Before launching artificial intelligence agents, businesses want control over their data. Despite catch up acquisitions, Salesforce, Databricks, and Snowflake could lose that race to EnterpriseDB.

In the last month, three leading technology companies announced $9.3 billion worth of deals to acquire data management companies in quick succession. These include:

Why this flurry of acquisitions? In a nutshell, companies want to control the data they use to build AI agents about which I wrote in my recent book, Brain Rush. “We surveyed our customers and the number one topic was sovereign artificial intelligence and data,” Enterprise DB CEO Kevin Dallas told me in a June 5 interview.

Controlling their own data is essential for making AI agents that are worth the investment. “Eighty-seven percent of our customers are talking about this topic,” Dallas told me.

“Fifty percent of our customers plan to invest in their data and AI platforms. Data is a deal differentiator — it drives value to the customer and maket is hard for competitors to replicate,” he added.

Dallas joined Enterprise DB — a popular database for transaction-intensive industries such as payment systems, flight reservations, and banking — as CEO in August 2023 aiming to deliver what these customers were asking for.

With the upcoming launch of Enterprise DB’s product, Dallas sees itself getting a jump on Salesforce, Databricks, and Snowflake. “They will take the next six to 12 months integrating their acquisitions and we are ahead,” Dallas said.

Databricks sees great opportunity ahead from its Neon acquisition. That’s because customers are eager to create agents and need to build databases to handle all the data those agents require.

“Pretty much every customer we have is super excited and wants to leverage agents,” Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi told the Journal. Neon’s Postrgres technology is a popular way for developers to build those databases, he added.

Salesforce — whose shares have fallen 18% this year — is enthusiastic about its partnership with Informatica. By combining Informatica’s data management expertise with Salesforce’s Agentforce and Data Cloud services, the deal will create the “most complete, agent-read data platform in the industry”, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told IT Pro.

Snowflake — which has enjoyed a 34.4% stock price appreciation this year — is bullish on the deal’s. Crunchy Data will be part of Snowflake Postgres.“The vision here is that Snowflake Postgres will simplify how developers build, deploy and scale agents and apps,” Snowflake senior vice president of engineering Vivek Raghunathan told the Journal

Analysts have a mixed view of this acquisition — seeing potential benefits for customers while posing significant integration challenges.

Some see the acquisition as helping enterprise users to implement AI agents more quickly. Salesforce customers will be able to access and use customer data — within Salesforce or external systems — to deliver “actionable insights across every channel and touchpoint,” Forrester Analyst Noel Yuhanna told VentureBeat.

“Critically, it accelerates Salesforce’s ability to deploy agentic AI, enabling low-code, low-maintenance AI solutions that reduce complexity and dramatically shorten time to value,” he added.

This acquisition will ultimately integrate the capabilities required to build effective AI agents. “A successful agent strategy depends on the integration of three domains: models, applications and data,” BARC vice president of research Kevin Petrie told VentureBeat. “Salesforce gains significant strength in the data realm, especially metadata and cataloging, through this acquisition.”

The integration problems stem from the overlap between data management and integration tools from Informatica and roughly the same technology from MuleSoft — which Salesforce acquired in 2018, noted ITPro.

“Most enterprises are going to need one platform, for application and data integration,” CEO of SnapLogic and co-founder of Informatica Gaurav Dhillon told ITPro.

“But on the other hand, it will likely create massive turmoil for Informatica (and MuleSoft) customers. That turmoil is inevitable when two legacy integration platforms like MuleSoft and Informatica have to be squeezed down to one; to truly get a grip on important business data about customers, suppliers and markets. This integration could be a “slow, painful process” that takes years, even if all goes to plan,” he added.

The merger of these two companies will help companies build AI agents more quickly. “Right now, there’s no place to be able to track the entire trajectory of software development agents,” app-development startup Replit CEO Amjad Masad told the Journal.

“Databricks’ Neon acquisition will make it easier for Replit to manage its agent-building capabilities. We’re dying not to have to build everything ourselves,” he added.

Since more than 80% of Neon’s databases are built automatically rather than by human database administrators, the technology will help enterprises build AI agents more efficiently.

“Neon’s serverless autoscaling approach to PostgreSQL is important for AI because it allows agents and AI projects to grow as needed without artificially coupling storage and compute needs together,” said Amalgam Insights CEO and Chief Analyst Hyoun Park, noted VentureBeat.

Snowflake’s acquisition of Crunchy Data is “a defensive and offensive maneuver,” noted Futurum Group.

“By moving decisively to own Postgres talent and IP, Snowflake is making a clear statement: the battle for enterprise AI will be won not only with large language models and analytics alone but with the ability to supercharge these technologies,” Futurum Group added.

Enterprise DB is growing revenue faster than 20% annually, Dallas said.

He envisions the company’s upcoming product launch as delivering what customers need. “We are very clear on what our platform must deliver. Companies want open source (Postgres); transaction, analytics, and AI capabilities, a single pane of glass through which to view their large data estates, shorter time to implement AI agents, and the power to decide where the company runs its agentic AI applications,” he added.

Enterprise DB says it is ahead of the competition. “We are six to 12 months ahead of the market in an AI first, sovereign first world. We have put in a lot of work. Now we get to enjoy. It will be exciting,” Dallas concluded.

I look forward to seeing whether any of these rivals can help turn agentic AI into the first killer app for generative AI.