As the dust begins to settle from last week’s announcement that Salesforce Inc. will acquire data integration market leader Informatica Inc. in a deal valued at $8 billion, Informatica Chief Executive Amit Walia called the move the beginning of a new round of growth for his company rather than an endpoint.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Walia (pictured) framed the acquisition as complementary for both companies, leveraging Salesforce’s scale and global reach to expand Informatica’s market opportunities while fueling Salesforce’s ambitions to become a leader in agentic artificial intelligence.

Walia said the deal solidified a longstanding collaboration between the two companies, adding that Salesforce has been a customer and a partner of Informatica. “We’re partners, so we know each other’s value and strength,” he said. “It all just came together at the right time.”

Walia wouldn’t comment on the acquisition timeline or how the merged organization will look, noting that such details are still in the discussion phase. He rejected the notion that Informatica’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings miss, which sent the stock down by one-third, had any bearing on the deal.

“Our last earnings were terrific,” he said, citing 30% growth in Informatica’s cloud business, “We exceeded all metrics toward the high end.” He cited strong attendance and engagement at the company’s recent Informatica World conference as further evidence of momentum.

Walia said Salesforce saw Informatica’s platform as essential to enabling its AI strategies, which requires a strong data foundation. “There is no AI without data,” he said. “You’ve got to feed the right quality data and govern the agent. That’s what we do.”

1+1=3

He said Informatica’s data integration, quality, governance, cataloging and master data management tools complement the capabilities Salesforce currently lacks. At the same time, joining Salesforce accelerates Informatica’s ability to deliver its capabilities to more customers, especially in regions where Salesforce already has infrastructure and regulatory clearance.

“They have global availability of cloud infrastructure and are in every country,” he said. “For me to go into the next 20 countries would require a lot of scaling up.”

Though Salesforce doesn’t disclose the number of sales representatives and employees, Walia said the company’s impressive enterprise reach should deliver immediate benefits.

“In one day, every Salesforce rep can put us in front of their customer,” he said. “That kind of scale is so hard to get for us.” He also praised Salesforce’s ability to preserve and grow the companies it acquires, citing examples such as MuleSoft Inc. and Tableau Inc., both of which have continued to grow as subsidiaries.

Salesforce already has a data integration business it acquired with MuleSoft in 2018, but Walia said the overlap is minimal. While both firms appear in the same industry categories, he said Informatica focuses more on data integration while MuleSoft emphasizes application integration. “We rarely end up in the same deal,” he said.

Walia said the response he’s received from Informatica’s customers and partners has been overwhelmingly positive. “They see the validation of Informatica, the validation of the scale we have, the validation of the AI chops we have,” he said. Global systems integrators, in particular, see additional opportunity in the combined offering, he said.

Although most details have still to be worked out, Walia said Informatica unequivocally intends to maintain its neutrality in the data ecosystem. “We will continue to support all ecosystems, all data formats, all data types,” he said.

Photo: Informatica