Informatica goes private, counts Microsoft, Salesforce as strategic investors

Informatica closed its deal to go private Thursday and disclosed that Salesforce and Microsoft both bought a stake.

The deal to go private valued Informatica, a key data integration player, at $5.3 billion, or $48.75 a share in cash. The company will be controlled by Permira funds and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, but Microsoft and Salesforce Ventures became strategic investors as the deal closed.

Informatica will be led by current chief product officer Anil Chakravarthy. As Chakravarthy becomes CEO, current chief Sohaib Abbasi will be chairman of the board.

Why would Microsoft and Salesforce buy into Informatica? Both companies have strong partnerships with Informatica and collaborate on data integration technology. It's worth noting that Informatica has built its cloud tools on Amazon Web Services.

Informatica goes private in $5.3 billion deal | Informatica CEO Abbasi on data, scale, leadership, and innovation

By going private, Informatica is betting it can become "a multi-billion dollar leader in all things data." Like other tech giants that have gone private---BMC, Dell and a host of others---Informatica argued that it will have more flexibility and time to carry out its research and development and product roadmaps.

Abbasi noted that Informatica can now be "measured in years, not quarters."

The strategy under new CEO Chakravarthy will largely remain the same. Informatica sill focus on cloud integration, big data integration, master data management tools and data security.

Informatica also announced that Bruce Chizen, former CEO of Adobe, will join the company's board.

According to its fourth quarter earnings presentation, Informatica is looking to become a company more based on recurring revenue and subscriptions. In 2014, Informatica, which will cease trading today, had revenue of $1.05 billion.