Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss Salesforce’s proposed $8 billion acquisition of Informatica.
Highlights
00:16 — Salesforce announced that it intends to acquire Informatica, paying $8 billion for the data management company. And what’s at heart here is Marc Benioff building an AI data powerhouse for the AI era. Salesforce has become indistinguishable from the whole notion of cloud enterprise apps, and now it’s shifting gears. And in doing so, it’s flipping the role of applications.
01:30 — In the old model: applications were the thing. We had a number of big applications companies. And businesses got great utility out of that. What we’ve seen more recently, though, with the rise of AI, is that applications, rather than being the endgame, now become part of the food chain that generates the data that plays into AI models, solutions, and capabilities.
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02:28 — Now, the Informatica acquisition will benefit Salesforce in what it’s doing now with its Data Cloud, which Benioff has said many times is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history; with its Agentforce agents, which Marc Benioff has poured an enormous amount of time and energy into over the last 12 to 15 months.
03:37 — All of this rolls up, I think, in some ways, and perhaps the biggest benefit for customers of all of the Informatica–Salesforce proposed acquisition here will be: it can lead to faster ROI for AI projects.
04:26 — We’re seeing across the board the recognition that applications are still incredibly important, but they’re serving a supporting role. We’re seeing this as Workday bills itself as a platform company. Oracle is certainly using all the benefits of the Oracle database to enhance what it is doing with its applications and AI.
