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Last month, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Informatica in an $8 billion deal. In the official statement, Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, said:

“This combination brings together Salesforce’s Einstein and Informatica’s CLAIRE AI engines to forge the ultimate AI-data platform, trusted, explainable, and built to scale. Together, we’ll supercharge Agentforce, Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft, and Customer 360, enabling autonomous agents to act with intelligence, context, and confidence across every enterprise. This is a transformational step in delivering enterprise-grade AI that is safe, responsible, and deeply integrated with the world’s data.”

Now let’s unpack what that really means, and why it’s not just a win for Salesforce, but a major turning point for the enterprise integration ecosystem, especially for platforms like MuleSoft and Data Cloud. 

How Informatica enhances Data Cloud

By unifying data across sources and activating it in real time, Data Cloud excels at identity resolution, customer graphing, and real-time activation inside Salesforce. But it is not built for heavy-duty batch processing, traditional data transformations, or complex governance. It lacks native capabilities for large-scale data ingestion, MDM (master data management), and data quality enforcement, which enterprise customers expect when they hear “data platform”.

The acquisition of Informatica helps to close this gap by pairing Data Cloud with the right infrastructure. Informatica is a market leader in enterprise large scale data movement. It brings:

 

  • Robust ingestions tools for batch and bulk loads
  • Powerful data quality and MDM capabilities 
  • Pre built connectors for various end points
  • Flexible on-premise and cloud deployment models  
  • Ability to connect, manage, and unify data across cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments
  • And lastly, deep trust across regulated industries

With Informatica now in the Salesforce portfolio, Data Cloud becomes exponentially more valuable, not because it changes what Data Cloud does, but because it allows Salesforce to finally solve for the full data lifecycle:

What does this mean for MuleSoft?

At first glance, it may seem like Informatica overlaps with MuleSoft, the leading Salesforce integration, automation, and API management platform. This raises the $8 billion question: Why did Salesforce acquire Informatica?

The answer is nuanced yet straightforward: Informatica is a complementary addition to MuleSoft, not a competitor. Understanding this complementary relationship is critical for businesses leveraging the Salesforce ecosystem. The key difference lies in how and when they operate:

MuleSoft is built for real-time, API management, app-to-app communications, and orchestrating live business processes. It’s ideal for connecting apps and orchestrating live business processes between modern applications. For example: a customer updates their address in the CRM, and it updates billing, support, and mobile apps instantly.

On the other hand, Informatica excels in precisely those areas MuleSoft was not originally built for: large-scale batch data movements, sophisticated data quality processes, complex data matching algorithms, data governance, and integrating systems that might lack API accessibility. For example: loading millions of customer records from legacy systems or syncing customer and product data from hundreds of sources.

A complete integration strategy with MuleSoft and Informatica

MuleSoft connects applications in motion. Informatica prepares and governs the data that powers those applications. They’re two sides of the same coin, and together they give Salesforce a complete integration strategy:

  • Real-time/near real time with orchestration →  MuleSoft
  • ETL data movement →  Informatica
  • Activation and AI → Data Cloud + Agentforce

For MuleSoft, this is a net positive. It no longer has to stretch into roles it wasn’t designed for (like ETL or data prep), and can double down on what it does best: powering real-time digital experiences. Informatica fills the batch and governance gaps, which only strengthens the end-to-end integration story.

With this acquisition, Salesforce is officially playing at the enterprise architecture table. The trio of MuleSoft, Informatica, and Data Cloud gives clients:

  • Unified, governed, AI-ready data pipelines
  • Seamless integration across real-time and batch
  • Full visibility from source systems to CRM and analytics
  • A platform that can support both operational and analytical use cases

Salesforce acquiring Informatica isn’t just another tech story. It directly addresses Data Cloud’s previous limitations by enabling Salesforce to support complex, enterprise-grade data operations. Crucially, it strengthens MuleSoft’s position by clearly defining its role within a company’s ecosystem’s broader integration and AI strategy. For partners and clients, it means we can now deliver modernization programs that don’t just connect systems, but connect the entire enterprise!

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