Breaking: Salesforce buys Informatica for $8bn
The consolidation continues and the vendor lock-in reaches fever pitch
After a failed attempt in April 2024, Salesforce have bought Informatica for $8bn. Redwood City-based Informatica had a market value of $6.8 billion at the close of trading on Friday, so this represents a pretty awesome deal given the Informatica stock has traded sideways/ down since IPO in 2021/2022.
Salesforce’s share price dropped 2-3% in after hours trading following the news. This follows Salesforce’ acquisitions in the data market:
🗓️ 2025
Convergence.ai – May 2025
Focused on expanding AI-driven data processing and analytics.
🗓️ 2024
Own Company (formerly OwnBackup) – September 2024, $1.9B
Strengthened Salesforce's data protection and disaster recovery solutions. Cyntexasaasguru.co+6Ascendix+6MarketWatch+6
🗓️ 2023
Airkit.ai – September 2023
Focused on AI-powered customer service applications and experiences. Wikipedia
🗓️ 2022
Phennecs – April 2022
Improved data privacy compliance solutions.
🗓️ 2021
Slack – July 2021, $27.7B
Significantly expanded Salesforce's collaboration and communication platform. Wikipedia+2Cyntexa+2Salesforce Ben+2WikipediaServicetrace – September 2021
Enhanced robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities. ChannelE2ELevelJump – October 2021
Strengthened sales enablement and onboarding solutions. Salesforce
🗓️ 2019
Tableau – August 2019, $15.7B
Significantly bolstered data visualization and analytics capabilities. WikipediaMarketWatchClickSoftware – October 2019, $1.35B
Enhanced field service management solutions.MapAnything – May 2019, $225M
Improved location-based intelligence and mapping services. AscendixBonobo AI – May 2019, $45M
Advanced conversational intelligence and analytics.
🗓️ 2018
MuleSoft – May 2018, $6.5B
Strengthened application network and API integration capabilities.Datorama – August 2018, $800M
Enhanced marketing intelligence and analytics. Ascendix
🗓️ 2016
Krux – November 2016, $800M
Improved data management and audience segmentation.
Commentary - a platform or another Talend story?
Informatica, a la GPT:
Informatica is a leading provider of cloud data management solutions that help organizations connect, manage, and unify their data across a wide range of platforms. At its core, Informatica enables businesses to integrate data from various sources—whether it's on-premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments—so that it can be accessed, cleaned, and prepared for analysis. This includes powerful tools for data integration, data quality, data governance, master data management (MDM), and metadata management. By ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and secure, Informatica empowers companies to make more informed decisions, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate digital transformation efforts.
What sets Informatica apart is its use of artificial intelligence and machine learning through its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), which automates many aspects of data handling and streamlines complex workflows. Organizations use Informatica’s platform to support a variety of critical functions, from migrating workloads to the cloud and maintaining regulatory compliance, to enabling advanced analytics and real-time business intelligence. Industries like finance, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing rely on Informatica to turn fragmented data into a strategic asset that drives innovation and business growth.
Mulesoft gives them Data Integration
Tableau gives them visualisation
Informatica gives them the end to end suite for managing the entire stack
Surely this turns Salesforce into a platform?
A cobbled together group of tools - learnings from Talend
We have seen this pattern before with Toma Bravo and talend. Some Talend customers reported 10x price increases last year.
In 2021, private equity giant Thoma Bravo acquired Talend, a popular open-source data integration company, in a $2.4 billion all-cash deal. At the time, Talend was seen as a rising star in the data management space, offering a suite of cloud and big data tools that helped enterprises wrangle complex data pipelines.
Thoma Bravo’s acquisition was pitched as a way to accelerate Talend’s growth and innovation, but many users quickly noticed the real transformation was less about product evolution—and more about price tags. After taking the company private, Thoma Bravo initiated a series of behind-the-scenes changes: product lines were consolidated, licensing models were quietly altered, and prices began to soar.
By late 2022 and into 2023, longtime Talend users were facing eye-watering renewal quotes—sometimes two to three times higher than before—with few alternatives if they wanted to maintain continuity.
Support tiers were restructured, legacy offerings were phased out, and customers reported more aggressive sales tactics pushing them toward higher-priced enterprise bundles. These moves sparked criticism, especially among the open-source community that had supported Talend from its early days.
While Thoma Bravo’s strategy clearly focused on boosting profitability, the backlash from users painted a picture of a company that had drifted far from its original developer-friendly roots. Industry watchers noted the pattern echoed other Thoma Bravo plays: optimize the balance sheet, extract value, and worry about customer loyalty later. (TechCrunch, InfoWorld, Gartner Peer Insights).
Informatica woes
Informatica gets a terrible rep in the data community.
People post on Reddit about once a month talking about how awful Informatica is and how it makes them want to change jobs. It is not exactly a fan favourite, but with revenue of $1.64 billion it is pretty hard to ignore. Commonly:
1. High Cost and Complex Licensing
One of the biggest complaints about Informatica is its cost structure. Licensing can be opaque, and pricing often escalates quickly based on usage, data volume, or number of connectors. This makes it hard for smaller teams or businesses with scaling needs to predict expenses. Many users also mention that Informatica’s pricing is not transparent and requires negotiations with sales, which can be frustrating.
💬 "We had to re-negotiate pricing twice in a year due to overages we weren’t expecting." – Gartner Peer Insights
2. Steep Learning Curve
Despite its feature-rich platform, Informatica is often criticized for being too complex, especially for new users. The UI and workflow design are powerful but not always intuitive. Learning to use the suite—especially advanced features like data governance or MDM—can require significant training, and skilled Informatica developers are often in high demand (and short supply).
3. Performance Issues at Scale
While Informatica performs well for most use cases, some organizations report latency or performance bottlenecks when dealing with extremely large data sets or real-time data processing. Optimization can be challenging without deep expertise, and certain transformations may cause slowdowns unless finely tuned.
4. Slow Innovation and UX
Although Informatica has modernized with its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), some users still find the platform clunky and outdated in parts. The user experience in legacy components—like PowerCenter—can feel old-fashioned, and updating or migrating to newer modules isn't always straightforward.
5. Vendor Lock-In
Many users feel tied into the Informatica ecosystem due to heavy initial investment in implementation, training, and integration with other systems. This vendor lock-in can be a risk if pricing becomes unsustainable or if the product no longer aligns with the organization’s needs.
So what is Salesforce’s play here?
Copy the Mulesoft way - vendor lock-in for the bottom 20%
Salesforce does not publicly break out revenue figures for individual acquisitions like MuleSoft. However, available data provides some insight into MuleSoft's financial performance within Salesforce's broader operations.
In fiscal year 2024, Salesforce reported total revenue of $34.86 billion, with subscription and support revenues accounting for $32.54 billion . While specific figures for MuleSoft were not disclosed, it's known that MuleSoft's revenue grew by 22% in constant currency during this period (source)
Prior to its acquisition by Salesforce in 2018 for $6.5 billion, MuleSoft's annual revenue was estimated at approximately $296.5 million . Post-acquisition, MuleSoft has been integrated into Salesforce's broader platform offerings, contributing to the company's overall growth in the data integration and API management space. (source)
While exact revenue figures for MuleSoft within Salesforce are not publicly available, its continued growth and integration into Salesforce's services suggest it remains a valuable component of the company's portfolio.
I think Salesforce will do the same thing here with Informatica. Slowly improving it, integrating it into the platform and cross-selling.
The way they will do this is by locking in the bottom 20%. What is interesting about working with Azure and Fabric is you realise there are many companies whose executives are so tied to Azure they simply say to the data team “You must do this in Azure” — there derives the market for Microsoft Fabric.
The Salesforce Team clearly think they now have enough clout to be able to convince executives to say “just do it in Salesforce”. Salesforce have over 150,000 customers, and this move therefore effectively represents a marginal shutoff of those customers to the rest of the data ecosystem.
Use Salesforce and Informatica? Looks like it’ll be that way for a long time to come. Good luck selling into there. The Salesforce system is alive, well, and extremely sticky.
Learn more about Hugo Lu and Orchestra
If you have the good fortune to not be tied to Informatica, or are in the process of extracting yourself, you might be thinking of building
Modular scalable architecture without vendor lock-in to a single vendor
Best-in-class frameworks for ingesting, transforming and activating data like dlt and dbt
Consolidated visibility and metadata for massively improved monitoring
A scalable and usable platform FIT FOR AI that you can use to build your own agents
If any of that resonates or you think that might be hard in Informatica, check out Orchestra.
Hi Hugo, yes, I was REALLY surprised by that price tag.