Salesforce has now completed its acquisition of Informatica, in a deal positioned as a way to strengthen Salesforce’s AI data foundation. If you are an Informatica customer, that headline is not the end of the story. It is the start of a long, complicated chapter. Informatica is no longer an independent data company. It is now one piece of Salesforce’s AI CRM story. That has real consequences for your data strategy, your AI roadmap, and your room to manoeuvre.

In the AI era – the need for enterprise-wide data—from every operational system—available for instant analytics is real. Microsoft Fabric has fundamentally simplified the modern data estate, centering everything around the flexible, unified power of OneLake. A cornerstone of this platform is Mirroring, a low-latency, low-cost solution designed to break down silos. But for data engineering pioneers, the most exciting development is Open Mirroring.

As the demand for data to power AI models and real-time decision making continues to grow, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to simplify and optimize the ways to ingest, and process fresh data within the enterprise. On average, organizations allocate 20–50% of their annual data warehouse spend on compute for data ingestion, amounting to millions of dollars in costs for large enterprises.

Data integration has long been one of the most time-intensive parts of enterprise IT. Connecting multiple systems, reconciling formats, and ensuring data reaches its destination reliably often requires weeks of preparation before the first record moves. But with AI-powered integration, that timeline compresses dramatically. What once took weeks can now be designed, validated, and delivered in minutes.

Organizations waste an average of $12.9 million annually due to poor data quality. Traditional ETL processes built on hard-coded rules break with schema changes, batch processing misses real-time insights, and manual mapping creates bottlenecks that delay critical business decisions by days or weeks.