After Saelsforce (CRM) agreed to buy Demandware (DWRE), RBC Capital believes the deal will boost Salesforce's competitive advantage by enabling it to offer an e-commerce application. The firm believes that Demandware will be able to more easily penetrate large retailers following the deal. It thinks that the transaction will increase the competitive pressures faced by SAP (SAP), Oracle (ORCL), and IBM (IBM).

Oracle Corporation Japan "announced that it plans to invest more than $8B over the next 10 years to meet the growing demand for cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Japan. The investment will grow Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's footprint across Japan. In addition, to help customers and partners address the digital sovereignty requirements in Japan, Oracle will significantly expand its operations and support engineering teams with Japan-based personnel. Oracle plans to increase local customer support of its public cloud regions in Tokyo and Osaka and its local operations teams for Oracle Alloy and OCI Dedicated Region. This will enable governments and businesses across Japan to continue to move their mission-critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud and embrace sovereign AI solutions."

Morgan Stanley notes that Salesforce (CRM) management has advised investors that strategic M&A would be coming back into the company's toolkit at some point and recent press speculation about the company being in advanced talks to buy Informatica (INFA) suggests the company "may be ready to break the ice." While any significant M&A brings execution risks and "increased angst from investors still harboring memories of prior expensive deals," the analyst says a rumored transaction with Informatica, if it were to be confirmed and the deal were to be struck around a $12B enterprise value, looks to meet Salesforce's "criteria for responsible M&A." The firm, which sees potential for a complementary expansion that further buttresses the capabilities of Mulesoft and Data Cloud, has an Overweight rating and $350 price target on Salesforce shares.