Salesforce has announced plans to acquire Informatica in a deal valued at roughly 8 billion dollars. The move signals the company’s largest purchase since taking over Slack Technologies in 2021.
After more than a year since initial discussions ended without an agreement, salesforce informatca acquisition resumed talks with Informatica and reached new terms. Informatica’s core focus on data management is expected to support Salesforce as it intensifies work on artificial intelligence features.
Focus on Artificial Intelligence and Data Management
Company executives believe this acquisition will give Salesforce far greater control over business data, which is seen as vital for embedding generative artificial intelligence into its products. Marc Benioff, the chief executive officer, described the combination as creating the industry’s most complete data platform.
Salesforce has already launched AI tools for tasks such as recruitment and customer service, and its Agentforce platform recently secured over a thousand paying enterprise customers. These AI agents are designed to handle many tasks without intervention.
For the purchase, Salesforce offered 25 dollars per Informatica share, which reflects a premium of close to 30 percent over the stock’s closing price before news broke of the renewed negotiations. Informatica stock jumped over 5 percent in premarket trading soon after the announcement, while Salesforce shares also inched higher.
Salesforce intends to pay for the deal using a mix of cash and newly issued debt, and expects to finalize the transaction early in the next fiscal year, starting in February. The company projects that the acquisition will increase its operating margin beginning in the deal’s second year.
Some analysts, including those at Scotiabank, say this move could help Salesforce match the offerings of its largest software competitors, who have started packaging salesforce artificial intelligence data management tools within broad software suites.
Salesforce has made other major purchases before, including Tableau Software in 2019 and Slack two years later, tallying billions of dollars in total acquisition spend. Those deals prompted activist investors to demand greater profitability from the company in 2023.
By stepping up investment in data-focused products and artificial intelligence, Salesforce appears poised to strengthen its hold in the 150 billion dollar enterprise data market.
