Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for building data warehouses for clients with data visualization tools. We need to pull data from other sources so we use Informatica as the ETL. The solution is generally deployed on-prem but sometimes on cloud. 

The solution provides good performance with an easy to use interface and reasonable documentation.

One of the things that I found lacking is that there should be some sort of a calculator where you can input your requirements regarding the number of data switches required, number of users, and the number of data switches in order to get a general idea of cost. It would save me time rather than having to run to the company to get the information. 

The solution is stabl. 

It's a scalable solution. 

I haven't had any issues with technical support. 

This is an expensive solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Integration between different applications, such as Hospital Information Systems built on AS400 and in-house legacy. It is old data structure file based as opposed to relational. Therefore, it was very difficult to connect and integrate with other new applications. We used Informatica to read from our Hospital Information System and transform the data into a relational model in order to speed up reporting and do cleansing of the data. We also used Informatica to integrate SQL Server based applications with our Oracle applications.

Ease and speed of building integrations, especially integrations between different applications, such as our Hospital Information System. 

The GUI.

10 years.

No.

Its maintenance is expensive.

Yes, we evaluated SSIS and IBM. We also looked at additional features in Informatica.

Our primary uses of the solution are for data integration and to build a warehouse model.

The solution is a very helpful product for data integration.

The partitioning and optimization to help enhance our development is a very valuable aspect of Informatica PowerCenter. There are multiple transformations for service consumers to publish and use web services as well,In addition to the ability to implement ETL and ELT n a very easy way and finally, you have structured data for use in an integrated business intelligence solution.

The multiple interfaces in Informatica PowerCenter are not great for the user experience. Because of this, I think it can cause confusion for any beginner developer.

When we are dealing with multiple transformations and mapping, we cannot see the flow of our transformation until we run reports. It is not like Informatica Developer, where we can see every step of what we're doing and the flow of the mapping. With those solutions, we can see data and transformation and how it's affected by our expressions or anything we do. In Informatica PowerCenter, we cannot see any data in the transformation until the end or you may need to do some debugging, and it is very confusing for some people. They need to enhance their viewer so we can see data within the transformation and show the affected data. 

I haven't had a problem with Informatica PowerCenter's stability until recently. Sometimes it's very slow. I don't know why, but recently, the development has been very slow. I'm not sure if this is related to stability, however.

The solution is good for scalability because it can be supplemented by a Data Quality solution ,Also, if our organization needs the scale increased, Informatica can satisfy this need, because it can deal with different types of sources and a huge amount of data. The features in partitioning and data optimization that Informatica uses make it very powerful.

Technical support has been very helpful. Whenever we have a problem, they are able to solve it.

Informatica platform installation was straightforward, just If the prerequisites checks done successfully, it will be very easy to do.

I'm working with a lot of Informatica products. I use Informatica PowerCenter and IDQ as well as Informatica Axon.

In terms of Informatica Powercenter, we're not using the cloud. We have it running on our own servers.

Overall, I find that it's a very helpful product and a powerful tool compared to other products.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

We use this solution for ETL of a US Law Enforcement agency's data sources to a data warehouse.

Using this solution has given us better performance than just purely using PL/SQL.

The most valuable feature is the new Data Lake feature, which provides the basic capabilities needed.

I found it is kind of weird that not all of the mapping changes are treated as true changes.

Our primary use case for this solution is at a Russian bank.

The goal was to integrate DWH with a banking core system that used Pervasive SQL 2000 DB. The bank as our client in the field of Data Warehousing asked us to extract data from their core banking system and build a Data Mart for preparation of regulatory reports.

Informatica PowerCenter moved forward the technology level of ETL-process management of the bank with visualization and standardization of ETL development instead of a huge volume of scripting used previously. Moreover, the task of integration of systems based on different technology platforms was successfully solved.

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. The second task that was solved with Java transformation was the correct transformation of the Amount field (each amount in PSQL 2000 is stored in three different fields). These tasks were solved by using PSQL 2000 Java SDK library imported to Informatica PowerCenter Java Transformation.

I hope that the next release of this solution will:

• Work with HADOOP and other BigData solutions.
• Have an ability to compile code to run it quicker.
• Include new features for parallel job execution.
• Include more instruments for LOGs analysis, interpretation, and job corrections.

It works stably but needs a dedicated professional admin in the project team.

It's scalable and can be supplemented by a Data Quality solution.

We used the vendor's distant support and the expertise was excellent.

As we are a consulting and data management company, the instruments we have to use during the project are chosen by our customers.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.

We implemented this solution at the customer's site as consultants. 

We are also using IBM DataStage, Oracle Data Integrator, SAP Data Services. From project to project it's up to the customer.

ETL ; Extract Transform Load from data base to data warehouse based on specific business rules.

Informatica PowerCenter satisfies our customers need; thus making Extract Transform Load from data base to data warehouse based on specific business rules.

There are two valuable features. The first is the main typical functionality that the PowerCenter gives, that is the ETL. The ETL is able to extract transform load from/to a variety of sources, like Oracle, Microsoft's SQL Server, and Big Data. 

The second is the capabilities of the GUI interface; drag and drop solution. 

It's a powerful tool and might be the first ETL tool based on Gartner to extract, transform, and load data operations.

The licensing cost for Informatica is very high. Other all-in-one solutions offer much lower prices. 

Also, sometimes with data capture, the solution doesn't support some data types so you must find an alternative, Informatica Data Replication, for instance. You end up buying two very expensive products to get just a little bit more functionality. They need to offer an all-in-one package.

I'd like Informatica to provide more use cases. We have a huge knowledge base, but use cases in specific domains like healthcare, banking, and financial transactions would be helpful. There are some tools that exist for making predictions in different domains. I want something like that in Informatica so we can see use cases that showcase better management, better quality, and better governance, in different domains.

The solution needs better support and training. Informatica can do a better job in making it clear at the beginning what is supported and not supported, and what the licenses include and do not include. That way we are better able to communicate with the clients and to get assistance from support. It would also save us time in raising issues with support if we knew what was covered.

The stability is mainly written in Java programming language. If someone is working as a data engineer and he is not from a computer science background, he may fear there are some errors, specifically in Java packages that Informatica has built. It is not yet stable, but some hotfixes in the big data edition of Informatica, in versions 10 and 10.1, work well to patch any issues.

The solution is very scalable but at the same time, it is very expensive. It's a scalable platform and is distributed, but on the other hand, you have to pay for many separate things. For instance, a real-time integration like a cloud connector for grabbing data from the cloud may be advantageous, but the disadvantage is that the whole package would cost a very huge amount of money for the license. 

Technical support and their approach is good. They have a support portal and support tickets. If you open a ticket it has multiple levels of severity from level one to very high or critical. 

Also, you can buy a support policy for 24/7 support. 

Sometimes, we've had issues where customers complain so we have to keep pressuring support and escalating the matter to upper management to get things fixed in a timely fashion. However, this doesn't happen too often. The process as a whole is good.

Our company has many locations, in the Middle East and Africa, but we're mostly based in Cairo, and have about 100 engineers using the solution.

In terms of advice, I would give to others considering using the solution, I'd say this: they should start with a datasheet of every product on Informatica. Licensing is expensive, so you should study the needs of the customer or your business and make a compliance matrix between the products and what the company needs. You'll run into big problems if your customer's needs aren't met in the Informatica products you choose.

I would rate the solution at a seven or eight out of ten. They're still far away from offering a holistic solution for better management, and there can be more enhancements in use cases, but it's a good solution.

The stability of the solution is one of its best features. The user interface is also very good.

The cost and set up of the licenses could be improved. You need a lot of different licenses, depending on your setup, and it gets expensive. For example, we're connected with Oracle, be we need licenses for that plus the core server, Terradata, etc. It gets costly.

There's also a feature that exists on IBM DataStage called CDC. It's not on Informatica PowerCenter, but if they could add a feature similar to this in the next release, it would be useful.

The solution is very stable.

It is easy to scale the solution.

I don't get in touch with technical support very often, but I would rate them as medium in their level of efficiency in dealing with issues. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We use the on-premises version of the solution.

I'm a consultant, and I largely work with enterprises.

I would recommend the product for integration. It's one of the best tools in the integration field.

I would rate this solution nine out of ten.

We are implementing our master data management integration solution. The idea is to have the data cleaned, and have a catalog set up so that we have a library we can consult to see what type of data is being used. At the same time, have a tool to provide a three hundred and sixty-degree view of our customer data. We will also have a unique repository and a data link that we're setting up in Azure.

We will be moving all of our storage to the cloud so that we have a single repository, and this data will be accessible by our tools such as Tableau, for integration with our reporting. 

Currently, we are in a hybrid-cloud environment, but our intention is to be cloud-based using Azure.

The two most important components are the building and integration. On top of that, you can clean and analyze your data to make sure that you don't have any corruption. In the end, you have structured, proper data for use in an integrated BI solution.

I would like to see the inclusion of a tool that allows you to report performance metrics. For example, it can determine whether the connectivity is correct, or how long it's taking the integration to move data from one place to another. This would allow administrators to govern the performance and better maintain the solution. Having a tool that can work is nice, but we're not sure if it works accurately without something to evaluate performance.

Integration with Artificial Intelligence would benefit this solution. The system should start to learn the behavior of your connections, and understand where your data is coming from to ensure that the process is being done correctly. As the system learns the stages, it will be able to easily identify problems. For example, if I have different databases where I want to store information, such as pictures in one and PDF files in another, it will be able to distinguish that.

We are still launching this solution so I cannot tell you if it is stable or not. We believe that with the support and resources we are getting, it will be. Our vision is to be as stable as possible, and we do not want to lose any data.

We performed some testing with our Asian platform and it was working fine. We are working in several countries at the same time, integrating their products, and we are hoping that it goes as smoothly as the one from Asia. This tool should allow us to scale, but we will have to wait and see.

We have between fifty and sixty people using this solution.

Informatica is assisting us with the implementation and they know what we are trying to accomplish. They have visibility as to what our company does, and having people like that helps a lot. Overall, at the moment we are very happy with the support and their contribution.

We did not have another solution in place before this. We knew that it was something that we needed to do. Since we are moving from on-premise to the cloud, we needed something to help us with the integration.

We hired somebody from Informatica to help us with the implementation. We have no complaints about their service.

Choosing this solution was a little bit complex for us because there are a lot of different vendors in that space. We had to do a proper evaluation and negotiation to get to the solution that we needed. Some vendors offer a certain package, whereas others offer another package, and there are certain components from one vendor that we needed in the other one. There is where the complexity came from. In the end, we choose the one that we thought was the proper solution for us.

There is a lot of competition in the space, and the vendors want to get good companies where they can implement their solution. It doesn't mean that every product fits every organization. My advice for anybody researching this type of solution is to meet with all of the vendors, discuss the proof of concept based on what the company has, and see if the solution is really the proper one for them. The vendors need to be honest in evaluating whether the product can really fit the needs, and they should be able to justify it.

Overall, we are satisfied with the product so far, as well as the support. In any tool, there's always something to chase and always something that can be done better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.