Salesforce to buy Informatica for $8 billion

“Together, Salesforce and Informatica will create the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Salesforce is acquiring cloud data management star Informatica for $8 billion in a move to create the top AI data platform company in the world with a focus on agentic AI, says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Salesforce and Informatica announced this morning that they had signed a definitive agreement for the deal. The acquisition is expected to close early in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027, which begins Feb. 1, 2027.

“Together, Salesforce and Informatica will create the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry,” said Benioff in a statement today.

“By uniting the power of Data Cloud, MuleSoft, and Tableau with Informatica’s industry-leading, advanced data management capabilities, we will enable autonomous agents to deliver smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes for every company, and significantly strengthen our position in the $150 billion-plus enterprise data market,” Benioff said.

Upon close of the acquisition, Salesforce plans to rapidly integrate Informatica’s technology stack — including data integration, data quality, data governance, and unified metadata for Agentforce, and a single data pipeline with Master Data Management (MDM) on Data Cloud.

The acquisition aims to enhance Salesforce’s data foundation for deploying powerful and responsible agentic AI. The combination of Informatica’s data catalogue, data integration, data governance and privacy, data quality, metadata management, and MDM services with the Salesforce platform will create a unified architecture for agentic AI, the company said.

If the deal closes, it would mark Salesforce’s biggest purchase since its roughly $28 billion acquisition of Slack Technologies in 2021.

Informatica CEO On ‘Powerful’ Next Chapter

Informatica CEO Amit Walia said today’s merger announcement marks the next “powerful” chapter for his company.

“We are committed to continuing our strategy of building best-in-class, AI-powered data management products—delivering a complete, end-to-end platform with industry-leading, integrated solutions to connect, manage and unify data across any cloud, hybrid or multi-cloud environment,” Walia said on LinkedIn today.

Earlier this month Informatica launched a new AI Agent Engineering service to prevent what Walia described as “agentic AI fragmentation.” In an interview with our sister title CRN, Walia touted how the need for data management tools for AI initiatives was driving demand for the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud – the company’s flagship data management platform.

Salesforce plans to merge Informatica’s metadata with Salesforce’s unified data model, to empower AI agents to interpret, connect, and act on enterprise data with meaningful context.

Salesforce said Informatica will strengthen its Data Cloud’s leadership as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), ensuring data from across the organization is not just unified but clear, trusted, and actionable.

The combined companies will also provide a critical foundation for autonomous AI agents to interpret and act on complex enterprise data, aiming to build a system of intelligence on a trusted system of understanding. “I look forward to collaborating with the Salesforce team and building on our momentum once the acquisition closes,” Walia said. “Thank you to our customers and partners for your unwavering support.”

Earlier this month Salesforce revealed that it also plans to buy London-based AI agent startup Convergence.ai to boost the capabilities of its AI agent platform Agentforce. The vendor’s channel chief revealed to CRN this year 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.

This article first appeared on Computing’s sister title CRN.