IBM InfoSphere DataStage Reviews

IBM InfoSphere DataStage was mostly used for ETL and data integration purposes, so extract, transfer, and load, including some data quality use cases. My team used the solution to extract data from various sources, do some business transformations, load the data into a target database, or generate files.

The best feature of IBM InfoSphere DataStage for me was that it was very much user-friendly. The solution didn't require that much raw coding because most of its features were drag and drop, plus it had a large number of functionalities.

What needs improvement in IBM InfoSphere DataStage is its pricing. The pricing for the solution is higher than its competitors, so a lot of the clients my company has worked with prefer other tools over IBM InfoSphere DataStage because of the high price tag.

Another area for improvement in the solution stems from a lot of new types of databases, for example, databases in the cloud and big data have become available, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage is working on various connectors for different data sources, but that still isn't up-to-date, meaning that some connectors are missing for modern data sources.

The latest version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage also has a complex architecture, so my team faced frequent outages and that should be improved as well.

I've been working with IBM InfoSphere DataStage for more than seven years.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a stable product and it's been in the market for quite some time, but in its latest version, there's been some instability caused by the new features introduced in the solution. The architecture was changed a lot and that was causing issues and frequent outages that my company had to go back to IBM for troubleshooting. My team didn't face issues in the earlier version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage. It was the latest version that had instability issues.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a very scalable product.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage has a pretty good technical support, but with the new version, particularly the new architecture and the microservice concept, support sometimes takes a bit of time, even for the IBM team to figure out what's wrong, but once that's been figured out, the team comes up with the solution or with a patch.

Setting up IBM InfoSphere DataStage was easy.

How long the deployment takes would depend on certain factors, but it usually takes just two to three hours.

I have no information on the exact pricing for IBM InfoSphere DataStage because the solution is usually procured by the clients my company works with, though the pricing is higher compared to other solutions, so many clients choose to go with a different solution rather than IBM InfoSphere DataStage.

The last version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage which I've worked with was version 11.7.

I work for an IT service company that works with multiple clients on multiple projects, so close to two hundred people use IBM InfoSphere DataStage for various clients.

Per project, on average, three people take care of IBM InfoSphere DataStage deployment, maintenance, and support-related activities.

My advice to people looking into implementing IBM InfoSphere DataStage is that it's a very good product. A lot of similar products have come up nowadays, but this product has a pretty good reputation as it's been in the market for quite a while. I do think other products such as Talend, Informatica PowerCenter, and Informatica Data Quality are better than IBM InfoSphere DataStage.

My rating for IBM InfoSphere DataStage is eight out of ten.

My company has a partnership with IBM.

I'm working for an insurance provider. They have applications where they register claims, insurance, et cetera. We get a flat file from the vendor and put those flat files into our Oracle Data Warehouse and report on the data. We publish those reports to our institutional investors, partners, and business users, including banks. 

The performance is good.

It is working fine.

The solution is stable.

It can scale well.

There can be data quality issues sometimes. It might not be the application. It may be a human error or an issue with the users or developers as well. 

The initial setup can be complex. 

I've been using the solution for a year.

The solution is very stable and reliable. We use it in production without issue.

It is scalable and easy to extend. We have had issues with our data pipelines and were able to scale up within a few days. 

There are around 150 users on the solution right now. 

We do have plans to increase the number of users. We can easily increase or decrease as needed. 

I've never used IBM technical support. 

Another product was used previously. We are a financial services organization. We've used Oracle as the financial business suite. With Oracle, there is DB2 in the back end. There are SAP data services used as well, and there's integration between the applications. 

I did not directly set up the solution. 

Right now, we have the product on-premises.

It is an IBM tool, and there are a lot of steps to deploy it. It's not straightforward. You need to have experience. You need to create replication objects, and you need to learn the commands and scripts. It can be quite complex. 

You do need to have some third-party assistance. A consultant needs to assist with the setup. 

The company has a contract with IBM. I'm not sure of the exact pricing. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

I haven't used it too much. I need more time with the solution. 

Whether another user should try it or not depends on the environment. If you already have a lot of Oracle applications, it might make sense. It can do everything any other ETL can do.

We use the solution for data warehousing and data migration. 

The solution is one of the best solutions. 

It is very powerful. It's quite agile. 

It works with multiple servers and offers high availability. It can handle very complex architecture. It has good active-passive capabilities. It makes migrations very easy. 

It is stable.

The solution can scale. 

It offers pretty good support services, at least in France.

A lot about the solution could be improved. 

I'd like to be able to do more with the data and metadata, including copy and pasting, et cetera. It has become easier with the cloud, however. 

I'd like to have the ability to customize code. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. I've used it since 2006. I started with version 7.

The product is stable and reliable. I'd rate it eight out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash. 

The solution is scalable. I'd rate the scalability eight out of ten. 

We have six or seven developers on the solution. 

I tend to do most of the troubleshooting. I do not need the assistance of technical support as I am quite knowledgeable. That said, my understanding is that support in France is very good. 

I've also used SQL and Talend. I've also used Informatica, Spark, and AWS Glue. I use a variety of solutions for various clients. 

The installation is pretty fast. It doesn't take too long. We did a deployment a few years ago, and it only took maybe two to three days. We updated it to version 11 at that point. The length of time depends on the architecture. It can vary a bit. 

First, we have to install it on the web server. After that, we have to set up the repository with Oracle or DB2. That takes a lot of time. When you are a big organization, it takes a lot of people. There are configurations and prerequisites that have to be considered. 

Only one person is needed to manage the maintenance. 

We handle the installation ourselves. I handle it mostly on my own. 

I have not noted any ROI statistics.

The pricing depends on the setup. However, we paid $100,000 as a one-time cost for an on-premises setup. 

You do have extra costs when using the product on-premises. For example, you need to have servers to host it. 

I used to be a partner with IBM. I have to reset the partnership. 

I would recommend the solution for on-premises setups. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

The solution is mainly used for, marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, and home loans.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to incorporate very complex business rules in Data Stage.

The solution can be a bit more user-friendly, similar to Informatica.

I would like the solution to have some basic streaming functionality added.

I have been using the solution for one year.

We don't currently have much in our production environment. We are gradually moving into production, so whatever small setup we have is okay for now. I'm taking the overall perspective into account and I think we do have dependencies on the other jobs. This is purely based on the feedback we receive, which sometimes means that we're not able to run our process because there are dependencies, similar to other jobs also. The jobs don't complete on time. We received feedback that there was a problem handling data, which caused jobs to fail and needed to be rerun. This could be product-specific, design-specific, or anything else, but I think there is room for improvement in terms of stability. I would give the solution a seven out of ten.

I think that scalable systems should also have good performance. The scalability of this solution in my opinion may not be on the same level as Informatica Power Exchange Data Integration.

I give the scalability of the solution a seven out of ten. We are facing problems whenever we have huge amounts of data and there are job failures. We need to take care of how to tackle that situation. 

We didn't need to do anything because the customer, with whom we are working on the project, had already set everything up for us. The initial setup was not in our preview.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

We have a separate platform team or support team. In case of any query, it used to be routed to this team, which was internally used to deal with the Data Stage people.

I'm not a technical expert because I haven't been a developer for 12 years. This is what I understand from the feedback I've received. Informatica Power Exchange Data Integration is much better from a scalability perspective, compared to IBM InfoSphere Data Stage. Scalability, user-friendliness, and inclusion of different business rules are all important, but I think Informatica Power Exchange Data Integration gives us one step further on that.

We use it for many kinds of projects. For example, we use it for business intelligence, master data management, data quality, data governance, data integration to SAP, Oracle retail, and real-time integration.

The concept of integration is a valuable feature of the product. The product excels in this area. In fact, it is one of the two leading products in the integration field. 

Based on my experience, interacting with data through integration has been more profitable than any other products or projects. Data integration is a reliable feature.

The graphical user interface (GUI) feels a lot like the interfaces from the 1980s. Regarding IBM, they initially indicated that version 8.11.7 would be their final release. We require more connectors to establish clear connections to cloud services. Connecting to the cloud is not easy or transparent within the product. Although the product has the potential to connect to the cloud, configuring and setting it up is challenging.

In future releases, connecting to the cloud should be easy and transparent.

I’ve been using this solution since 2005. I’m currently using version 11.7.

The stability of the solution is ten on ten.

The scalability of the solution is nine on ten.

Setting up the system is difficult and requires a lot of technical expertise. It demands a high level of experience during the setup process. 

However, despite the difficulty, our team, possibly the only one in Mexico, is good at quickly completing the setup.

Most of our implementations or installations are on-premises, accounting for approximately 90% of the total. The remaining 10% of our implementations are on the cloud.

The product has proven to be exceptional and highly competitive in the market. As a result, I have experienced substantial financial success with the product. There are many examples we have for the ROI.

The price of the product is reasonable, especially for mid-sized companies. We have been successfully selling to several mid-sized companies.

The market is indeed filled with numerous solutions. Currently, I am exploring Microsoft's offerings, particularly their integration capabilities. Also, the purpose and functionalities of Azure are pretty interesting. I have been working with Quick Link, and specifically, I have been working with Azure Database.

If you want to learn about integrating data, this product offers a valuable learning opportunity. Then you can consider transitioning to the next product in line. The underlying concept remains the same. 

I believe this solution is more reliable and provides a better understanding of data integration, data quality management, and master data management. It covers all aspects of data management, making it easier to learn. 

This is my perspective, possibly influenced by my extensive experience working with this product for many years. It is the main strength of this solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

Right now, I'm working for a telecom company. So, we are using IBM InfoSphere DataStage for constructing ETL jobs for them so that they can load data from their various different sources into their warehouse.

The valuable feature of the solution is, I think, its functionality. So, there are a lot of transformations that you can apply by just using a transformer. Also, you don't need to complicate your SQL queries while trying to transform your data. Hence, the transformer is something I like in the solution.

I don't know if it's just a problem with me, but the issue I see is that when we connect to the server from the client, especially when you're going to run a job or something, the whole connection is really slow. It takes a lot of time to actually trigger your job and then go into the logs and other stuff. So all of this is really time-consuming.

I have been using IBM InfoSphere DataStage for five years. Also, I am using IBM InfoSphere DataStage Version 11.7. My company is a consultant for DataStage.

Most of the time, it is stable. Sometimes there are some issues you don't understand and go away when you have a read-only job. But that is quite rare. Other times, it seems quite stable.

The solution's scalability is really good. In terms of parallel jobs, we are using multi-instance jobs where you can scale them easily.

In my company, my team is spread across multiple countries, including Pakistan and India.

I haven't contacted IBM's technical support.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. Also, it's a one-time activity. It is better to have a competent person for deployment since newbies cannot do it themselves.

When I started using IBM InfoSphere DataStage, it was already deployed on the server. So I did not have to go through the installation phase.

ROI is something that the client takes care of, and I think they must be keeping track of it and getting a certain result indicating a good ROI. So, that's why they may have continued using it over the years.

Before DataStage, I did not evaluate other options. Our client was already comfortable with DataStage, so that's what we had to use.

I recommend that other people who want to use it go for DataStage on the cloud. The on-prem version of the solution looks and feels old. Also it's time-consuming as well. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

We are supporting a healthcare domain vendor located in the US. We get data from various domains, such as health insurance. We have member data, provider data, and consumer data. We also have client-related stuff and broker-related commission data. 

We get the data from these domains, and after receiving it, we apply the transformation rules, such as joints. We also do the standardization of data by formatting and doing field validations, such as formatting the date field and doing data and time validations. We also do other normal transformations with some business logic. After applying all this, we send the data to the business.

We are mostly using transmission rules. It has a lot of functions and logic related to transmission. It is a user-friendly tool with in-built functions.

It doesn't have any big data connections. It would be good to have them because most of the systems are moving towards big data. There should also be a user-friendly way to interact with the cloud. 

Its loading process is very slow. It takes a lot of time for around 5 or 6 million records, and we are not able to provide real-time data to the vendors due to this delay. Its performance needs to be improved.

It is also like a legacy system. It is not updated much. In higher versions, they only do small changes. We would like to have new features and new technologies.

I have been using this solution for around 15 years.

It is easy to scale. In my project, six or seven people are using this solution, but in my company, we have around 15 to 16 projects.

We have an internal admin team for support. If they are not able to solve an issue, they raise a ticket with the IBM team. In the last ten years, we had to contact IBM only two to three times. Our internal team is able to handle most of the issues.

Its initial setup has moderate complexity. It required some coordination with the vendor because their system also needs to be ready. We also get maintenance support from them.

Our internal team takes care of group licensing and cost. We don't have individual licenses. We have group licensing at the company level. Usually, IBM doesn't charge anything separately on the licensing side.

For storage and everything else, we are paying around $6,000 per month, which is not very high. It includes Linux data storage, execution, and licensing. They're charging $40 for one-hour execution. Based on that, we are spending around $2,000 on the production environment and $1,000 on the lower environment for testing and development-side executions. For the mainframe, we are using the Db2 mainframe database, and we are spending around $1,000 on the Db2 mainframe database as well. All this comes out to be around $6,000. We, however, would like to have some cost reduction.

DataStage is a good tool for the ETL platform, but it is not suitable for a huge volume of data. It works well for low to medium volume of data. I would advise others to do a feasibility study and evaluate available options in the market in terms of features and cost.

I would rate IBM InfoSphere DataStage a seven out of ten.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a core ETL tool. We use it with source systems like mainframes. DataStage is perfectly suited for extracting data from mainframes.

IBM is stable and accurate to monitor. It's easy to understand to monitor the data lineage from source to target.

DataStage is quite expensive. It is too hard to find a consultant using DataStage in Turkey.

I have been using IBM InfoSphere DataStage for three years. I also used this solution for two years back in 2009-10.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The quality and response time of support is fine. It's pretty quick.

Positive

Informatica is the first choice for me. It's easy to use and not so expensive compared to DataStage.

You install IBM InfoSphere DataStage once you've set it up properly. It's robust and reliable, but initially configuring it can be challenging.

The first consideration is the type of source system they have, whether it is a mainframe or not. Another key indicator for me to suggest DataStage is if the client has other IBM ecosystems, such as data quality or IBM governance tools. This makes it highly suitable because you can easily establish data lineage.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.