Salesforce announced plans to acquire the cloud data management leader, Informatica. The Salesforce acquisition news caused SaaS giant’s shares to capture significant attention on Monday following a late Friday revelation that discussions to acquire Informatica had reached an advanced stage.

Informatica’s stock nearly doubled this year

During 2024, Informatica’s stock price soared from approximately $29 to $38, pushing its market valuation beyond $11 billion. Acquiring firms often offer a substantial premium to persuade shareholders that selling is preferable to waiting for potentially higher offers. This strategy likely influenced the spike in Informatica’s stock to about $44, following the widespread dissemination of news over the weekend regarding the Salesforce acquisition.

The merger would enable Salesforce to integrate Informatica’s newly released AI tools into its suite of client relationship solutions and expand its reach to Informatica’s 5,000 active clients, including major names like Unilever, Toyota, and Deloitte among others.

Should the transaction be finalized, it would mark the largest acquisition by Salesforce since its $28 billion purchase of Slack Technologies during the 2021 work-from-home surge. Before acquiring Slack, Salesforce had brought data analytics firm Tableau Software into its portfolio in 2019 through a $15.7 billion all-stock transaction.

Salesforce’s aggressive acquisition strategy faced examination from activist shareholders such as ValueAct Capital and Elliot Management last year, prompting the dissolution of its M&A committee, the adoption of austerity measures, and a renewed emphasis on profitability.

The technology sector dominated M&A activity in the first quarter, witnessing a 42% increase in transactions from the previous year to approximately $154 billion, driven by the widespread adoption of enterprise AI.

Following a peak in late February, Salesforce’s stock has shown patterns suggesting a potential downturn, stabilizing within a descending triangle—a situation often viewed by analysts as a precursor to a decline. Investors should monitor the $252 level for potential support, buoyed by a long-term trendline and an ascending 200-day moving average. Conversely, a surge above this pattern to a new all-time high on robust volume could signal the continuation of its long-term growth trajectory.

Concluding the year, Salesforce shares stood around at $294, reflecting a substantial 50% growth over the past year.

Featured image credit: Salesforce

Microsoft is rolling out new Azure services as a part of the larger strategy to “help more people realize the possibilities of big data.”

Last week, at the  Strata + Hadoop World conference in San Jose, the tech giant claimed to make “big data simpler and more accessible” to the masses, with the following releases:

1. A preview of Azure HDInsight running on Linux
2. The general availability of Storm on HDInsight
3. The general availability of Azure Machine Learning
4. The availability of Informatica technology on Azure

Azure HDInsight is an Apache Hadoop-based service in the cloud enabling customers to crunch petabytes of all types of data in speed and cost-effectively scaling on demand, as well as programming extensions so developers can use their favorite languages. Customers will now be able to run HDInsight on Ubuntu clusters.

The open source stream analytics platform Storm for Azure HDInsight, enables processing of millions of data events in real time as they occur.

Azure Machine Learning promises to provide advanced analytics for businesses to predict future trends with data.

“In mere hours, developers and data scientists can build and deploy apps to improve customer experiences, predict and prevent system failures, enhance operational efficiencies, uncover new technical insights, or a universe of other benefits,” write T. K. Rengarajan, corporate vice president, Data Platform and Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president, Machine Learning, for the blog post making the announcement.

More details about HDInsight are available on this blog.

Azure Marketplace has Informatica joining other partners making its Informatica Cloud agent available in Linux and Windows virtual machines on Azure. Microsoft notes that this “will enable enterprise customers to create data pipelines from both on-premises systems and the cloud to Azure data services such as Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory and others, for management and analysis.”

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(Image credit: Roman Azure by Terratrekking, via Flickr)