Salesforce to Acquire Informatica Signals Salesforce True Intentions -> Data to Power AI

I think it's a good move for their relevance in the AI world, but let's unpack what it means.

What happened?

* Salesforce is signed an agreement to acquire Informatica. Informatica plays in what's called "Master Data Management" space, including storing the enterprise source of truth for product catalogs, and quite a number of other domains. This includes governance of that data -- how and why it can change, what changes have been made, and how to evolve that data over time.

Here are a few thoughts:

* Informatica is a long-term owner of a lot of Enterprise master data through their PIM and MDM solutions. All of the major global system integrators have a large Informatica practice.

* Just in case you think this is not interesting, Amazon has a serious belief that the AI models will follow where the data is housed, so there is potentially a very large model-creation and interaction business that Salesforce ensures it has a piece of in the future, which is their intention.

* Salesforce is signaling that to have an AI future you need the data. Data Cloud is not working well enough on its own -- what is the "draw" to give your core data to Salesforce? Not much. It had to find the next best source of data after Amazon and Microsoft, and that name is likely Informatica.

What's Next?

* I do think a player like Snowflake is in play, and I do think it is likely that Salesforce sniffed around Snowflake but it was too expensive. Informatica has less of a "cloud/AI" play than Snowflake and so this match-up for the valuation required sounds better.

* This could distract and slow down Salesforce. Informatica is not known for being nimble, and cultures do not change post-acquisition.

* You could almost seeing this as Salesforce dropping some of its on-again, off-again noises about the lower middle-market. It's not a very lucrative play for their goto-market strategy (heavy Enterprise sales cycle) anyway.

Overall, I would call this move commerce-adjacent. The world is consolidating AI around OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic/Amazon, Google, and the world is searching for other players. Salesforce wants to be the 4th or 5th player not the 10th player in this game and is trying to piece together the assets to do it.

I do think this complicates Shopify's Enterprise strategy. It also potentially boxes in Shopify's wins in Enterprise to the "front-end/checkout" of the stack, and makes it more unlikely to see Shopify moving further into the ERP/MDM side of things.

Which of course, Shopify was likely never even seriously considering in the first place.