It’s been 13 months since Salesforce and Informatica called off their first attempt at an acquisition. But the second time appears to be the charm, as Informatica today announced that Salesforce will buy it for $8 billion.
Informatica was founded in 1993 ago to serve the burgeoning market for data integration tools, in particular the need for extract, transformation, and load (ETL) tools for early data warehouses. Companies at the time needed to pull transactional data out of mainframes, midrange, and Unix systems, transform the data into a suitable format, and then load it into their analytical database.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.