Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

We are generally using it for ETL systems. 

We have different sources of files coming, sometimes from the mainframe, and Informatica is very useful for accepting different sources, such as spreadsheets and databases, and doing the transformation. Libraries are also helpful. I also managed to go into the database and create my own transformations for mapping automatically.

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 didn't like about it is that the platform itself is not great at distributed processing. When you need high parallel processing, it has some inherent issues. We had to use Java transformation, and it did not go very well. I have heard that it is going to the cloud, but we haven't tried that. We have Informatica in-house, and we thought it would go with ADF. Microsoft is leaning on us to do that because we're working with Azure. So, I don't know much about cloud features.

The pricing model is a little bit difficult for development tools versus running the system in production. So, it has some shortcomings, but in general, it is not bad.

We worked with PowerCenter for a long time, and we have a site license for it.

We haven't had major problems. The issues that we had were more around libraries linking to other places. It was not so flexible there. For example, we used a Java transformation that needed a separate set of libraries, but they collided if a library was used by Informatica. So, we had to stay a version earlier. Although it seemed a little bit rigid on what it can provide in terms of the ability to go into the database and create your own stuff, I wrote a makefile that actually went into the database, and based on the parameters that people put in the makefile, created transformation for them.

I wasn't impressed with its ability to process in parallel. Some of it is inherited in the tool, and there is nothing you can do about it. For example, if you have aggregation, then everything stops, which is okay and I understand that, but for the other things also, I didn't see it scalable. I have heard that it is better in new releases.

I work with Azure Data Factory and Informatica PowerCenter, and we are now considering taking either of them. We did work with PowerCenter for a long time, and we have a site license for it. With ADF, we're just starting.

We have a site license, but we do pay by the division.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case is to collect data from different sources and to build it for the house or data hub, or to fill already built-in appliances like Cloudera and Teradata. 

It has helped us meet our monetization needs. 

Real time is amazing. If you have AI use cases, you can predict if it's a threat or if it's a positive or negative transaction. You can use real time with PowerExchange to write data directly to Kafka, to consume, write, or parse data using an AI algorithm to detect if the data is positive or negative and to define what use cases you want. 

It would be nice to move from Windows tools (like Developer, Designer, or Manager) and have everything in one place like DATAQ developer, which is eclipse-based and user-friendly. 

CDC needs more improvement. It's stable and has good features, but it's only easy to develop if you are familiar with Linux. 

Sometimes a new monitor will not be accurate in logging or you'll open a log and get a misleading error message. The connection parameter is sometimes inaccurate, or the parameter will not load. Proactive Monitoring doesn't work very well with all of the Informatica processes. The latest version came out five years ago and there has been no enhancement since then. It doesn't make sense for a product to be ranked number one but have no enhancements. The product hangs and you can lose control for several hours. It works, but it hangs. 

I have been using PowerCenter and PowerExchange for around 7 to 8 years. 

It's stable and we rarely have any issues. During the setup, when developers tried to connect, there were some issues, but it ran smoothly once it was configured and fixed. Sometimes, there is conflict between servers (like Analytics, Data Quality, or PowerCenter) and we have problems with loading libraries.

It's easy to scale, but it has a limit. For high availability or for service on the grid, it's okay, but it has a limit. If we had the option to enable scalability based on big data architecture, like Adobe or MongoDB, it would be easier. In Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC), you can extend them by adding nodes to the cluster, but currently, to maintain scalability in both centers, you'll add a node, join the domain after that to distribute work, but fortunately, this works well. We also got a complaint, when adding a node, that the session failed without recovery. 

For technical support, there are levels. The first level of support is called TechAccess and it's between Informatica and other vendors. TechAccess takes time and their response is often delayed. After that, we escalate and go to the Informatica level of support. Once we reach them, they proceed to explain the solution. 

We've tried SSIS and DataStage, but we prefer PowerCenter for stability and monitoring. 

The set-up was simple and I did it myself. If you try it one time, it'll be easy the next time. The one product that does need improvement in installation is Enterprise Data Catalog, EDC. It's very difficult and all my colleagues hate communicating with and installing EDC.

I implemented it myself and with my team. We have expertise, so there was no need to engage Informatica Professional Services. 

The pricing is a little expensive, but in the same range as IBM and other competitors. There is not a big difference in pricing between its main competition. The pricing is mostly the same between other vendors. 

PowerCenter is good for large enterprises and good for ETL purposes, but not for ELT. If you need to go with ELT, Informatica has another package called Data Streaming that's more stable and recommended for a larger environment. 

I would rate Informatica an eight out of ten. 

PowerCenter has yet to announce additional features. The face that it has not made improvements is fine, as it is very easy to integrate. We are in touch with the vendors of products other than Informatica PowerCenter. 

The reason I chose to rate the solution as a nine out of ten is because there is a need to buy a separate license if one wishes to connect with some kind of SAP system, such as SalesForce. 

I've been using Informatica PowerCenter for more than 16 years.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup is easy.

The price is mostly reasonable. 

I am satisfied with the solution. 

I rate Informatica PowerCenter as a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution for businesses that wish to analyze their raw data. The solution allows us to do data cleansing and to transform the raw data into useful, insightful information.

Informatica PowerCenter is a very strong tool which offers a host of features. We can use heterogeneous data to easily merge and derive the useful information. Also, flag files processing is very useful.

An issue which should be addressed is that the solution only allows us to do structured, as opposed to unstructured, data processing. Also, the EPA related data processing should be improved. 

Processing capabilities should be streamlined.

I prefer a third party scheduler tool to that of Informatica scheduler, since the latter is not one which is very physical. The solution is not so helpful if one wishes to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. 

We have been using Informatica PowerCenter for nearly eight years.

Scalability could be improved, as it is of an intermediate level. 

We have plans to increase usage. 

Technical support is really great.

Deployment was simple and straightforward. 

Licensing costs are excessive and pose an obstacle to someone who lacks familiarity with the solution and wishes to have a proper understanding of it. 

We have a team of around 40 to 50 people who use the solution.

I would, for sure, recommend the solution to others, since I feel it to be a really strong tool. It is very robust and has complex capabilities. It allows one to accomplish tasks with ease. We are talking about a strong ETL for those who are undertaking ETL related tasks.

We are using Informatica PowerCenter for our data warehouse to generate reports from heterogeneous data sources from XML, JSON, or CSV databases. We then do some transformations to generate XML ISO standards to send to regulators in Europe and UK.

We have found the PowerCenter and B2B data transformation most valuable. Additionally, they have many native connectors, high performance, and a lot of support documentation.

The solution can improve by providing more connectivity by having native ODBC or JDBC connections available. It will be easier and more people could start using it.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable.

We have approximately 40 people using this solution regularly in my organization.

The solution is not as scalable as the cloud solutions, we will be releasing it in a few years.

The technical support has been responsive and we were in contact with them quickly. We were very satisfied.

The initial setup was easy. The full implementation took approximately two weeks.

Our internal technical team did the implementation and handles the maintenance of the solution. The maintenance team makes sure Informatica services are started and are up and running.

The solution is in the middle price range compared to other solutions. There are additional costs if you want other features. For example, more connectors or the use of other solutions, such as Snowflake.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Informatica PowerCenter a nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

The most valuable features are the monitoring tools and the reporting manager.

Integrating new tools can be tricky and challenging.

I have been working with Informatica PowerCenter for more than five years.

I have not seen any issues with respect to stability. 

We have been in frequent contact with the Informatical help center. It is not only me but other people in the company. They have been very good at supporting us.

We were using the cloud version of PowerCenter with one of our clients, but they have since moved to MuleSoft.

Usually, the initial setup for PowerCenter is straightforward. The is nothing complex about it. However, if you are integrating new tools or if you are putting in an adapter for a product like the Amazon Cloud Service or RedShift, it will be challenging.

The price of this solution is high.

With an interval of every couple of years, they upgrade to a new version and stop supporting the previous versions. At this point, you need to acquire a new license. 

If you are looking to add a new adapter then it will be more costly.

My advice is that if you are looking for a traditional on-premises service, PowerCenter is a good option to stick with. If on the other hand, you want a cloud-based service then there are better options.

In summary, this is a good product, and other than integrating with other tools, I don't face any challenges.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We receive the data files from insurance carriers. We load the data, do some processing, and then make the data available to their internal systems. We apply some business transformations and data validations and share the data in the healthcare domain and EDI B2B exchange.

Its version varies based on the customer, but when it comes to the cloud, we have the latest version. We have been using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) for two years. We have used IICS for two purposes. One is for data integration, and the other one is for application integration.

Complex transformations can be easily achieved by using PowerCenter. The processing layer does transformations and other things. About 80% of my transformations can be achieved by using the middle layer. For the remaining 15% to 20% transformations, I can go in and create stored procedures in the respective databases. Mapplets is the feature through which we can reuse transformations across pipelines. Transformations and caching are the key features that we have been using frequently. 

Informatica PowerCenter is one of the best solutions or products in the data integration space. We have extensively used PowerCenter for integration purposes. We usually look at the best bridge solution in our architecture so that it can sustain for maybe a couple of years. Usually, we go with the solution that fits best and has proven and time-tested technology.

Its licensing can be improved. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise. A bundle will definitely be costly. In addition, we might use one or two features. That's why the pricing model should be based on the features. The model should be flexible enough based on the features.

Their support should also be more responsive to premium customers.

We have been dealing with this product for around 20 years.

It is stable.

It is easy to scale. It has the concept of a grid, but it is too costly because you also need Informatica big data edition. Informatica PowerCenter has its own software licensing called big data edition. So, whenever we want to scale to a huge volume, we need to go with big data. It has horizontal scaling, which always impacts the price. I can go for a four-node cluster grid or an eight-node cluster grid, which will have an impact on the price.

We have scaled it for one of our enterprise customers, and we had a little bit of complexity in setting it up, but we were able to achieve the desired goals with respect to the performance.

We have been in touch with Informatica support. They should be more responsive. They should react quickly to premium customers.

Different products are suitable for different use cases. One unified product cannot address multiple use cases. For example, Informatica may not be suitable for real-time integration, but it may be helpful for batch integration. Similarly, MuleSoft caters to low latency, but it doesn't get into high latency, which means it is not suitable for larger data processing systems. That's why we need to have a combination of technologies. For example, I may say that I have a resource or a person who has a primary skill and a secondary skill. Primary skill is specialized, and then secondary skill is complementary to that. Similarly, every product has a primary thing and a secondary thing. For Informatica, it is the batch processing, not the real-time data processing. It only processes the structured data, but it does not process unstructured data. For unstructured data, you need to go for a different product. For the cloud version, they have introduced IICS specifically for catering to the application integration requirements.

It is a simple process because we have a pool of experts in our team. Some manual work could be required. We did have challenges while setting it up, but we could also resolve those challenges. 

We provide development, integration, operations, and maintenance services for Informatica solutions to the customers. We do ETL monitoring, and we monitor the daily loads and resolve and manage the pipeline features. 

We also handle the change requests coming from the customer and performance optimization. We may sometimes also look at the transformations optimization, caching, and all those things.

It is for big enterprises. We have leveraged Informatica for big enterprises but not for small and medium enterprises because it is a very costly product as compared to other products. We propose this solution only for enterprise customers. For small to medium enterprises, we would propose the Microsoft solution.

Its licensing is currently bundle-wise. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise.

It is a very mature product, but now everyone is moving to the cloud. They need to give more attention and focus more on the IICS rather than PowerCenter. PowerCenter on-premises will cater to one or two industries, and they should give more features in IICS. It can cater to only 70% of the features of Informatica PowerCenter. The data integration is currently not as mature in IICS. It doesn't have Mapplets, and we have faced some constraints. We have already logged a service request for this.

I would rate Informatica PowerCenter a nine out of ten.

This solution is really the backbone of what we do. Informatica PowerCenter is one of the most used platforms for data governance in the banking and insurance industry. It's quite expensive so it's not used much outside the industry, but it's very reliable and strong in everything connected to data management and data governance strategy. For our industry, that is crucial. We are customers of Informatica and I'm the head of big data and solution architecture. 

From my point of view, the solution has two valuable features. It has the ability to manage a huge quantity of data along with a high level of reliability from a performance point of view. Secondly, it has all the tools and features within the platform to establish a real data governance strategy. That includes lineage data preparation, ETL, ELP, everything regarding monitoring and processes that are implemented in the platform. It's quite feature full in that regard.

The solution currently requires quite an established data center in place because there is no option for software as a service so the best option to install the platform is on-prem. I know Informatica is thinking about it because they are introducing a brand new platform for big data management, but it doesn't yet have the same level of features as PowerCenter. This is something they can improve on. There are some significant differences between the two platforms.

The other issue is price. I understand this is a high-level professional tool designed for big companies that have a great need for managing huge amounts of data and I understand these kinds of tools are quite expensive, but sometimes the cost is too high. Their focus is obviously a high-level market but I think there would be other companies who would want to use it but it's too expensive for them. 

I'd like to see improved on-prem support like Cloudera which is very oriented towards traditional databases, like Oracle, SQL Server and others. 

We've been using this solution for five years. 

It is clearly a stable solution, otherwise it would not be used in industries such as banking and insurance. Technically speaking, it's very stable and reliable. In my opinion, it's one of the most stable and reliable platforms for data governance.

Technical support is good and a lot has improved over the years. 

Most of my customers use solutions in the cloud so I've used Azure in AWS and GCP. There are lots of services, platform services, or software as a service, tools that are used for the same purposes or objectives, like data governance, data preparation, data integration. It's hard to compare because the environment is completely different and they have different issues. PowerCenter is quite a traditional technology. A product like Hadoop, for example, for storage and process management, has the same objectives but they are fulfilled in a completely different way.

The initial setup is not so easy but once it's been deployed it's quite reliable from a performance point of view.

My advice for this product is to be aware of what's involved and be sure about deploying and using it because it's a very technical tool, something you cannot buy and install in some weird brutal machine. It requires planning and has to be managed, not only in terms of using it, but also economically speaking, because of the cost.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.