Last weekend brought the intriguing rumor that Salesforce is in late stage talks to acquire data integration vendor Informatica.     This followed the previous week’s rumor that Google-parent Alphabet is consideringan offer for Salesforce-competitor HubSpot , and came the same week as a slew of partnership announcements tied to Snowflake’s Marketing Data Cloud Forum . You don’t need a crazy wall to see how these events are connected.   Cloud database vendors including Google and Snowflake are expanding into marketing applications.   This poses an obvious threat to customer cloud vendors like Salesforce, in good part because it expands the ability of IT and data teams to build their own solutions rather than buying them.   Viewed in this light, Informatica helps Salesforce to compete by strengthening its ties with IT and data teams.…