Salesforce – Once a Silicon Valley Rebel, Now an AI Revolutionary

Circa 1999. When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce, little did he realise that he was starting a movement, the Capex to Opex movement. One can call him a ‘tech rebel’ challenging the status quo in a world that only knew at that time IT could be delivered only on-premise. While the Application Service Provider (ASP) model had briefly gained some traction in the late 1990s as a way to deliver software over the internet, it was limited and fragmented. When Benioff and a bunch of other tech visionaries unfolded a hypothesis that IT could be delivered via the Internet at scale, many dismissed it as ambition, an utopia. Later, this vision came to be called Cloud and SaaS.

Clearly, when Benioff started Salesforce, he wasn’t just starting another software company, rather, he was rebelling against the very idea of software, to deliver CRM entirely over the internet, long before “cloud computing” became a buzzword. Salesforce did crack the code, and ushered in a radical shift in terms of IT consumption, and in the bargain, Benioff acted as one of the pivots for transitioning native IT to delivering services virtually.

Fast Forward to Now

Salesforce has come a long way. Defining its growth trajectory with organic capabilities with strategic acquisitions. But what Salesforce is attempting now may be even more ambitious: to become the trusted data and AI layer for the enterprise stack. And that ambition got a fillip with its acquisition of Informatica, in a $8 billion deal.

Reflecting on the deal, Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce said, “We’re excited to acquire Informatica for approximately $8 billion, uniting the world’s #1 AI CRM with the #1 AI-powered MDM and ETL platform. 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.”

To give a sense, MDM (Master Data Management) ensures consistent, accurate core data across systems, while ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) moves and prepares data for analysis. Together, they enable trusted, usable data for AI and enterprise workflows.

This deal signals Salesforce’s determination to go from owning customer workflows to owning how customer data is discovered, cleaned, governed, and activated in AI environments. And it is expanding Salesforce beyond its CRM perimeter, it is on the threshold of becoming a ‘platform of intelligence’.

How Salesforce Engineered Its Transformation?

To understand how Salesforce has pivoted to what it is today, we need to look at its native strategies and capability buys, that were aimed at deepening its roots in enterprise integration.

Let’s here look at its key acquisitions so far:

In 2018, MuleSoft ($6.5B) brought the connective tissue, it ushered in API-led integration that enabled the company to build systems talk to everything else in the stack. In 2019, it acquired Tableau ($15.7B). It delivered the ability to visualize data in ways that empowered non-technical users. And then in 2021, Slack ($27.7B). It offered it the headroom at the front-end of enterprise collaboration, a place where conversations, alerts, and approvals converge.

These acquisitions have built an ecosystem, and what Salesforce now calls ‘Data Cloud’, a real-time data platform that assimilates, harmonizes, and activates data across sources. The idea is simple, yet powerful: data needs to be unified before it can be intelligent.

But, it’s easier said, than done. In the real world enterprise data is messy, fragmented, and unstructured. And it is this area, that Informatica acquisition makes the cut.

How Informatica Changes the Game for Salesforce

According to Salesforce, bringing together Informatica’s cloud-native capabilities, including its extensive data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and MDM, with the Salesforce platform will unlock new capabilities for Salesforce’s enterprise data stack, delivering a complete solution to the challenges of AI at scale, by:

Achieving Data Clarity with Data Cloud: Informatica will strengthen Data Cloud’s leadership as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), ensuring data from across the organization is not just unified but clear, trusted, and actionable.

Elevating Agentforce: Combined, Informatica and Salesforce will provide a critical foundation for autonomous AI agents to interpret and act on complex enterprise data, building a true system of intelligence on a trusted system of understanding.

Augmenting the Customer 360: Salesforce CRM applications will be enhanced, giving teams the confidence to deliver more personalized and effective customer experiences, backed by trusted data.

Governed Understanding for MuleSoft: Informatica’s advanced data quality, integration, cataloging, and governance will ensure data flowing through MuleSoft APIs is not just connected but also enriched, standardized, and trustworthy, a reliable stream ready to fuel AI-powered decisions and actions across the enterprise.

Context-Rich Insights for Tableau: Tableau users will benefit from richer, context-driven insights thanks to a more accessible and better-understood data landscape.

Clearly, Informatica brings tools that do the invisible but essential work of data readiness like, cleansing, deduplicating, tagging, securing, and tracing data lineage. These are the foundational and essential elements required for any enterprise to use AI responsibly and at scale.

While AI takes deeper roots, but increasingly, one is seeing the uptick of how AI when not managed in an ethical framework can lead to data compliance failures, can damage reputation and value in real time, Salesforce isn't just acquiring a data company, it's acquiring enterprise trust with Informatica.

Informatica gives Salesforce a competitive moat. It enables its agents to be accurate, compliant and explainable. What it essentially means is that, Salesforce gains a vertical integration of trust. Right from customer records to ecommerce journeys, from marketing campaigns to helpdesk tickets, Salesforce now has eyes and potentially, the oversight, cutting across every customer-facing journey of an organization. And at the same time, it's threading them together with intelligence, and now with auditability as well.

And clearly this is where the long journey of Salesforce’s evolution comes full circle. A company that started out by making CRM software simpler is now solving the complexity of making AI safe and actionable, right from source data all the way to human interaction.

“Truly autonomous, trustworthy AI agents need the most comprehensive understanding of their data. The combination of Informatica’s advanced catalog and metadata capabilities with our Agentforce platform delivers exactly this,” said Steve Fisher, President and Chief Technology Officer, Salesforce. “Imagine an AI agent that goes beyond simply seeing data points to understand their full context, origin, transformation, quality, and governance. This clarity, from a unified Salesforce and Informatica solution, will allow all types of businesses to automate more complex processes and make more reliable AI-driven decisions.”

Is Salesforce Unfolding a New Operating Model for the Enterprise?

If one looks at the current capabilities of Salesforce, it does have a very holistic model, just like strategically aligned Lego blocks. By layering Slack on top of business workflows, Einstein AI across its apps, MuleSoft beneath the surface, Tableau for visibility, and Informatica for governance, Salesforce is inching toward something far bigger than CRM.

In a way it is building an enterprise operating layer, one that doesn’t just store or display information, but intelligently acts on it, explains it, and automates it. And as AI adoption accelerates across industries, it is evolving from a ‘placeholder’ to a ‘must have’. In this backdrop, the companies that win will be the ones that offer usable intelligence at scale, without compromising control.

That is the bet Salesforce is making. Informatica is the latest, and arguably most essential, move in turning that vision into reality.

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