We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerExchange, and SSIS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."UI-based ability to create data mapping."
"The most complex task, in this case, was to read and transform BLOB data, and Java transformation in Informatica Power Center was a great solution."
"Reusable definition of data sources and the out-of-the-box availability of a large number maplets for common transformation functions."
"Can manage a huge quantity of data and provide reliability."
"PowerCenter performs well during data transformation and optimization."
"If the systems get migrated or upgraded, the amount of resources required are very minimal. We can change the connections and establish a new connection. It's very helpful."
"The most valuable features of Informatica PowerCenter are the ease of use, and development, and is simple to find resources."
"I would recommend that others considering the solution go ahead and use it for any batch and high volume loads with complex transactions."
"The scalability is excellent."
"Provides a significant amount of control over the landscape and overall implementation."
"The agentless RCDC enablement through PowerExchange is a great idea and has worked very well so far."
"The solution can connect to different systems i.e. mainframe, IMS or AS/400 Legacy Systems."
"This product is easy to install and it can be done in a few hours."
"The most valuable feature is connectivity to data sources."
"The user interface and user experience are perfectly all right."
"It is easy to integrate the solution with other tools."
"The performance is good."
"The performance is better than doing it in some alternative ways. We don't have to worry about so much manual work."
"The most valuable feature of SSIS is that you can take data from other servers which are not MS SQL Server or Oracle."
"With this solution, there is the potential to expand, so that you can immediately write code onto the SQL server."
"The workflow features have been very valuable. You can have automated workflows and all the steps are controlled. The workflow functionality of integration services is excellent."
"Data Flows are the main component we use. These can range from a simple source to sink ETL, to many source to many sink dataflows."
"You can get data from any data source with SSIS and dump it to any outside source. It is helpful. Getting, extracting, converting, and dumping data doesn't require much effort because we can do everything in the user interface. You drag and drop, then give the required input. It's intuitive."
"The data reader is the most valuable feature."
"The solution does not scale."
"The documentation could be improved."
"We had to take on a large volume of data from the legacy Sybase system. This was taking a very long time, i.e., more than a day. We were trying to improve it with partitions to gpload, but we were told that we can't go more than four partitions."
"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."
"While on-premises is a better product, we really need to move to the cloud and need the cloud to be as robust as this product."
"Informatica PowerCenter is outdated and would benefit from modernization. They should have a very good migration strategy from Informatica PowerCenter to AACF. Informatica PowerCenter there is no point in using it, you have to use a cloud version."
"I would like to see it be able to import data from NoSQL."
"PowerCenter could be improved by having more big data components. Normally, we prefer Informatica as a relational database, but nowadays, companies are trying to understand and use big data components. I think it would be useful if we had more chances to create a hub ecosystem because customers try to use some data integration tasks by SQL, Spark and Spark codes, and Scala, but at the end of the day, the company will understand that we need to trace all the steps. An ETL tool is a must for that company, if we're talking about the regulated industries like finance, telcos, etc. If Informatica's biggest ecosystems feature were okay, I would prefer to use it."
"Real-time has not been enhanced that much over the past few years. There has not been as many features added like they did before."
"I would like the stability to improve."
"I would like to have easier integration with cloud platforms."
"Technical support can be improved with respect to delays in ticket response time."
"Should diversify more, maybe with a reporting and visualization utility,"
"The solution needs better integration with other tools."
"Pushdown optimization could be improved."
"Informatica is very expensive in all aspects, so the pricing is something that could be improved."
"We're in the process of switching to Informatica, and we need to work out data lineage and data profiling and to improve the quality of our data. SSIS, however, is not that compatible with Informatica. We managed to connect it to Informatica Metadata Manager, but we don't get good lineage, so we have to redo all our ETLs using the Informatica process in order to accept the proper data lineage."
"We In upgrading SSIS, we encountered challenges fixing SQL Server and performance issues, including problems during a failover in our data warehouse."
"We'd like them to develop data exploration more."
"The solution could improve by having quicker release updates."
"Microsoft's technical support has decreased in quality over the last few years, becoming less responsive and tending to pass problems on instead of solving them."
"The debugging could be improved because when it came to solving the errors that I've experienced in the past, I've had to look at the documentation for more information."
"I would like to see better integration with Power BI."
"Microsoft should offer an on-premises support warranty for those using that deployment. They seem to be withdrawing from on-premises options."
