The Salesforce Informatica Acquisition.
A Smart Move? Smartbridge Weights in.
By now, you’re aware that Salesforce is acquiring Informatica in an $8 billion deal. This move signals Salesforce’s shift from a CRM provider to a data and AI powerhouse. As both a Salesforce and Informatica partner, Smartbridge offers a unique perspective on this development.
What does Informatica bring to Salesforce?
Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica isn’t just another tech merger. It’s a strategic step to enhance its AI capabilities by integrating Informatica’s robust data management tools.
This integration aims to provide a comprehensive, agent-ready data platform, enabling AI agents to operate safely and effectively across enterprises.
Informatica brings to the table advanced data cataloging, integration, governance, and privacy tools. These are essential for maintaining data transparency and compliance, especially in industries like healthcare and finance.
And this isn’t our first rodeo with Salesforce wrangling data companies. When they purchased Tableau in 2019, the goal was clear—visual storytelling on top of CRM data. But Tableau alone didn’t solve the deeper challenges around data quality, lineage, or prep at scale. That’s where Informatica fills the gap.
Smartbridge’s Take: Did Salesforce Make the Right Move?
Salesforce has been trying to convert itself from a CRM company to a Data + AI company. Salesforce’s previous attempts to become an ERP company were not successful in my opinion, but they are taking all the right steps to become a data company.
Data Cloud and Agentforce are extremely impressive products that can provide great customer insights. By adding a mature Data Analytics platform like Informatica, now Salesforce can help its clientele truly get a 360-degree view of their customers within the Salesforce ecosystem.
By acquiring Informatica, Salesforce has brought in one of the top data management and preparation tools and greatly improved their in-house data transformation capabilities. This will clearly impact how data is integrated in and out of Salesforce, but I’m interested to see how this impacts Tableau moving forward. Tableau has primarily focused on data visualization, with some secondary focus on data preparation through tools like Tableau Prep.
However, in the age of agentic analytics, more and more work will be centered on preparing robust semantic models which agents can interpret and interact with, which will require more data preparation. I’m curious to see how Salesforce integrates Informatica into their Tableau tool suite to help actualize this future vision of agentic analytics.”
What’s Next for Salesforce?
This acquisition positions Salesforce to offer a unified data and AI platform, enhancing tools like Agentforce, Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft, and Customer 360. For organizations, this means more integrated and intelligent solutions for customer engagement and data management.
As a consultancy deeply involved with both Salesforce and Informatica, Smartbridge is poised to help clients navigate and leverage the synergies from this acquisition. We’re here to guide you through the evolving data and AI landscape.
Continue Reading about the Acquisition
Here are some of the articles we’re reading about the acquisition:
Consulting Partner
Managed Services Provider
Keep Reading: Salesforce Data & Analytics: Our 3 Favorite Findings
Looking for more on Salesforce?
Explore more insights and expertise at smartbridge.com/salesforce
There’s more to explore at Smartbridge.com!
Sign up to be notified when we publish articles, news, videos and more!
Other ways to
follow us:
