In a Flood of AI Noise, This Acquisition Actually Matters
Why Salesforce Buying Informatica Is One of the Most Important Deals of the Year
In the past year, the enterprise tech landscape has drowned in AI announcements. Foundries. Copilots. Agentic frameworks. GPU alliances. Model-tuning platforms. Every week delivers another strategic partnership or acquisition, each promising to redefine work.
We’ve been here before. The industry floods the market with messaging until signal gives way to noise. The pace and volume of announcements often create more confusion than clarity. Much of it feels disconnected from the realities of transformation. I mean the real kind, where legacy systems, data inconsistency, and governance gaps slow every attempt to modernise.
For those of us working in the trenches of system unification, data quality, and architecture renewal, these AI proclamations can seem like they belong to a parallel universe. One where marketing leads and PowerPoint slides solve problems that in the real world still require human decision-making, careful sequencing, and strong foundations.
But once in a while, something breaks through. A move that doesn’t just ride the hype but addresses the foundations beneath it. Salesforce acquiring Informatica is one of those moves. And it deserves far more attention than the latest AI feature drop.
This acquisition matters because it finally confronts a structural truth. Salesforce, like every other major platform, built its reputation on managing customer relationships. But it never solved the harder problem: how to create a single, consistent customer view across systems.
The CRM might be clean, but the ERP is not. The help desk holds a different record than the citizen portal. And every data warehouse downstream is only as trustworthy as the mess it inherits.
ServiceNow leads in workflow. Microsoft continues building its application empire. But none of them, until now, has brought master data management into their core platform architecture. Informatica changes that for Salesforce.
Master Data Management, or MDM, is not new. It’s not flashy. It doesn't inspire launch events. But it solves the problem that every digital transformation eventually encounters. Who is the customer, and what version of that person are we working with across our systems?
The importance of that question can't be overstated. AI can generate a response, complete a task, or recommend an action. But if it draws on fragmented data, it can't do any of those things well. Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica signals that platform strength means nothing if the data layer remains broken.
To be clear, when we talk about customer identity in this context, we’re not referring to identity and access management. This isn’t about who logs in, or what they can access. That’s the domain of platforms like Okta and Entra ID. What’s at stake here is something deeper. It is the ability to establish and maintain a single, trusted view of a customer, citizen, or stakeholder across every system where they appear. That’s MDM. And that’s what Salesforce just bought.
Take a city council as an example, because we all interact with them in some way.
Its ERP system holds a Name and Address Register, which acts as the supposed source of truth. But the library system holds its own customer records. So does the CRM, the planning system, the facilities booking system, and several legacy applications still in use.
These systems weren’t designed to talk to each other. They each capture fragments of a person’s identity. Names slightly different, addresses formatted inconsistently, contact details duplicated or missing. There’s no golden record. No cleansing process. No governance layer that reconciles these differences. Just mismatched data, broken automations, and service teams guessing which version of a person is the right one.
Now look at it from the customer’s side.
Why can’t you log in once and see everything? Your overdue library book, your parking fine, the status of your planning application, a gazebo booking for this weekend, your gym membership renewal, your pet registration, the complaint you lodged about a busted footpath, or the upcoming rates installment?
Why do you still need to call three departments, quote five reference numbers, and repeat your name and address every time?
This is the real promise of transformation. The outside-in view. The experience where an individual interacts with one organisation, not with a disconnected patchwork of departments and systems. And it’s impossible to deliver without a golden record.
No matter how beautiful the front-end portal or how intelligent the AI assistant, without a single, trusted view of the customer, the experience will always feel fragmented. The transformation won't land. The customer won’t feel known.
That’s why this matters. Not because it’s technical. But because it’s human. To me, that is the golden egg of this acquisition.
This is not a vendor problem. It’s not the fault of any one ERP or CRM provider. It’s an architectural blind spot, one that has been ignored for too long because solving it felt too hard, too abstract, or not urgent enough. But digital transformation always runs into this wall. And AI only raises the stakes.
As platforms mature, they compete less on features and more on coherence. The future belongs to those who can deliver not just interfaces, but integrity. That means data needs to be clean. Identity needs to be reconciled. Every system needs to agree on the fundamentals before automation, intelligence, and self-service can deliver on their promises.
The Salesforce acquisition doesn’t just add another tool to its stack. It repositions data quality as core to platform strategy. It acknowledges that integration isn’t enough. Workflow doesn’t work if the customer exists in five places. AI won’t help if it pulls from outdated or conflicting records. Governance, cleansing, deduplication, and survivorship aren’t optional. They are essential.
And yet most organisations aren’t ready. MDM often remains a future-phase idea, deferred in favour of faster wins. But the wins never last if the data can’t be trusted. The smart move now is to begin. Not wait for a vendor to solve it for you.
Every organisations need treat customer data as a strategic layer. Build the processes that clean, reconcile, and maintain it. Elevate the conversation beyond individual systems. Define ownership, stewardship, and quality as part of your architecture, not an afterthought to it.
Real transformation doesn’t begin with AI. It begins with clarity. It begins with truth. Salesforce acquiring Informatica reminds us that digital strategy isn’t just about platforms and tools. It’s about foundations. Data powers transformation. Platforms execute it. AI enhances it. But without consistency at the core, none of it holds.
This is a very strong play from Salesforce.