Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

I am using Informatica PowerCenter to upskill and learn to use new tools.

I found the map links, work links, and workflows valuable. They are important features.

It would be better if I could do all the work within a single window. If I'm working on any mapping and if I have to switch to sessions, I have to open a new window altogether. If I have to get into workflows, I have to open a new window. It was also very expensive. In the next release, I would like it to be more user-friendly.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for over two years. 

Informatica PowerCenter is a stable solution.

Informatica PowerCenter is a scalable solution. Expanding is easy, and we can execute multiple workflows based on events. I don't see any constraints, and it looks pretty good. We have approximately 50 or more people supporting or developing applications for various clients.

I have experience with SSIS, and I compared the features. They are different, especially on the navigation front and the user interface. The SQL server integration service is always handy in Azure. Most of the time, you'll be using Microsoft products, so their interface is very user-friendly. But in Informatica, it'll be completely different, especially on the mapping side. When you map from the first to the next target, you have to know how to connect the source and targets. But in SSIS, it's easy for a layperson to understand how the data flows.

The price could be better. It's very expensive.

On a scale from one to five, I would give Informatica PowerCenter's price a one.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Informatica PowerCenter a nine.

Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration tool.

The most valuable features of Informatica PowerCenter are the ease of use, and development, and is simple to find resources.

Informatica PowerCenter could improve by having a single interface because half of the system is still in the legacy interface and many other elements are moved to the developer client. It would be good if there was a single interface for the end user and developers.

In the next release, Informatica PowerCenter would be beneficial to have run time column propagation. Other solutions have this feature but it is missing in this solution.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for approximately 18 years.

Informatica PowerCenter is stable.

The scalability of Informatica PowerCenter is good.

We have approximately seven people using the solution.

The support is good from Informatica PowerCenter and they have been responsive.

I rate the support from Informatica PowerCenter an eight out of ten.

Positive

The implementation of Informatica PowerCenter is easy.

The price of Informatica PowerCenter is expensive, but it does give value.

This is an amazing solution. If I ranked it in terms of all of the data integration solutions, I would rank it first.

I rate Informatica PowerCenter a seven out of ten.

We use Informatica PowerCenter primarily for its processes. We derive dashboards, functionalities and graphs with the information it provides. We create reports, generate excels, and data scientists use the information to generate reports in Tableau, Power BI or other tools.

It is UI friendly and has all the advantages of an ETL tool. In addition, integration is possible between Oracle and SQL.

It is also relatively expensive but is worth the price because the software provides a good experience. The resources we need exist, and the people are available.

We have been using this solution for about six months. It is private on Oracle but available at our data centre.

It is a stable solution, and there are no significant issues. In addition, it is a relatively easy solution for any beginner or intermediate-level person using it. The only problem is that it is moderately expensive, which is essential to emphasize.

Everything in the market is shifting to the cloud, namely Oracle, Azure, and any other cloud. If a company has a solution on a license, they will use something with the cloud on Google, Azure or AWS. It would be good if Informatica collaborated with Oracle, Azure or AWS, allowing for greater functionalities and benefits.

I believe it is a scalable solution, but I do not have all the details on scalability. For example, in AWS, there are databases like PostgreSQL, SQL and Oracle. So, it would be good if, for a specific price, Informatica PowerCenter could be available in Azure or have the ability to use Azure in the ETL tool.

About six to seven developers use Informatica PowerCenter in my company.

The technical support is helpful.

The setup was easy. However, the solution could have better documentation on basic steps or blocks that specify what to do. For example, a particular topic could be described at length in a video so people can understand it.

Installation is also relatively easy, but when we tried to include data warehousing, extraction or ETL functionality, we needed specific configurations and capacity. That is a pain point for users, developers and architects. However, it became easier after several periods.

In terms of costs, it is moderately expensive, but I am unsure of the exact price. It would be good if Informatica PowerCenter incorporated free trails or learnings to help beginners use the solution. There should also be more campaigns similar to other ETL tools.

My advice would be for Informatica to decrease the price. Generally, companies have more customers when prices are lower. So even if the company grows with a lower margin, the number of users would be higher, which would be beneficial.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, it is important that ETL functionalities are readily available and that it is GUI friendly.

My experience is in the semiconductor industry with our customers using the Azure supply chain. We have built-in the AIS system, IBM and Db2. We transfer data from SQL Server to MongoDB and transfer the data to Db2.

Security is very important, the solution is deployed to the private cloud. We assigned five people to build the project.

Informatica PowerCenter is built into the technology supply system. I use the solution to transfer the MS data system to the supply chain system.

We use Informatica PowerCenter to transfer the transitional database to and from the data warehouse. This is very efficient as it enables us to quickly find our data reports and the data, so we can build AI models.

In the future, I would like to see Informatica PowerCenter integrate a more powerful dashboard.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for 3 years.

In my experience Informatica is stable, however, it depends on our customer's environment.

This solution is scalable. For example, we have set two data warehouses for one of my customers, we use Informatica PowerCenter to join several PV tables separate to data warehousing. This allows us to divide, separate and exchange our data warehousing to the schema and the people in the schema.

In my last job, I used Pentaho. 

The initial setup of the solution is easier than Pentaho. Informatica was set up by me with the help of two supply chain consultants, in one day. 

To implement Informatica PowerCenter you need to understand your customer's systems first and what their requirements are. It is important to understand their existing system and find the data. By understanding their logic, you can know how to extract the data and transfer the data to the data warehouse.

Informatica PowerCenter is reasonably priced. It is less expensive than Pentaho.

There is a standard version fee in Taiwan. It is a one-time yearly subscription price that is approximately $3,010 US dollars for three users.

This is my first experience with this kind of tool, I would rate Informatica PowerCenter a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the ETL.

They know what they're doing, and it's a more mature tool compared to Talend. They really think about every scenario. For example, if you want to write a data cleansing algorithm and all that is probably rules. It's just easier. There are a lot of provisions in PowerCenter. In terms of the transformation algorithms and all that, there are a lot of operations. It's great.

The solution is stable.

It's a scalable product.

PowerCenter seems to be a little bit higher side of cost. Customers are thinking about alternatives. Talend seems to be a pure Java-based thing, however, there are some technical hiccups there. There are a few finance companies are probably started using Talend as a competition tool for Informatica. Most of the smaller companies are trying to build open-source-based ETL tools.

It should be more cloud-centric than on-prem-centric. That is where the problem with Informatica.

We've used the solution for a couple of years. 

It's a stable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is scalable. 

We have three or four clients we are working with in terms of Informatica.

In terms of technical support, there is plenty of information is available online, however, their tech support is okay.

Snowflake is something that is surfacing. Every customer is now started asking about Snowflake. They're thinking of it being a viable option. When it comes to data warehousing, it's the kind of a solution that you want to deal with huge among this data processing. 

Most startups and probably smaller companies thinking of building a custom open-source pipeline. It could be Pulsar-based, or Kafka-based. And that is what they're looking at. In enterprises, they don't want to go with a hundred percent, the open-source solutions. They like Informatica or probably Talend or probably some of the ETL tools that are available.

It's not a simple setup. It requires a bit of a learning curve, no doubt about it. For example, if you want an index, a three or four-year engineer would need to handle that. If you want to make them as a utility engineer, there is a learning curve involved. 

It took us three to four months to deploy the solution. 

We have 12 to 14 people working on the deployment and maintenance of the solution. 

The pricing could be a bit better. 

For example, if you look at Snowflake, companies are thinking of innovative ways of reducing the price and then transferring the benefit to their customers. 

In terms of innovation, creativity is not there in this solution. It is still an on-prem ETL tool. Informatica is one of the best options today and no doubt about it. However, is it cloud-ready? I don't think so. Therefore, I'd rate the solution a five out of ten.

Beyond cloud readiness (or lack thereof), pricing is an issue. It's relatively high compared to other products on the market. We all have to move from IBM thinking. You sell the customer and then penalize them with the pricing, pricing, pricing. That is where IBM has today become a dead man walking underneath, has become two different companies now. This company should learn from IBM. Pricing cannot be the only way of making money and probably comes with innovation, creativity, making it cloud-ready, and then transferring those benefits in order to sell more licenses. 

Informatica PowerCenter is being used for data warehouse development, using ETL and ELT, e.g. Informatica PowerCenter for ETL and Informatica Cloud Data Integration for integration between systems, e.g. with their downstream systems.

What I like most about Informatica PowerCenter is that it enables integration and connection with multiple new systems, both structured and semi-structured. I also find its adapters for multiple source systems valuable. Its features meet industry standards. It is a proven high-performing enterprise-scale ETL solution.

Though I wasn't able to explore all features of Informatica PowerCenter, it would be good if Informatica can also have connectivity with NoSQL compliant, unstructured data sources, e.g. Microsoft Azure Data Factory or Talend.

The cloud-based solution mostly focuses on continuous data stream processing, but not on batch processing. If Informatica enhances this cloud-based solution to also do the batch processing of data, and also integrate semi-structured and unstructured data processing, that will be more beneficial.

I've been working with Informatica PowerCenter for 15 years.

I find this solution very stable.

Informatica PowerCenter is easy to scale.

The support team is responsive. They're able to address our issues.

The initial setup for Informatica PowerCenter was straightforward.

Implementation for this solution was in-house. It was done by our own team.

I evaluated Oracle Data Integrator, Talend, and Microsoft Azure Data Factory.

We are using these solutions: Oracle Data Integrator with different versions, Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica Cloud Data Integration, and Talend. Matillion, we explored, but we don't use it for our company. We are a consulting partner. We are an implementation partner, so our consultants use these to implement solutions to many of our customers. We are an indirect partner through Oracle, and not a direct partner of Informatica.

Informatica PowerCenter is deployed both ways: on-premises and on cloud, but on cloud very recently. In the past two years, we have been using the cloud version. Deployment for this solution could take one to two days, if the person doing it is knowledgeable.

We have a team of 70 members who are data engineers and data analysts, but for the actual installation, setup, and configuration, we have another team made up of system/application administrators. We have a shared service model with 50+ associates who take care of this service. They will take a day or two to complete the deployment. Given all the infrastructure details available from the customer, it wouldn't take more than a day or two, worst case two days on average to set up and start the system, for it to be ready for working on and developing the ETL.

To maintain this solution, in a shared service model, e.g. not dedicated, it requires two to three people, but if it is dedicated, then one person can handle the maintenance.

There are two ways we are using this ETL solution. Number one: as part of Oracle's prepackaged solution, and number two: as an independent solution.

I don't deal with the licensing, but as part of Oracle's pre-packaged analytics solutions, we did use them. There's a one-time fee plus yearly support. That is their model, but I don't know the costs associated.

My advice to new customers of this solution is that if they are looking for an enterprise scale data warehouse and data management solution, Informatica PowerCenter is one of the go-to proven tools. Its limitations are on these two areas: one is that it needs to enable the cloud-based version to do batch processing, e.g. heavy data loads, and two is that it needs to enable connectivity to the NoSQL compliant and unstructured data sources.

Keeping the two product limitations out, e.g. the cloud version has limitations for batch processing and is unable to process unstructured and semi-structured data, my rating for Informatica PowerCenter is an eight out of ten.

Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration tool. We use it as an extract, load, transform tool and we can transfer data from production to test or to any other environment.

We have several use cases. For example,  we use it to create data warehouse applications, which are used for analytics and to help generate business value.

Another use case is to modify a test environment such that it is compliant with GDPR regulations. We can use it to transfer production data to a test environment for the purpose of facilitating our testing. Another use case is that if we are working on a data warehouse application, it can be used to extract data from different sources to load into the target environment.

The most valuable features are that it is quick and easy to use. Anybody can master it in a short time.

The interface is very clean and clear.

This tool integrates with distributed systems.

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. As it is now, writing custom transformations is not user-friendly.

I have been working with Informatica PowerCenter for approximately two years.

This is a stable product.

Informatica PowerCenter is scalable.

We have one person in the company in charge of administration. 

I am part of a seven-person team that uses it, although there are a lot of other applications in the company that make use of PowerCenter. The number of users overall is huge.

We plan to increase our usage in the future.

Our admin team is from Informatica, and if we have any problems then we contact them. For example, the tool that I work on directly interacts with PowerCenter, where PowerCenter works as a backend for my application. If I have connectivity issues or need special access to PowerCenter, I contact the admin team and they help me to sort out the issues.

Prior to PowerCenter, I used an open-source tool called Talend. It was not very good.

The installation is not complex. It is easy to do because you just need one database, such as Oracle, set up as the backend, and some executable files.

I was not involved in the deployment. Another team in our company was responsible for it.

The licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

In summary, this is a good tool and I definitely recommend it. It integrates with distributed systems and if the use cases involve data ETL then this is the best tool to use.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

In the company I work for, we provide a lot of solutions. I've been working with a lot of clients. The last client I worked with was a big hotel company, and we used this solution for integration.

It's a very powerful tool you can use to load data, get data, do the drawing between the tables, and put it into the packet in a very fast way.

So for this client, we are using the MDM (Master Data Management), and the PowerCenter will be very helpful in building data and merging all the data between the different systems they have. They have a lot of systems that contain the same information and we want to put that into a single place. This is the most valuable feature of this solution which has been of great help to us.

To be honest, we didn't find big issues with this tool. All the issues we found, we were able to fix. We don't have any issues with the tool so far.

I would like to see this solution change the way it creates workflows. In Alteryx, for example, it's easier to build the workflow because of the way it was built, while PowerCenter was built in a more complex way to be able to process a large number of roles. The way PowerCenter creates the workflows is much more complex than the others, but nothing big. It's just that it's the old way. It would be good to recreate the entire interface to make it easier for users to build workflows. This is what I'd like to see in the next release.

I've been using it for 10 years.

The solution is stable. No complaints.

I believe this solution is scalable.

That's a tricky question because it's always complex. For the business logic, it's complex. They had a lot of systems and we had to do the integration between the source. I've been working with this solution for a lot of years, so to me it's straightforward. So that's a tricky question. I would say that for professionals, it's straightforward.

I evaluated Alteryx.

It's Informatica PowerCenter I work with a lot of times, but I also have knowledge on Informatica Data Quality. Now on my last project, I'll be working with MDM, but I'm not an expert on MDM, as I've mostly been working with PowerCenter.

I've been working with this solution since 2010 on a lot of projects which I don't have on top of my head right now. I live in Brazil and I've been working for the government for healthcare where I used this solution. I also worked with PowerCenter for an insurance company. I used this solution during integration where we also created a web API. This is a feature in Informatica that can deploy and make APIs available for third parties or vendors so they can do acquisitions, restore API, and get data. These are what we created in PowerCenter as well.

All the projects were deployed on-premise. I never work on the cloud, but I would love to. Deployment took six months for this project.

We have 30 to 50 people using this solution. If the project goes well, if there are more resources to implement this solution, and more features to improve the analytics of the company, then we will plan to increase usage of this solution.

I'm a PowerCenter guy, so I'm rating this solution a ten.