We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerExchange, and SAS Data Management based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."One of the most valuable features for us is the metadata repository because it can easily understand the lineage of first target mapping. My company and I also find Informatica really easy to use—when a consultant joins our company, in just a few days to a few weeks, they can understand how to use it—so we prefer to use this ETL tool."
"It is very comprehensive in terms of connector and transformation capabilities from both a source and target perspective."
"Technical support is great. It's one of the reasons we really like them. When you compare support from IBM and support from Informatica, Informatica is much better."
"Informatica PowerCenter is a very good ETL tool."
"Reusable definition of data sources and the out-of-the-box availability of a large number maplets for common transformation functions."
"The greatest feature is that it is very easy to have someone come in and jump right in. It is one of the nicest tools in terms of getting a person acquainted quickly."
"What I like the most is that we have to deal with less while writing the queries."
"To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions. Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use. Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle."
"The solution can connect to different systems i.e. mainframe, IMS or AS/400 Legacy Systems."
"The product’s flexibility is valuable."
"From the product feature or product capability perspective, the aspects around integration, transformation, and standardization are valuable. It's fairly easy to use. It has a GUI-based interface."
"It is a scalable and versatile solution."
"Provides a significant amount of control over the landscape and overall implementation."
"The main benefit of PowerExchange is its native real-time capabilities. Competing tools are counting on third-party packages or Oracle to offer real-time capabilities. However, Informatica has a native ability to scan the data on the file system level and capture the changes almost instantly when I push it to the consumers. The solution has a powerful built-in replication engine."
"The agentless RCDC enablement through PowerExchange is a great idea and has worked very well so far."
"Overall, it's a good tool. It's currently number one on the market. It pretty much has all the necessary capabilities to pull the incremental data from the source system, technically speaking."
"I am impressed with the tool's ability to customize."
"If you compare it to SQL, the memory and development times are very quick."
"Its robustness is valuable. It is a full-fledged suite. We have a data warehouse model, and there are also a lot of data quality management tools. The repository and all other tools are there. So, it is a full package in terms of reporting tools."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The tool is reliable, quick, and powerful."
"The solution is very stable. We haven't faced any issues with glitches or bugs. We haven't had any crashes."
"In terms of which features I have found most valuable, I would say the importing and exporting features. Additionally, the data sorting, categorizing and summarizing features, especially how it can summarize based on categories. These are the key features."
"The product offers very good flexibility."
"Its interface can be modernized. It is an old product. I have been working with it for 14 years, and it still looks the same. It hasn't been modernized much. It also needs to handle more modern formats, such as JSON files. It works with the old text files and databases, but it does not always work with the newer, modern stuff. You need to make your own programs to support that kind of stuff. Support is also a kind of difficult with Informatica. They don't do direct support and rely on using their distributors around the globe for support, which means that you kind of have to go through this layer of different companies before you get help."
"The developer tool documentation can be enhanced with a more clear explanation of each utility, accompanied by relevant examples, so that developers are able to create programs with ease."
"I would like to see it be able to import data from NoSQL."
"The UI is outdated and old-fashioned, at least in our current version. Also, we have experienced some stability issues with the Workflow Monitor application."
"What needs improvement in Informatica PowerCenter is the cloud experience because, nowadays, other companies, such as AWS, Azure, and Google, have more experience in the cloud. The pricing for Informatica PowerCenter on the cloud is also very expensive for customers, so some customers prefer open-source tools or lower-priced tools, such as Azure. From my point of view, Informatica must work on the pricing policy and review the policy on the cloud for Informatica PowerCenter or propose more tools with lower pricing. Clients want the automatic integration of Informatica PowerCenter with other tools. Currently, the integration process is manual, and you have to add other tools to facilitate the integration, especially with the DevOps methodology. You need scripts and tools for the integration, and you'll need to use other integration tools if you want automatic deployment for Informatica PowerCenter, so this is another area for improvement in the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for the integration with APIs to be simpler, because currently, the API integration feature of Informatica PowerCenter is very difficult. It's not intuitive. You have to facilitate API integration and the real-time streaming of messages in Kafka, for example, so that should be improved."
"There is a need to buy a separate license if one wishes to connect with some kind of SAP system, such as SalesForce."
"There can be scalability issues. Huge amounts of data ingestion will impact performance."
"I would like to see improvements made to the custom transformations. It should be more open for users that want to write their own code and use cases."
"The solution could be made more user-friendly. The configurations are also quite difficult."
"I would like the stability to improve."
"Should diversify more, maybe with a reporting and visualization utility,"
"The major shortcoming of PowerExchange is high availability and failover. None of the versions we've used to date have had the out-of-the-box ability to enable failover and high-availability requirements. This is a significant challenge and risk."
"V10.2 is very stable, but we are still struggling to make V10.5 stable. We found services that were down, and PowerExchange stopped working."
"Apache Spark has a machine learning algorithm, an area where Informatica PowerExchange lacks."
"The product's high costs can be an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Pushdown optimization could be improved."
"The pricing of the solution needs to be improved. They need to work to make it more affordable."
"We find we often have to go back and re-train users when there are changes made to the solution because the changes are not intuitive."
"The solution could use better documentation."
"One problem is accessing the data using a solution other than SAS. The SAS data, which we create in the SAS, cannot be accessed by other tools. We can't open those data in other applications. So we need to have that application in place."
"We implemented it a while ago, and we are trying to improve the data delivery performance. We are looking into how to get faster and automated reporting. We would need better designs and workflows."
"I would like the tool to include the ability to automate the modifications of the integrations."
"Very little needs to improve but perhaps a nicer graphic interface and remaining competetive in the growing field of data analytics."
"With SAS Data Management, you have to purchase an external driver, configure all of the tables for all of the data that you will extract from Salesforce. It's not a straightforward process."
