to find quality issues in their datasets, delete unnecessary file copies and perform related tasks. Informatica says that its installed base includes more than 5,000 organizations worldwide.

Salesforce will use the company’s technology to enhance its Agentforce platform. Introduced last year, Agentforce provides artificial intelligence agents that can automate tasks such as answering customer support inquires. It also includes a tool that allows organizations to build their own custom AI agents.

According to Salesforce, Informatica’s ability to retrieve data from external systems will help Agentforce AI agents find the information they require to answer user questions. The company also sees other benefits. Informatica’s platform collects metadata about the records that it processes including where those records were originally stored, how they changed and how they’re used. This metadata can help AI agents more accurately interpret the information they process.

Salesforce will also integrate Informatica’s technology with its Data Cloud. Similarly to ETL tools, the latter platform enables applications to access data stored in external systems. The difference is that Data Cloud processes information with a method known as zero copy. According to Salesforce, this approach removes the need to create a copy of records before sharing them between applications, which is a requirement in standard ETL workflows.

“The purchase of Informatica by Salesforce not only expands its Data Cloud capabilities and provides another revenue source but also helps it move outside its walled garden,” said theCUBE Research Managing Director and Principal Analyst Rob Strechay. “This is probably the most significant data platform enhancing acquisition of the year, giving Salesforce, with prior acquisition MuleSoft, a significant capability to map, use, gather and, when needed, move data and metadata that will be so critical to AI agent building.”

Salesforce plans to finance the acquisition with a combination of cash on hand and new debt. The deal is expected to close early in the company’s 2027 fiscal year, which will start next February. 

“It makes financial sense for Salesforce shareholders as Salesforce trades at circa 50% premium to Informatica at all key metrics, EV/revenues, EV/EBITDA and EV/free-cashflow,” said Martin Balaam, CEO of product information management company Pimberly Software Development Ltd. “With Salesforce’s revenue being 20x that of Informatica you would expect this deal to be accretive to shareholders from the get-go.”

Photo: Salesforce