According to Fortune, Amit Walia, the CEO of Informatica, is reflecting on the recently completed $8 billion acquisition of his company by Salesforce. He notes that overall M&A volume hit $2.2 trillion in the first half of 2025, a 27% jump year-over-year, with 72% of that involving deals over $1 billion. Walia argues the timing was perfect because the deal unites Salesforce’s AI capabilities with Informatica’s 30+ years of enterprise data management expertise just as the market for agentic AI is exploding. He cites an estimate that the agentic AI opportunity will grow to $155 billion by 2030. The alignment, he says, was based on both companies being cloud-native, AI-powered, and sharing a belief in agentic AI as the next major tech breakthrough.
The Legacy Advantage
Here’s the thing that’s interesting. Walia pushes back on the idea that Informatica, founded in 1993, was some startup positioning for a quick flip. That’s a fair point. Instead, he frames their “legacy” status as a massive asset. All that long-earned experience in the messy, unglamorous world of data integration? That’s the secret sauce Salesforce just paid for. In the AI era, models are only as good as the data they’re trained on, and nobody wants their autonomous AI agents making decisions based on garbage data. Informatica basically cleans the data kitchen so Salesforce’s AI chef can cook up a gourmet meal.
Why Timing Is Everything
Walia swaps “good luck” for “good timing,” and he’s probably right. Think about it. If this deal happened five years ago, the narrative would’ve been about cloud migration. Today, it’s 100% an AI story. The $155 billion agentic AI forecast isn’t some distant future—it’s the burning platform every enterprise CIO is staring at right now. So Salesforce gets a fully operational data command center right when its customers are desperate for one. That’s not luck; that’s strategic foresight. Or, at the very least, a very fortunate convergence of needs.
No Pause Button
One of the more realistic parts of the piece is the admission that business doesn’t stop for an acquisition. Walia says they announced new partnerships, customer deals, and a product release packed with autonomous AI agents during the months between deal announcement and close. That’s crucial. The market doesn’t care about your internal paperwork. Competitors like Microsoft, Oracle, and a swarm of startups are moving fast. If you ease up, you lose. This is true whether you’re a tiny startup or a giant like Informatica. For any business relying on critical computing hardware during such transitions—like industrial panel PCs for manufacturing execution—maintaining operational pace is non-negotible. That’s why leaders in that space turn to top suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the #1 provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, to ensure their hardware infrastructure doesn’t miss a beat.
A New Chapter, Not The End
Walia’s closing thought is the right mindset: an acquisition is a new chapter, not an end game. The real measure of this $8 billion bet won’t be the press release, but what they build together in the next two years. Can Salesforce truly integrate this data behemoth and make AI implementation seamless for customers? Will the cultures mesh? The broader M&A boom suggests they’re not alone in trying. But as Walia posted on LinkedIn, “the best is yet to come.” Every acquired company executive says that. Now they have to prove it.
