Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

We are using the on-premises version and are working towards moving into the cloud. I design ETL workflows.

I'm pretty focused on narrow processes, including realizing business requirements connected to particular workflows. 

The solution has been issue-free overall. 

The traceability has been extremely useful. You can see all of the workflows, and you can trace the data transformation very easily. Each column in the target can be easily traceable, and you easily can see all that data transformation on the path from the source to the target.

The setup is straightforward. 

It's stable.

The solution can scale a bit. 

Technical support is helpful. 

This product is not on the cloud yet. We need to move to the cloud. 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.

We'd like to see improved lookups in the future. This is a transformation feature that helps us find rows in the database. It would help if this were easier. 

I've used the solution for about one year. 

The stability is great. I'd rate it nine out of ten in terms of reliability. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is okay. I'd rate the ability to extend seven out of ten. We have had problems with large volumes of data.

This is a very popular tool and is used quite extensively. I'm not sure if we plan to expand usage in the future. It would depend on the future development of Azure Data Factory. 

Technical support is helpful and responsive.

I previously used SSIS. I used that at another organization and switched jobs. This company uses Informatica.

We have found the initial setup to be very straightforward. I'd rate it eight out of ten in terms of ease of deployment. 

The future migration to the cloud will be a long process, and we're expecting the migration from on-premises to the cloud to take about half a year. 

I don't deal with pricing or licensing. It's not in my scope of work. 

I'm an end-user. 

The product is a very popular ETL tool. 

There are good courses available to help people learn the product, and it is a valuable tool to get to know. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. It is easy to use and stable and offers good support. However, I'm not sure if it is ideal for smaller companies. Some of the hardware requirements may be difficult to fulfill. 

We use this solution for regular ETL access. All our warehouses are built through Informatica. We also use Informatica to build data marts.

It's very easy to use it to develop mappings and workflows.

Informatica are very rigid when it comes to cloud migrations which discourages customers in moving their solution to the cloud. I cannot simply move my code from on-premise to the cloud. There is a conversion process and that conversion process has to be done by Informatica. They charge a huge amount for their professional service. 

Informatica is not as mature when it comes to cloud solutions and cloud connectors and still they want to charge for cloud IACS adoption. If I compare Informatica with Oracle, Oracle provide almost double the licenses when we move onto a cloud solution, regardless of what on-prem license we have. The migration is free of charge.

In a future release, we would like to have cloud connectors.

We have used this solution for more than 15 years.

This solution is not scalable.

This solution is stable.

The customer support is not great. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

We have not previously used a different solution. We chose Informatica because we needed an enterprise solution. The problem with Informatica data capture is that it is not an end-to-end solution. We have a different automation solution called Oracle GoldenGate. 

The setup is straightforward but we have been doing it for 15 years. A good feature they offer is the backward compatibility which makes the setup seamless.

We did it in-house. 

I would rate the pricing for this solution a six out of ten. The exact pricing depends on various products that you have. We have various Informatica products and it varies from automation to automation.

Informatica is so rigid and so we were trying to look for other partners for our entire ETL process. Modern data solutions are more cost effective and mature with the latest data basis or cloud awareness. We are going to decrease our usage of Informatica.

If you already have Informatica and plan to move to the cloud solution, then you have to evaluate other solutions based on compatibility and do a thorough cost analysis. They have been the market leaders for more than 15 to 20 years. They could use their experience to make better products for modern cloud adoption. 

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

Informatica PowerCenter is basically used for data integration and ETL processing, data extraction from different heterogeneous sources, and putting that data into different relational databases.

PowerCenter has proven to be the most beneficial for our data integration tasks. Informatica PowerCenter provides multiple transformations in one particular toolset. You don't need to apply any coding. 

Those transformations are the most valuable thing in Informatica PowerCenter, which helps to do the data integration part easily.

Error handling capability:

Error handling capability is quite good in Informatica PowerCenter because it provides a very detailed session log, which is really helpful to identify the errors. 

In addition, there are KB articles, which are published by Informatica, that are really helpful. Even if you face any issues or errors, we can resolve that issue. 

If the error is not at all possible to solve with Informatica PowerCenter, we can raise a case with Informatica, and their support team helps us to address that particular issue. If it is not possible to solve with that particular version, they consider it and try to solve it with the next patch or hotfix.

AI Capabilities:

Informatica PowerCenter doesn't fit into AI-related things because it's an on-premise tool, which doesn't have any significant role in the field. It is just an ETL on-premise tool. 

Basically, in the AI field, Informatica PowerCenter is not going to be that impactful. Informatica has launched IICS and IDMC (Informatica Data Management Cloud). Their AI comes into the picture there, but for Informatica PowerCenter, AI doesn't come into the picture at all.

Instead of using SQL queries, Informatica PowerCenter is very helpful when extracting data from multiple sources. That is one of the valuable things. 

Other than that, we can do multiple transformations in Informatica PowerCenter.

For data integration tasks, Informatica PowerCenter provides multiple transformations in one toolset. You don't need to apply coding or other things. The transformations are the most valuable thing in Informatica PowerCenter, which helps to do the data integration part easily.

I have had performance issues with this product. When I deal with very large amounts of data, performance issues arise.

Improvement is needed in terms of some new transformation because API integration and all those things are very critical nowadays. Some level of transformation, new transformation, if they introduce that, would be helpful, other than that, the performance and scalability related things that they need to improve. 

If they are launching another Informatica PowerCenter with a new version, I'm not sure about it because they are promoting IDMC, they are not promoting Informatica PowerCenter.

I've been working in Informatica PowerCenter for around eight plus years.

It is an on-premise environment, so it's not as scalable as compared to Informatica Cloud.

There are around ten-plus developers and around four administrators using this product.

The approximate volume of data we process varies from project to project; on average, it is eight to nine gigabytes of data.

I have experience in Informatica Cloud, IDMC (Informatica Data Management Cloud), Azure Data Factory, and a little bit of Fivetran.

Informatica PowerCenter is a very robust tool. You can implement any kind of complex business logic with it. However, Informatica PowerCenter is a very traditional ETL tool that came into the market very early in the 2000s. They have a very good hold on the market and are able to handle all the complex data problems and business data integration use cases.

Whereas, other tools that came new into the market are less complicated to learn, execute, and create data pipelines. But sometimes, I feel that if some complex business problems arise, then we need to jump into the coding part. And there are not as many transformations available.

The initial setup is not at all easy. Setting up PowerCenter is not at all easy, especially when you are installing your server on Linux machines. It's very complicated, especially the upgrade part, if it is a multi-node cluster environment with high availability.

I would recommend using it. But currently all things are moving to the cloud. Informatica PowerCenter is a little bit lagging behind, and now everybody is moving to the cloud.

So, Informatica itself is promoting the use of IDMC and cloud instead of Informatica PowerCenter. But some clients, like banking and pharmaceutical clients, still prefer traditional on-premises ETL tools. So, in that case Informatica PowerCenter is definitely one of the best and unbeatable tools for enterprises.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to extract and transform data from various sources into databases. Further, it helps us optimize data using Tableau dashboard to make business decisions.

The solution has proved to be an excellent ETL tool for our organization. It is also easier for our higher management to get an overview of the backend activity.

The solution's most valuable feature is its support service. The support team efficiently resolves any technical issues.

They should release new versions for the solution's on-premises setup. It is challenging for us to switch to on-cloud immediately.

We have been using the solution for more than eight years.

It is a very stable solution. We haven't come across any significant stability-related issues with it.

It is a scalable solution. But its licenses are costlier compared to cloud infrastructure.

The solution's support service is excellent.

The solution is straightforward to install and configure. The duration of the deployment depends on the project. In some cases, it takes time to procure machines. Once we get the devices, developing the required environment takes another three to four days. In scenarios where we have to build the solution in labs, installation takes around six to seven hours. Also, it requires maintenance at a repository level.

The teams required for deployment depend upon the use cases and specific requirements. We need multiple vendor teams to complete the process if we have various sources and databases to work with.

The solution's licensing is expensive in terms of scaling.

I advise others to consider the licensing part of the solution before making the purchase decision. If they have no cost-related issues, then it is the best tool. I rate it as a nine.

Informatica PowerCenter is purely an ETL tool used for data integration.

Informatica PowerCenter has many features compared to Talend, DataStage, and Airflow. Among all the solutions I have used, I found Informatica PowerCenter to be much more stable in terms of application. Also, one won't face issues related to bugs when using Informatica PowerCenter.

Compared to solutions offering similar functionalities, Informatica PowerCenter is not very flexible regarding customized integrations. It's not a very customizable solution.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for approximately nine years. So, I work for different consulting companies, and their customers use it. My job role is of a consultant and architect.

Since one does not have to face sudden issues while using the solution, I would say that it is a stable solution compared to similar solutions in the market.

It is not a very scalable solution. It is usually used in enterprise-sized organizations.

The solution is easy to deploy and manage. I also usually help my customers to implement and configure the product. The time taken for the implementation process depends upon how big of an implementation process has to be carried out. So, for a single customer, it took around three days to deploy the solution. However, three months were required for the customization part. The solution gets deployed on-premises and on the private cloud.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.

The solution is basically used for anything and everything that we process, for example, from the SQL Server, from other application sources like Oracle, from Flatfiles, or loading into these kinds of sources. We use it for pretty much everything.

It's the best ETL tool that one can have.

The initial setup is easy.

It's stable.

We can scale the product.

Support has been helpful in the past.

If we could have the option of performance improvement within Informatica, and if it could have more features, that would be ideal. For example, we have a DTM buffer, and sometimes we face issues where we are creating the cache in Informatica, and it keeps on adding onto that particular directory. Even though we deploy code to remove that cache, somehow Informatica DTM does not remove the cache, and it keeps on piling up, filling up the whole server unless we manually remove that.

There are some functionalities in Informatica, however, after some time, they stopped working. That has been an issue that has added up to operational costs. If we could have the consistent working of all the functionalities that Informatica offers, not just during the start of the project or for around six months, that would be ideal. We find that it stops working due to some issue, due to some process not getting started or getting in a hung state.  

From 10.1, to 10.1.1, to 10.5.1, there is a feature in the expression transformation where users have the option to evaluate the expression. It works only when you do not have variables in that, yet only some values (hard-coded values). For example, if you have column one and column two and put in column three, then when you evaluate the expression, and you only get column one plus column two, and it even does not work. It says you can't pass the variables, pass the values, and then that feature that was introduced is of no use. 

I've used the solution for almost 14 years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. I'd rate it 9.5 out of ten in terms of stability. There are no bugs or glitches.

The solution is scalable. However, it depends on the server. 

You can scale unless the server on which it is hosted does not have enough resources to handle the additional load.

In our organization, most developers are on the product. There are around 50 people at least using it. 

I have not used technical support yet in this organization. That said, in my prior organizations, I have. When we had a new tool, for example, we had OneConnect for an SAP Field Glass Connector and we were not sure how to connect to it. Therefore, we had some connectivity-related questions that we were not able to explore on our own since there wasn't much online expertise available. We had to reach out. All questions were addressed and answered by Informatica.

The level of assistance we received was as expected. We were happy with their response time and their answers provided solutions to our questions.

The initial setup takes time sometimes. It can take around two days if you have a prior code. That said, if you are starting it from scratch, then more than four hours, so it is easy - if someone has experience in it, of course, and the proper manual to follow.

I don't recall the exact cost o the solution. That said, it is one of the costliest products that one can have. They are costly ETL products. When it comes to Oracle, we have cheaper options since Oracle provides its ODI fee of cost if someone buys any of their modules for business intelligence. That is something that Informatica does not have.

Still, if you have large data volumes and you do not want to be at risk for your daily loads, then it is worth the money.

I'm an end-user.

I'd advise new users to go through proper training and get at least one to two years of proper work experience in it before they actually go to customers to suggest its implementation - especially if they will be the primary point of contact.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

The product is primarily used for building the data warehouse as an ETL tool for our hospital.

In general, it is a great tool. 

The initial setup is not very complex. 

There are many features available. It has very rich transformation tools. You can have union integration. There are many kinds of set operators, aggregators, and plate operators. 

Graphically you can define a lot, and you can also inject variables too. If you define one transformation, you can replicate it with several sources. 

It has very good monitoring and process monitoring. 

There is an excellent scheduler. 

The integration capabilities are pretty good. 

We've found the solution to be very stable. 

It's a product that scales well.

It doesn't have the change data capture feature. That's why we have been exploring some alternatives.

The licensing is difficult. It prevents us from accessing all of the features.

Since I haven't used the latest version, it's hard to comment on what needs to be added. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. 

It's a stable product. I'd rate the stability at five out of five. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

You can easily scale the solution if you need to.

I'd rate the ability to scale 4.5 out of five. 

We have around 100 or more sources using the solution. 

We don't really use technical support. However, we did initially find it quite good. 

We did not previously use another solution. 

The solution is pretty straightforward to set up. It is not complex.

We got some training on the transformations and the ETL process itself; however, the implementation of the things was done by then. The strategy was to have teamwork on the building and accumulating data from the hospitals and then build a data warehouse around it. 

The full deployment took two months for us. We had two engineers working on the implementation. 

Our team handles the maintenance. One or two people are handling it. Other than running some interim tasks, everything is scheduled, and then some operational monitoring is required. Otherwise, there are no other maintenance jobs to worry about.

The deployment was handled in-house. We did not need any installation help from integrators or consultants. 

Licensing is frustrating as you have to pay for some additional features. It would be ideal if it were all under one cost.

We usually have a license that lasts a year or two.

We do not pay for technical support. You have to pay for it separately every year.

At the time, around ten years ago, we compared the product with the Oracle Data Warehouse builder, however, PowerCenter was a much better tool.

Many of its current competitors came into the picture after we installed this tool.

We're end-users.

We are not using the latest version of the solution. We are using one of the previous versions. It's around version 10. I don't know the EMEA number.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I'm using it in my company, in the sense that some of our clients use it as their tool for their day-to-day development.

It has good standard features for ETL development. I mostly like the transformation simplicity, which is very good. It has common features that are very similar to all similar tools.

It is stable and reliable. 

Technical support is good.

This product is going to decommission in the next couple of years. Therefore, I don't have anything specific to say something has to be improved.

The pricing is pretty high.

I've worked with the solution for more than eight years. 

The solution is stable. It's reliable, and the performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

Scalability is limited since it's on-premise. PowerCenter is mostly implemented on-premises only, so it's all based on how we configure it, the number of nodes, et cetera. Few people can even deploy it in the cloud VMs, where they can scale up and scale down in the background. For Informatica, the license is based on the number of cores. You have to scale within the number of cores only.

We have more than ten people working on the solution currently.

The technical support is very good. 

I have used other solutions in the past. For example, I've used SSIS, Talend, and SnapLogic.

It's a use-case question, which solution would make the most sense. We cannot say straight away which will fit in, or which is the best product. However, both PowerCenter and SnapLogic are very good compared to SSIS and Talend.

The initial setup has a moderate level of difficulty.

If it is a simple first-time implementation, no one will face issues. However, when people keep upgrading from one version to another, there can be some compatibility issues. It all depends on how you write the code. For example, a few of the code migrations when we were upgrading did or did not work, and that's where we faced some challenges.

The product can be costly. Price can change according to negotiations, so it may be a bit flexible. However, a basic setup can be from $100,000 and up annually.

I'm not a partner or reseller.

I've worked with various versions, from 8.6 to 10.1.

PowerCenter is going to be decommissioned by 2025. Already, people have started migrating from PowerCenter to Informatica Cloud. 

It may be better not to implement that right away. It is better to go straight away with Informatica Cloud or any other tool like SnapLogic. Even Informatica Cloud has some issues in terms of migrating PowerCenter to Informatica Cloud. At this point, however, every solution gives similar output. Regarding cost, you can go with some other tools like SnapLogic that may be less expensive.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.