Today, Informatica is going public, once again. The company, which went private in a$5.3 billion deal back in 2015, expects to raise$841 million on this round. Informatica's emergence from private equity comes as the company has transitioned to a cloud-first business where subscriptions have climbed to nearly half of overall revenue.

Informatica's journey into private equity has been a familiar one: A company seeks to transform its core business without the pressure of having to deliver quarterly results to Wall Street. It's a well-trod path that has been followed by a wide range of household names, and most recently in the data world, Cloudera. As with most PE financing, the objective was to pivot the company's core business. Namely, shift the revenue pipeline from the classic perpetual license and maintenance model to subscription; rearchitect its cloud offering into a modern cloud-native offering based on microservices; embed AI-powered automation; and finally, as icing on the cake, move its cloud pricing to usage-based.

Overall revenue during the 5