salesforce.com (CRM): KeyBanc Weighs In on Informatica Deal

KeyBanc analyst Jackson Ader reiterated an Overweight rating and $440.00 price target on salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM).

The analyst commented: "In Defense and Opposition of the Informatica Acquisition; In defense of the Informatica deal How many times have we heard in the last six months that a key bottleneck to Agentforce adoption is data availability, data cleanliness or the aspirational metaphor of the data estate? It comes up over and over again. Enterprise data are neither housed neatly nor are in a format in which AI engines can easily access them1, creating an issue for Agentforce, which needs clean data in Salesforce's Data Cloud in order to provide real value to customers. Informatica should help solve this problem with the combination of its master data management tools and its data movement tools (ETL); a combination, according to practitioners, is rare in the data space. There are also some potentially interesting strategic options this opens up for CRM, which we run through below.

In opposition to the Informatica deal Even if the combination does fix a need, that need needs to be fixed now. Follow that? By acquiring Informatica (rather than deepening a partnership or some other alternative) it all but ensures that the data availability and cleanliness bottleneck will exist for another year, maybe more. Further, the acquisition does not solve the problem of CRM not really being the center of gravity for an enterprise's data or knowledge workers."

For an analyst ratings summary and ratings history on salesforce.com click here. For more ratings news on salesforce.com click here.

Shares of salesforce.com closed at $271.91 yesterday.

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