Informatica PowerCenter Valuable Features
NM
Narasimha MLV
Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The functions in Informatica PowerCenter that I have found most valuable are the way it manages the volume of data, the push down optimization, and the performance aspects of it, mostly related to parallelism techniques. These are some of the things that stand out and make a difference compared to other tools. I haven't worked extensively on the Integration Cloud, which some of my team members are working with.
The Advanced Transformation capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter are particularly useful.
Informatica PowerCenter supports data governance and compliance requirements from my side, but I haven't worked extensively on the metadata management and data governance aspects of it.
View full review »PC
Prof. Dr. Rolando Casamayor
Professor of Economics of Informatic at CMAYOR
A significant feature of Informatica PowerCenter is its ability to integrate a wide range of data sources, such as those from IBM and Oracle, into a uniform form for processing in a data warehouse. This integration capability is beneficial for preparing data for analysis. The system supports real-time integration, which is essential for many of my tasks.
View full review »
Deepak Shiv
Resource Manager at Pyramid Consulting
It is very helpful when extracting data from multiple sources instead of using SQL queries. 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.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Informatica PowerCenter
April 2025
Learn what your peers think about Informatica PowerCenter. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
861,490 professionals have used our research since 2012.
YT
Yahya Tlaghi
Developer, Architect at L'Oreal
What I like most about Informatica PowerCenter is that it's the best tool in the market for data integration. Currently, I work in L'Oréal, where a new system from SAP is used. Informatica PowerCenter integration with SAP is very, very fast and very, very simple, so you have the server flow from SAP, and through Informatica PowerCenter, you can ingest the data and make that data available for the business more quickly.
View full review »HK
Hava Kafka
Developer and Team Lead at ZIM
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is good for big data, meaning it is a useful tool if there is a need for integration functionalities to manage a huge amount of data. The tool has many functionalities and options. The main valuable features of the product revolve around its flexibility and ability to deal with big data. The tool's components help my company in areas where integrations are required.
Lars Borchers
Senior BI Backend Developer at ALD Automotive Portugal
The reliability of the product and the way of orchestration of different services is valuable to us. It is a very old tool, so it is a classic solution. Once someone is familiar with it, they would like to use it.
View full review »
Ramesh SV
Senior Technical Lead / Practise Architecht at TEKsystems (ex Aston Carter)
The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is data transformation and user-friendliness.
View full review »
Katarzyna Palikowska
ETL Developer at Det Norske Veritas
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.
View full review »
reviewer1342140
Business Intelligence Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
It's very easy to use it to develop mappings and workflows.
View full review »
Novneet Jain
Data Integration Architect at InfoCepts
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.
Mukul Shukla
Assistant Manager at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
The solution's most valuable feature is its support service. The support team efficiently resolves any technical issues.
View full review »
Muhammad -Usman
Data AI Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »reviewer2042916
Analytics Insights - Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »AE
Afthab Ellath
Enterprise application architect at Ministry of Health
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.
View full review »PB
Pavan B
Technical Manager at Agriitex
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.
View full review »reviewer1080585
Practice Head - Advanced Analytics & Cloud at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
It is very robust, scalable, and simple to use.
It is very comprehensive in terms of connector and transformation capabilities from both a source and target perspective.
View full review »AS
Ankit Sinha
Associate Manager at Accenture
Informatica PowerCenter has good user feedback. The developers can easily make mappings in the solution.
reviewer2116809
Solution Design Expert at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
The cloud version is very useful.
The features provided are great.
It is stable and reliable.
Technical support is quite helpful.
The setup is very simple.
View full review »
Mohammad Faizan Ahmad
Sr. Technical Engineer at Investcorp Bank BSC
PowerCenter performs well during data transformation and optimization.
View full review »
Mohamed Elkady
Sr.Manager - Data Management & Data Governance at a tech company with 201-500 employees
To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions.
Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use.
Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle.
View full review »GF
Gully François
Computer system engineer at Groupe Casino
The support is valuable. There are also open-source ETL products, which work very well, but there is no support. When we face a production problem, being able to get support is valuable, and it brings efficiency. With an open-source solution, we can't engage anyone to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.
Its stability is high, and it is also scalable.
View full review »reviewer1734582
Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »
VinethSuresh
Senior Data Analyst at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the flow designer functionally. It is the best out of any ETL tool. Additionally, the solution is reliable and trustable in dealing with large data sources anytime. When we're using billions of data transactions, it's smooth.
View full review »reviewer2123568
Senior Oracle Database Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is an excellent tool. It covers our needs.
The solution is used mostly to handle our daily data loads in our data warehouse. We've been successful so far using it.
It provides monitoring and we can therefore be aware of what is happening when we are handling jobs.
The ETL and monitoring tools are the most useful for us.
The transformations we need to do, to comply with user requests, is very easy with this product.
The solution is stable.
It can scale.
View full review »VJ
Vasubabu Jetty
Principal Consultant at Genpact - Headstrong
I found the map links, work links, and workflows valuable. They are important features.
Parwaz Khan
Head of Data Analytics at Bupa Arabia
The most valuable features of Informatica PowerCenter are the ease of use, and development, and is simple to find resources.
View full review »
Ravi Kuppusamy
CEO and Founder at BAssure Solutions
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.
View full review »NM
Narasimha MLV
Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »
RajeevKumar9
Software Test Automation Engineer at Atradius
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.
View full review »FN
Franklin Nascimento
Principal Associate at Data Meaning, Inc.
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.
View full review »Deepak Shiv
Resource Manager at Pyramid Consulting
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.
View full review »reviewer1245828
CIO at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Once you have learned Informatica, it is very easy to use.
The feedback that I have received from team members is that they found it easy to work with.
View full review »
Henry Niessen
Founder at DEN21DS
I like the completeness of the way I can build ETL workflows. It's not one feature that stands out. Rather, it's the way everything is working together.
On the matter of data lineage and data catalog and metadata, in particular, several new developments are embedded as options you could use or could buy. The modular structure is very helpful.
View full review »
Dusanka Mladenovic
Data Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
This is an old and reliable product. I like the visual tool for data mapping and the workflow manager.
MohamedFouda
Informatica Developer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
PowerCenter is the market leader, so more organizations use it than other tools. It's a feature-rich solution, so that's why it's at the top of the market.
Muharrem Iseri
Managing Partner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
One of the most valuable features for us is the metadata repository because it can easily understand the lineage of first target mapping. My company and I also find Informatica really easy to use—when a consultant joins our company, in just a few days to a few weeks, they can understand how to use it—so we prefer to use this ETL tool.
View full review »IB
IhabBekhiet
Service Delivery Manager & Data Governance Consultant at Master Works
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.
View full review »reviewer1640310
Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
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.
View full review »SB
Saravana Babu
Project Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable features are the monitoring tools and the reporting manager.
View full review »HA
Harisha Acharya
Senior Data Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
We like that it is cloud-based and the performance is good. The number of docs has been reduced drastically, which is very good.
reviewer1318821
Technology Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »reviewer1498596
Senior Consultant at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is easy to use, and it is quick for developing things. It is fairly powerful, and it can integrate with a lot of different platforms without much hassle.
View full review »RM
RobertoMessora
Head of Business Integration and Architecture at Jakala
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.
View full review »reviewer1293765
Data Architecture/Management at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable features are the metadata repository and the data warehouse application console.
View full review »SeniorEtddda
Senior ETL Developer at Office of State Revenue
The features I find most valuable is that the solution is very user-friendly and the graphical design is very easy to understand.
View full review »
ChandrasekharPetaka
VP - Digital at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Informatica PowerCenter is a very good ETL tool.
View full review »reviewer1488372
Associate Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Informatica PowerCenter is very good for integrating a huge amount of data in a very short duration, such as a minute.
It is also very easy to use. After you provide the source and the target, mappings are automatically done, which makes it easy to use for the development team.
View full review »AR
AliRaza1
Senior Technical Lead at Speridian Technologies
It's quite suitable for our needs.
It's a complete package, which is why we use this solution.
We have not had any issues with this solution.
View full review »reviewer1656495
Lead BI&A Consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
It has a very good graphical interface.
It has the possibility to intervene in the automatic ETL.
It has a lot of components.
It has a Data Catalog that uses the Model repository.
View full review »reviewer1491816
Senior Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
I like the automated scheduling feature. Suppose we want to automate data anonymization, we have tools within PowerCenter for that. In terms of the capability of data loading features, Informatica products are better.
View full review »it_user1438488
Senior Software Engineer at Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation
If the systems get migrated or upgraded, the amount of resources required are very minimal. We can change the connections and establish a new connection. It's very helpful.
View full review »reviewer1448301
Information Technology Security Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
What I like the most is that we have to deal with less while writing the queries.
The unstructured data can now be imported into Informatica PowerCenter. This is an achievement for them.
reviewer1407579
Associate Director at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution provides good performance with an easy to use interface and reasonable documentation.
reviewer1323657
Database Administrator and Applications Specialist at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The GUI.
View full review »AE
AmanyEldaly
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »reviewer1215849
Senior Associate at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable feature is the new Data Lake feature, which provides the basic capabilities needed.
View full review »
Kirill Slivchikov
Owner at 7Spring Consult
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.
View full review »MK
MohamedKhamis
Data Scientist at IME
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.
it_user785520
Regional Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The stability of the solution is one of its best features. The user interface is also very good.
View full review »RP
Ricardo Pedro
Solutions & Achitecture Data Analyst Specialist at a construction company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »it_user1119516
Project Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The performance and design of Informatica have been very valuable. I find the performance faster than, Oracle Data Integrator or DataStage.
View full review »it_user1030422
Director of Innovation & Development Department at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The solution has the best user interface and it's the most user-friendly of all data integration tools.
View full review »it_user1080720
ETL Reporting Analytics Consultant at Accenture
The most valuable features are the dynamic reading of the file metadata profile, and the ability to define business rules that are used to verify and validate the uploaded files.
View full review »MM
Mark Ma
Student at Ontario Ministry of Labour
- Import from PowerCenter
- Copy Text between Excel and the Developer Tool
- Logical Data Object Read and Write Mapping Editing
- DDL Query
- Profiles
VS
Vijaya Saduvuv
Lead Application Developer and Informatica Administrator at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
It works with any multi-database, so it works with Sybase, SQL Server. Also, the performance is really good and it is easy to use.
View full review »it_user808662
Works at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Data Integration. The UI-based ability to create data mapping. Also, reusable definition of data sources and the out-of-the-box availability of a large number maplets for common transformation functions.
View full review »it_user793938
Integration developer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
- Big Data connectivity, Data Integration solutions, and Data Quality solutions.
- Easy to code and understand solutions in Informatica.
it_user488589
Technology Architect at Broadridge Financial Solutions
We are using it to source data from Sybase database and flat files so as to load to the target Greenplum Database. The facility to do parallel load on Greenplum using gpload feature is valuable for us. Also, the ability to scale through partitions helped us to improve the performance.
View full review »it_user677700
DW Admin at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Once you figure it out, it is a powerful and simple ETL tool. Its stability has been very satisfactory.
View full review »it_user275235
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Lead at Bank of America
- Able to access heterogeneous databases: It can work with any kind of database available in the market. In fact, it can be applied to NoSQL databases as well.
- SQL override allows users to write simple to complex queries inside mapping for performance tuning the load process, pre and post SQL can help control the load process to get desired outputs.
- Error handling techniques: Informatica provide a suite of options to handle errors. From logging error in database tables to e-mail notifications with log files, to decision/assignment tasks for data control, it can handle error at every stage of workflow. Restart options for batched work-flows.
- Debugging, is one other feature I found extremely useful. Before running a full load, you can run a subset of data from source-target and check for values generated from logic at every transformation.
- While in debugger mode Target tables do not load any physical data. The best part of debugging in Informatica is that, in the debugger mode, you can alter logic in expression transformation and check for the value generated from the logic. This will allow you to change logic if it's needed later.
- Transformations - the types of transformations (SQL Logics) provided are unmatched to any other ETL tool out there. When it comes to using transformations, even a beginner can understand with minimal effort, how to use them or what the expected output will be using that particular transformation. Most of them are self-explanatory, and provide the desired output. Especially Expression Transformation (which is the heart of any mapping).
- Can be used to build any type of logic with flexibility giving the number of logical functions (date/time/string etc...). Functions have a syntax that is very easy to understand.
- Informatica provides all the functions indexed in a proper fashion in expressions editor with syntax to allow users to build logic with ease.
- Version control, as check-in and check-out are easy and allow space for adding comments. These comments can come in handy during deployment when writing queries.
it_user202221
Business Intelligence Analyst at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
With this product, we managed to implement all of our ETL, including those with many sources, and complex transformations.
View full review »it_user150912
Data Quality and Conversion with 1,001-5,000 employees
- The possibility to create a data profiling mapping automatically from any imported source.
- The client installation includes a macro that can be imported into Excel. This will contains standard documents for technical design and documentation in general. The technical design developed in Excel can be directly imported into Powercenter using Powercenter Repository Manager and the corresponding mapping is automatically created. This can save a lot of development time for simple or not very complex mappings. This feature is called Mapping Analyst for Excel.
- The default error handling, automatically created, is quite good for those architectures that don't have a proper one or a budget for a custom one.
it_user4518
Head of Databases at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
• As it supports large data volumes, so it meets the demands of our company for security and performance.
• It helps us in making better and timelier business decisions by providing us the right information at the right time.
• Delivers data throughout our enterprise by accessing and integrating data in all formats.
• Provides security, scalability, performance to our system and establishes a foundation for our enterprise-wide data integration initiatives.
• Enables our teams of developers, analysts, and administrators to work faster and better together and also reduces our IT costs by encouraging collaboration and minimizing the development complexities.
View full review »
RemonHanna
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The most valuable aspects of Informatica PowerCenter are the many features, ease of use, and user-friendliness.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Informatica PowerCenter
April 2025
Learn what your peers think about Informatica PowerCenter. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
861,490 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Informatica PowerCenter Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2025
Popular Comparisons
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)
Azure Data Factory
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)
Palantir Foundry
IBM InfoSphere DataStage
Talend Open Studio
Oracle GoldenGate
Qlik Sense
SAP Data Services
Qlik Replicate
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Informatica PowerCenter Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Quick Links
Learn More:
- Primary Use Case
- Benefits
- Valuable Features
- Room for Improvement
- Customer Service and Support
- Initial Setup
- ROI
- Pricing
- Other Advice
- Microsoft SSIS vs. Informatica PowerCenter - which solution has better features?
- What Is The Biggest Difference Between Informatica PowerCenter and Microsoft SSIS?
- How do you compare Informatica PowerCenter with IBM DataStage?
- Which Informatica product would you choose - PowerCenter or Cloud Data Integration?
- A recent review wrote that PowerCenter has room for improvement. Agree or Disagree?
- Which is better - SSIS or Informatica PowerCenter?
- How do you evaluate the pricing model of Informatica PowerCenter?
- How do you rate the public cloud support of PowerCenter?
- What are the most frequent use cases of Informatica PowerCenter?
- How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica PowerCenter?
