Data Wars: SAP Vs. Salesforce In The AI-Driven Enterprise Future
The past weeks certainly brought a lot of news, with SAP Sapphire and Salesforce’s surely strategically timed announcement of acquiring Informatica, ranging at the top. I have covered both in recent articles. The enterprise software landscape is crackling with energy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly the star of the show. It isn’t anymore about AI as a mere feature; it’s about AI as the strategic core of enterprise software. Two recent announcements underscored this shift: SAP’s ambitious AI-centric vision that was unveiled at its Sapphire 2025 conference, and, arriving hot on its heels, Salesforce’s agreement to acquire data management titan Informatica for $8 billion. Both signal an intensified battle for AI supremacy, where trusted, enterprise-wide data is the undisputed new monarch. Of course, SAP and Salesforce are not the only ones duking this one out. SAP’s Sapphire Vision: An AI-Powered, Integrated Enterprise At its Sapphire 2025 event in Orlando, SAP laid out a sweeping vision for an AI-driven future. The central themes resonating from Sapphire were “AI everywhere” and “the AI flywheel”, with intelligence deeply woven into its integrated suite of applications and powered by the SAP Business Data Cloud as a strong, unified data layer. Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, is slated to become “omnipresent,” extending its reach not only across the entire SAP ecosystem but also into third-party applications. It’s designed to proactively assist users and launch autonomous “Joule Agents” to automate a wide array of workflows. SAP has ambitious plans to significantly expand its library of these specialized agents. Underpinning this is the SAP AI Foundation that includes Joule Studio for agent development, a Knowledge Graph...
Informatica – Salesforce’s Precious; one Platform to Govern all Data
The news On May 27, 2025, Salesforce announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica for about $8bn. According to the press release, “bringing together Informatica’s cloud-native capabilities — including its extensive data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and MDM — with the Salesforce platform will unlock new capabilities for Salesforce’s enterprise data stack, delivering a complete solution to the challenges of AI at scale”. The acquisition is planned to enhance Salesforce’ data foundation which is critical for deploying agentic AI. “The combination of Informatica’s rich data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services with the Salesforce platform will establish a unified architecture for agentic AI — enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across the modern enterprise”. The bigger picture For agentic AI systems – or agents in general – to operate efficiently, it needs two things: data and data. Data from a vendor’s own systems as well as data from external systems that can get harmonized and accessed/used by the software agents. SAP during its annual Sapphire event just made exactly this point by showcasing how its Joule family of agents can use data from SAP and non-SAP applications. As there is no vendor to rule them all (thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien for this inspiration) there is an importance on again two things: (zero copy) data integration and data management including its governance. These seemingly not-so-sexy capabilities are sorely lacked by many application vendors but, again, thanks to AI, increasingly necessary. Again, AI, especially autonomous AI systems, cannot be...
Agentforce 2.0 – Champ or Chump?
The News On December 17, 2024, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 after introducing Agentforce 1.0 during the company’s Dreamforce event. With it, it repositions Agentforce as a “Digital Labor Platform” that is capable of supplying businesses with an infinite workforce. This way, they shall be able to address internal challenges like labor shortages, fixed capacity, stalled productivity, or burnout. In addition, they increase their ability to work with increasing customer demands like no patience, their wish for personalization and empathy and with a knowledgeable expert, etc. “Agentforce 2.0 is the newest version of Agentforce and the first digital labor platform for enterprises — a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This new release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy AI agents in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – enabling teams to scale their workforce with a custom Agentforce capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy.” Agentforce 2.0 comes with a library of prebuilt skills, which are jobs that digital agents can perform. These skills do not only cover Salesforce software but also cover partner software and, with the help of Mulesoft, any other system. The agent builder, that is part of Agentforce 2.0 enables the building of new agents/skills using natural language. New agents can be built using the skill library or custom logic. Agentforce 2.0 is live and will get additional capabilities throughout Q1/2025. The Bigger Picture AI has hit an inflection point. We came from rule-based...