Amit Walia, CEO, Informatica
| Photo Credit:
Scott R. Kline

Salesforce’s $8-billion bet on Informatica, announced in May, hinges on the latter’s dominance in data integration, quality and governance, capabilities CEO Amit Walia says are critical to powering Salesforce’s Agentforce AI push.

“We have many joint customers with Salesforce, who were also users of Informatica. They needed data management to realise Agentforce. This included data quality, data governance and data integration. We have all of those capabilities and were a perfect fit for them — to not only go into the data management stack and grow the market, but also help with their AI growth,” Walia shared.

He noted that one key driver of the acquisition is that in the GenAI era, the data management stack has become the primary hub of growth and innovation.

Informatica, for its part, aims to accelerate growth and sees this as an ideal opportunity to expand while ensuring greater benefits for its customers and employees.

“Salesforce has a customer-centric mindset, and so, it can increase our customer reach. At the same time, they wanted our innovation, which includes our people,” he said.

As the deal heads for closure early next year, Informatica is leveraging its Hyderabad-based iLabs, home to over 2,700 employees, to build the next wave of CLAIRE AI-driven agents.

The CEO continued, “We recently completed 20 years of iLabs. India is our innovation engine, and CLAIRE agents are being engineered here. The country has emerged as the AI engineering hub for Informatica. We have employees for every function here and intend to continue to grow our market share in India.”

Informatica launched CLAIRE in 2018 for AI-powered data management, a move that positioned the company to fast-track its growth once GenAI entered the scene.

“In 2018, Amazon was making product recommendations. Facebook had photo tagging. Both of these were built on open-source machine learning algorithms. We wanted to use these algorithms in the world of data. With CLAIRE, we took thousands of ML algorithms and curated them for data management. The same algorithm that did photo tagging could now do data tagging,” Walia explained.

As CLAIRE grew, the company amassed vast amounts of metadata, further enhancing its intelligence. With the arrival of GenAI and the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Informatica introduced the CLAIRE Copilot and a preview of CLAIRE GPT in May 2023, focusing on building the chat interface and copilot experience before rolling out both.

For this year, Informatica has guided its cloud subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR) to exceed $1 billion. As per its Q2 2025 results, the company’s total ARR increased to $1.72 billion, at a 2.9 per cent year-over-year (y-o-y) growth on a constant currency (cc) basis. Cloud subscription ARR increased to $901.0 million, representing 28.2 per cent y-o-y growth in cc terms.

Published on August 13, 2025