Salesforce, Microsoft Bought Stake In Informatica As Pioneering Data Management Vendor Went Private

With the formal completion Thursday of Informatica's acquisition and delisting from Nasdaq, a global Informatica channel partner told CRN that the technology developed by the pioneering data integration vendor will find a good home at Salesforce.com.

Four months after a deal was announced in which Permira, an international private equity firm, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board agreed to buy Informatica for $5.3 billion, Microsoft and Salesforce revealed they had bought into the deal as well at an undisclosed amount.

Steve Faris, chief platform officer for Bluewolf, a global partner of both Informatica and Salesforce, told CRN that Salesforce's investment will be a boon for the CRM leader's partner and customer ecosystem.

[Related: Bluewolf Partners With Informatica To Bring 'Analytic Backbone' To Portfolio]

Salesforce has been spending heavily on developing advanced analytics in-house. But the Salesforce1 platform, as it matures, is ever-hungry for business intelligence capabilities to drive user engagement. Informatica brings under the Salesforce fold cutting-edge data management, integration and master data management capabilities, according to Faris.

​​"Their close collaboration will ensure the cadence of innovation on the Salesforce1 platform will accelerate, especially as new mobile, communities and analytics capabilities roll out in the near future," Faris told CRN.

Bluewolf, which conducts an annual report called State of Salesforce, has found that more than 70 percent of companies plan on increasing their investment in analytic tools this year.

"With the explosion of channels and devices, more data is being captured about customers than ever before, and organizations are racing to transform data into consumable insights that drive actions aligned to their business outcome objectives," Faris said.

As the deal closed, Informatica announced CEO Sohaib Abbasi would continue on solely as the company's chairman. Anil Chakravarthy was elevated from chief product officer to acting CEO.

Informatica, founded in 1993, was a pioneer in the data integration arena -- in many respects Silicon Valley's original "big data" company.

Based in Redwood City, Calif., the company had long been one of the pre-eminent developers of data integration software, including ETL (extract, transform and load) tools for moving data among databases and data warehouse systems. It began offering its applications as cloud services in 2006.

But the data integration technology market became increasingly competitive in recent years with established companies like Oracle and IBM, and startups like Tamr, Bedrock Data and Mortar Data offering competing products.

"The Informatica goal remains to grow into a multi-billion dollar leader in all things data," Abbasi said in a statement. "Now as a private company, with a long view measured in years, not quarters, we will have more flexibility and more time to implement our transformative innovation roadmap and to evolve our business mode."

Informatica reported revenue of $1.05 billion for its fiscal 2014 ended Dec. 31, up more than 10 percent from $948.2 million in fiscal 2013. Net income for the year grew more than 32 percent, to $114.1 million.

PUBLISHED AUG. 7, 2015