💃 How Salesforce's Informatica Acquisition Impacts You🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! What is Informatica?

Why should you care?

The answer to these questions and so much more👇

THE SHINY NEW TOY!

Salesforce Acquires Informatica for $8 Billion

What is Informatica?

Informatica is a data management company 🙂. It is SaaS ☁️. It is AI-infused 🤖.

It is a platform with a ton of pre-built tools. Salesforce has Flows, Object Manager, and Permission Sets. Informatica has API builders, ETL tools, and MDM (master data management) capabilities.

Why should you care?

Salesforce already has Data Cloud and Mulesoft! What is Informatica bringing $8 billion-worth of something that the aforementioned apps are not?

Mulesoft is an ESB (enterprise service bus), but not an ETL like Informatica.

Data Cloud is a data lake (lakehouse?). Informatica moves and transforms data, but is not meant to store large volumes of data for long-term.

In summary, Informatica is filling in some enterprise-stack gaps that Salesforce had. Gaps that Microsoft does not have, but does lack elegance 🤢.

What does Informatica NOT do?

OK, so Informatica has integration, ETL, and MDM tools. But what does it NOT do?

It is NOT a Business Intelligence or analytics tool.

It is NOT an Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning platform.

It is NOT a database or data warehouse (or data lake or data lakehouse….)

It is NOT a process automation tool.

It is NOT a magic data scrubbing tool. Sure, if you can write a rule then it can execute that rule. But take Address scrubbing as an example - there are an infinite amount of human errors when entering addresses in combination with a variety of accepted rules (St = street, E = east, # = unit or suite or apt, etc).

End users will NOT directly interact with it. It will not create user reports. It will not fix busted business processes.

But here is what it can do ⬇️

SCENARIO

Healthcare, Salesforce, and Informatica

Let’s look at a sample scenario where implementing a net-new Informatica solution augments an existing Salesforce stack

Global Healthcare Provider Unifying Patient Data for Personalized Care

The Business Challenge

Haley’s Healthcare, a large healthcare organization uses Salesforce Health Cloud for patient engagement, but its patient data is scattered across multiple legacy electronic health record systems, cloud applications, and on-prem databases.

This fragmentation makes it difficult to get a complete, accurate view of each patient, slowing down care coordination and limiting the effectiveness of AI-driven insights for personalized treatment.

The Solution

🔀 Data Integration and Migration

Haley’s Healthcare uses Informatica’s data integration tools to extract, transform, and load (ETL) patient data from legacy health record systems, billing systems, and partner clinics into Salesforce Health Cloud ☁️.

Informatica ensures that all data is standardized and mapped correctly, eliminating duplicates and resolving inconsistencies. (don’t get it twisted - this will require a data analyst 100hrs + to write the ETL scripts, tons of iterations, and still have exceptions that need manual intervention…but it’s still worth it).

🫡 Master Data Management (MDM)

Informatica’s MDM capabilities unify patient records, creating a single, trusted “golden record” for each individual, even if their data originated from different sources or had variations in name, address, or medical history.

This is huge because Salesforce is not a proper system of record for Master Data (ERP is traditional solution). Informatica enables this key ERP function without the massive overhead an ERP requires.

From an enterprise financial perspective, this is extremely powerful and can connect GTM, QtC, revenue, expenses, and all the P&L things with some proper planning and alignment.

For example, Master Data for a Transportation company may include (the tables/objects) Regions, Trucks, Trailers, Drivers, and Customers. This master data would not only feed corresponding CRM objects, but also financial apps, HR apps, Transportation Management Software (TMS), company websites, and any other tech.

And then your BI could roll reporting up to the master data level, giving a c-suite the necessary perspective for quality financial planning analysis!

SO EXCITING, right?! 🙄.

Seriously though, master data is key for large enterprise alignment.

👨‍⚖️ Data Governance and Quality

Informatica enforces data governance policies, tracks data lineage, and monitors data quality, ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations (like HIPAA) and building trust in the data used for care decisions and AI analytics.

🤖 AI-Driven Insights and Automation

With unified, high integrity 👀 data in Salesforce, the organization can leverage Salesforce’s Agentforce, Einstein, etc to-

🤖 Predict patient health risks

🤖 Automate follow-up reminders

🤖 Personalize care plans based on a 360-degree patient view

🤖 Enhanced analytics and insights

Informatica feeds clean, governed data into Salesforce Data Cloud and Tableau, enabling advanced analytics and reporting for population health management and operational efficiency.

THE COMPETITION

Microsoft vs Salesforce

When it comes to CRM, no one touches Salesforce. Then why is Microsoft a $3.5 TRILLION company and Salesforce is a fractional $250 BILLION?

They say pictures are worth a thousand words…the sheer scale of Microsoft is astounding…

Salesforce knows they are not going to grow to the size of Microsoft, nor capture a significant chunk of their Productivity or Cloud revenue, but it doesn’t mean they’re not going to try 😅.

And the Informatica acquisition is proof of that 🙌! Salesforce is filling in tech-stack gaps….gaps that Microsoft does not have, so is becoming a stronger competitor.

But Salesforce has a long way to go - Microsoft is making more from Xbox than Salesforce is making as an entire company 😳.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

The Informatica acquisition looks like a good one on paper.

👉 It augments Salesforce’s existing offerings, bolstering Mulesoft and providing additional data plumbing for the core clouds.

👉 It leans into Saleforce’s focus on AI, helping to manage data integrity which is the foundation for quality AI solutions. Not to mention it has some AI assistance on-platform.

👉 It’s another tool a Salesforce AE’s tool chest when battling the monster that is Microsoft, who already offer everything Salesforce does and more.

And it was 1/3 the price of Slack 😅 💸.

To be determined is how seamlessly and quickly Salesforce’s engineers (and their AI co-pilots 😉) integrate Informatica into the code base. They’ve done a fine job with Mulesoft, so it’s not uncharted territory.

As a Salesforce professional, you’ll encounter it as much or a bit more than Mulesoft in the next 2-3 years, which is to say not much and mostly in enterprise (100+ users) orgs. And when you see it, hopefully this article helps inform you on its capabilities!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes