Salesforce has eyes on Informatica in potential largest deal 

Salesforce employs almost 2,000 people in Ireland, but had in recent months announced plans to cut its global staff count

Then-taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the announcement of Salesforce Tower in Dublin in January 2019.

Salesforce's Marc Benioff is pursuing what would be one of the company’s biggest-ever deals after fending off activist investors critical of his reliance on acquisitions. 

Salesforce is one of Ireland's largest foreign-owned private employers, with almost 2,000 employees, but had in recent months announced plans to cut its global staff count.    

Mr Benioff is now in talks to buy Informatica, according to people familiar with the matter, in a move that would add to Salesforce’s data integration and management capabilities. The companies could reach a deal as soon as within a week, said the sources. A Salesforce spokesperson said the company does not comment on “rumours and speculation”. The talks were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Informatica competes against MuleSoft, Salesforce’s third-largest acquisition. The deal could push further consolidation in the software-as-a-service industry and attract regulatory scrutiny, he added. The company, which helps customers manage their data in the cloud, projected in February that annual revenue would increase about 6% to $1.7bn (€1.6bn). 

Informatica, which is based in Redwood City, California, has a market value of about $11.4bn. 

Mr Benioff has been grappling with activist hedge funds pressing the company to run a tighter ship. Salesforce averted a potential proxy fight with activist investor Elliott Investment Management last year, after a series of strategic changes and a rise in the stock price.

San Francisco-based Salesforce has cut costs and improved profitability over the past year. Now, the focus is on sales growth, which has slowed as corporations rein in their spending on software.

Informatica would rank as the company’s third- or perhaps second-biggest acquisition out of 117 completed and pending deals. Salesforce’s largest acquisition — a takeover of the business communications platform Slack Technologies for about $27bn — was completed in 2021.

Should the Informatica deal go through with a significant premium to the current share price, the amount could rival Salesforce’s $14bn purchase of Tableau Software in 2019, according to the data. Including debt, Informatica has an enterprise value of more than $12bn. 

Salesforce said in 2018 that its acquisition of MuleSoft represented an enterprise value of $6.5bn. Informatica was taken private in 2015 by private equity firm Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in a $5.3bn transaction. 

Bloomberg