Microsoft and Salesforce pool resources to buy Informatica for $5.3bn

Why Informatica, why together and why now?

Microsoft and Salesforce have snapped up data integration specialist Informatica Corporation.

It's not actually been announced how large a share the companies have in the firm, but it's now delisted from NASDAQ, and chief product officer Anil Chakravarthy has been announced as acting CEO, with former CEO Sohaib Abbasi remaining as chairman.

Informatica was formed in 1993 in Redwood City, California - an area still closely linked with Oracle. The firm specialises in data integration (including cloud), extract, transform and load (ETL), data warehousing, data masking, replication and virtualisation. It currently has a database of 5,800 enterprise customers, including Time Warner, News Corp, Johnson & Johnson, BT, General Electric and Citigroup. It has $1bn annual revenue of $1bn, and a revenue growth of 13 per cent as of Q2 2015 - however, this is a flat-rate growth that was risking making the firm unsustainable on its own.

Earlier this year, the firm was already rumoured to be in the early stages of acquisition by private equity firm Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for the same figure of $5.3bn.

The attraction for Microsoft and Salesforce is obvious enough, especially as Informatica has been "a strong part of Microsoft's partner ecosystem as a data integration leader" for some time, a Microsoft spokesperson told Forbes.

Informatica also launched a cloud business - Informatica Cloud - in 2006, which is also of significant relevance to the cloud-dependent Salesforce and an increasingly cloud-focused Microsoft.

It may also be interesting to consider what this effort in joint ownership may mean for Microsoft and Salesforce. Salesforce has recently been the subject of rumours about a potential buyout by the Redmond giant, although apparently these came to nothing.

In collaborating over Informatica two companies may be filling gaps in their respective portfolios without the disruption and expense of going through a full-scale merger or acquisition process. Or they could be lining things up for such a venture in the future.