Informatica deepens Microsoft ties with Foundry boost

Informatica has expanded its collaboration with Microsoft, adding its data management tools to Microsoft Foundry and broadening integration with Microsoft Fabric.

The announcement focuses on two product changes for joint customers using Microsoft's cloud data and AI services.

First, Informatica's Headless Intelligent Data Management Cloud is now available within Microsoft Foundry through its Model Context Protocol servers. Customers building AI agents in Foundry can discover and connect Informatica services directly from that environment.

These services include Cloud Data Governance and Catalog Metadata Search, Cloud Address Verification, Customer Identification, Job Management and Data Provisioning. The setup is intended to give AI agents access to governed, traceable data from hybrid and multicloud environments.

Foundry access

Microsoft Foundry is used by Azure customers to build AI agents, but many need data spread across different systems and cloud environments. By placing its tools inside Foundry, Informatica aims to make that data easier to use in agent-based workflows without separate discovery and integration steps outside the Microsoft platform.

The second part of the expansion centres on Microsoft Fabric. Informatica has extended Cloud Data Integration support for Fabric to include mass ingestion and Change Data Capture for Fabric Data Warehouse.

This gives customers a way to move large volumes of data into Fabric OneLake or Fabric Data Warehouse and keep it synchronised through incremental updates. The service can ingest data from more than 300 enterprise sources.

Customers can ingest billions of rows each month into Fabric environments, while Change Data Capture is designed to reduce compute use and lower the cost of keeping data current.

Analytics push

The development reflects growing demand from companies trying to connect AI systems with broader analytics estates. Businesses adopting AI agents often face a practical problem: the agents are only as useful as the data they can access, and much of that data remains fragmented across legacy systems, multiple clouds and operational applications.

Informatica cited Salesforce's State of Data & Analytics Report, Second Edition, which found that 89% of data and analytics leaders believe agent interoperability will soon be required to do business. The same proportion said a strong data foundation is the most critical factor for successful AI adoption.

Rahul Auradkar, President and GM of Data Foundations at Salesforce, linked the collaboration to those pressures on enterprise data teams.

"Trusted data for AI and trusted data for analytics are the foundation of scaling responsible, transformational AI," said Rahul Auradkar, President and GM of Data Foundations at Salesforce.

"With our focus on collaboration and innovations with Microsoft, we are meeting Azure customers where AI and analytics converge - delivering enterprise-grade, production-ready capabilities that help to ensure data is high quality and ready for actionable insight at scale," Auradkar said.

The announcement also includes testimony from media group Hearst, which is using Microsoft's data and AI stack as part of a broader enterprise data platform effort.

"Informatica's integrations into Microsoft Azure make them an important part of our journey as we use Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Foundry to build an enterprise data platform that brings our critical data directly into the hands of the business users who need it," said Theodora Bakker, VP of Data at The Hearst Corporation.

For Microsoft, the tie-up adds another specialist data management provider to the ecosystem around Foundry. As technology groups compete to attract corporate AI workloads, software vendors are increasingly trying to make their tools available inside the platforms where customers build and run AI systems, rather than requiring separate deployment and configuration.

Tina Schuchman, Corporate Vice President and GM of Foundry Agents at Microsoft, said Informatica's tools are now listed in the Foundry Tools Catalog.

"Microsoft Foundry continues to expand its tool ecosystem to help customers build and scale AI agents with confidence," said Tina Schuchman, Corporate Vice President and GM of Foundry Agents at Microsoft.

"Informatica's MCP servers, now available in Foundry Tools Catalog, enable us to bring trusted enterprise data and interoperability into our ecosystem - enabling customers to seamlessly operationalize AI at scale with high-quality, governed data," Schuchman said.

The wider commercial backdrop is a race among enterprise software providers to position data governance, integration and metadata services as core infrastructure for AI adoption. Companies have spent years building analytics pipelines, but agentic AI introduces new demands around context, auditability and the ability to connect tools across multiple repositories and applications.

By extending support across Foundry and Fabric, Informatica is positioning its software in two parts of Microsoft's stack that are drawing attention from large organisations: one for building AI agents and another for storing, moving and analysing data. The practical test for customers will be whether those integrations reduce the effort involved in bringing governed data into AI and analytics workflows at scale.