Informatica PowerExchange Reviews

We are a system integrator. My experience is primarily around solution consulting, designing, and proposing it in the right perspective so that its features are best utilized, and we are able to provide the best value for our customers.

From the product feature or product capability perspective, the aspects around integration, transformation, and standardization are valuable. It's fairly easy to use. It has a GUI-based interface.

There are elements related to the fast-paced movement of data. If you combine PowerExchange with Change Data Capture (CDC), in a very fast-moving batch, PowerExchange does a good job, although it doesn't quite support that in real-time. 

The transforms and the objects that are a part and parcel of PowerCenter help speed up the development and design and also help with better performance. If you are able to club it with a very high-performing database underneath, then you get the best of both worlds through a pushdown optimization mechanism. You can exploit Informatica's innate and native transformation capabilities. You can also exploit the underlying databases, scalability, and fast processing capabilities. These things come seamlessly with PowerExchange. PowerExchange has implemented this in PowerCenter on Teradata very effectively. It's one of the best combinations for pushdown optimization where you utilize the transformation engine of Informatica, and you have a very powerful Teradata underneath. The entire Teradata construct and architecture is quite strong in terms of processing, fast movement, etc. You are able to establish the best of both worlds.

Price competitiveness is an area for improvement. That's something not very good for PowerExchange, and that's an area that Informatica should focus on as a strategy.

They should make it quick and easy for use of citizen data integration or for people or integrators developing at the customer side. They could be development teams within the business team. For them, the product owners can consider making it a little bit more seamless and a little bit more democratized. However, it's difficult to democratize data integration and ETL technology in the way you can do with data visualization technology. It's much more difficult, but it's an improvement area.

Real-time data processing is another area where it's falling short, and it can certainly do better there.

I have been working with Informatica products since early 2003. The PowerExchange product came on board about five years ago. I have direct experience with it for two to three years, and that has been mainly around solution consulting. I don't do any coding.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

The company I work for has fairly large customers. They are mostly medium to large customers.

It's able to handle quite large volumes. Especially in a big data ecosystem, it isn't a problem. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability.

I'd rate their support a seven out of ten. The knowledge is very much there, but it's a question of availability. If they're available at the right point in time, that's good.

Neutral

For on-prem deployment, the installation and configuration aren't a tall order. They can be done within three weeks for each environment. That's not a problem. One can do the configuration by following the best mechanisms and the best configuration parameters, etc. That's not an issue. The challenge is the actual implementation. For a data warehouse of medium size, the implementation timelines would be around 9 to 10 months with proper integration and proper standardization. For a big data warehouse, it'd be slightly more. If you want to do it quite quickly, within 3 months or so, then you would not possibly go for technology as costly as Informatica. You can go for it, but you may want to choose other technologies in the market.

I have not faced much of a challenge with its implementation. The issue comes only when a person doesn't know how PowerCenter has to be set up with the repository, the underlying metadata structures, etc. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of the ease of the setup.

It's expensive. In fact, nobody would buy any product of Informatica if the price was the only consideration. It costs money, and it doesn't come cheap, but it provides value for money in many ways.

If the customer has money, I'd recommend Informatica PowerExchange. If the customer doesn't have money, I'd recommend a PoC. I'd certainly suggest trying it once.

Overall, it's a fairly comprehensive technology, and it has been one of the earliest movers in this space. It has been there right at the top in the Gartner quadrants and other platforms. It has been used by a significantly high number of customers across the globe.

I'd rate Informatica PowerExchange a nine out of ten.

We are using the solution for real-time integration. Sometimes there are some complex requirements for real-time reporting, and  it'll be maybe for CDC, change data capture.

One of the most important beneficial values has been reducing the impact on the source systems. For example, rather than having batch mode scenarios, it will be in real-time. It will provide minimal impact on the source system, thereby offering better performance to the application users. 

It is also helping the top management and decision-makers to make real-time decisions rather than waiting for one or two days to make a decision. It can tell them the information on the fly and they can decide based on what they have in front of them.

The change data capture is the most important feature of this product.

It offers a simple initial setup.

The scalability is excellent. 

It's stable.

Technical support is great. 

The connectivity with T24 core banking could be improved. This is the only downside I can see.

The solution could beef up its support. 

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

It's quite a stable, reliable product. I would rate it nine out of ten in terms of stability. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze.

We have found the product to be quite scalable. I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten. 

We're providing the solution to 20 to 25 customers in the region. 

Support is very reliable. They are responsive and knowledgeable. We are very satisfied with the level of assistance we receive. 

Positive

I've used a variety of Informatica solutions. 

The solution is straightforward to set up. I'd rate the simplicity of implementation nine out of ten. 

It only takes a couple of hours to deploy the solution. 

The deployment can be done by one person. However, it usually requires a team, depending on the size of the department.

We handled the deployment ourselves, in-house. 

There is an ROI. However, it's not tangible per se. It comes from giving users the ability to make better, smarter decisions, and that level of value is hard to quantify. I'd rate the ROI eight out of ten.

The pricing is moderate. I'd rate them five out of ten in terms of affordability. 

I am using the software, I'm a distributor of the software. 

I'm managing the distribution of Informatica technology, so I have many customers, and a lot of them are using the latest version. However, the version can vary from customer to customer.

Overall, I would recommend this product to others. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

PowerExchange is a data integration tool. We use PowerExchange when we have data sitting in silos in different systems and databases, and the customer wants to capture and analyze it. Customers usually want to bring the data into one place or build a central data warehouse to perform analytics or reporting. The solution can ingest data from different systems and bring it to the data warehouse.

The product’s flexibility is valuable. It supports open APIs. It has multiple native connectors with different systems. We can also write APIs to connect to different systems. The flexibility of connecting to different systems is the biggest advantage of the tool. It is one of the best data integration tools in the market.

CDC lets customers get updates on their data quite fast. It captures the data from the last read data up to the new read data. It captures the data change and provides updates faster. These updates are much faster than uploading the data. The incremental data makes data capturing much faster.

Data transformation and mapping complexity are very crucial. Data is available in different systems in all formats. The format can be structured or non-structured. It can be PDFs, images, social media feeds, or vector DBs. PowerExchange can handle all sorts of formats.

Informatica is now moving to the cloud. PowerExchange is not being promoted as it used to be. The product is not suitable for application integration. There are other tools in the market that are better.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The tool is highly scalable. It is highly available and has multiple deployment options. We have more than ten customers.

The customer support is good. The team takes a little bit of time to resolve the issues. The team works on shifts. It takes time, but the support is good.

The ease of setup depends on the customer's requirements, how many datasets and tables they have, and how many different databases we have to connect. It also depends on whether the data repositories are on-premise or cloud. However, whether the deployment is simple or complex, the tool supports everything. We follow a typical software deployment.

Depending on the complexity, customers can easily see the ROI within a few weeks or months of deployment. ROI is easily calculatable once we define what we’re using the tool for.

The product is not very expensive. However, the price can grow depending on the customer’s needs and the data feed they want. It depends on how many tables and ingestion pipelines the customers have. There is a different subscription for the cloud.

We provide the solution to our customers. If customers want a cloud solution, PowerExchange is not the best option. IDMC best suits customers looking for a cloud option to integrate different databases. IDMC is a better option for hybrid and cloud setups. PowerExchange is suitable for on-premise solutions. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We are using the solution in banking, telecommunication, and insurance companies. We use it to take data from sources and make data warehouse models.

The pushdown feature is valuable. We use pushdown after transferring and when we use TPT. It is easy to integrate the solution with other tools. It is the best solution.

Pushdown optimization could be improved. Pushdown optimization cannot be used very well if the users do not know how to use Informatica.

I have been using the solution for 15 years.

The product is stable. We do not have problems related to stability.

The product is easy to scale. We are a medium-sized company.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The product is easy to install. I can deploy the tool and do whatever I want with it. Informatica has a platform that we use to teach people. It is effective. The learning curve is good.

Sometimes, we use Oracle GoldenGate for data capture. We use the columns on the table to see the batch update dates or the created dates. We have also used ODI. Informatica is better than Oracle and SSIS. Informatica’s user interface is better than that of other tools. It is easier to integrate it with other systems.

My organization is a partner. I am a consultant. The data is completed in the morning. We get it at night from the source systems to the data warehouse. We do it in batches. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use PowerExchange for operational analytics. Some customers need us to collect data events in real time and push them into some central place like an operational hub or database and build insights on top of it. It gives us business insights into whatever is happening in the organization in real time.

We have around 20 to 30 engineers enabled on the real-time and PowerExchange products.

The main benefit of PowerExchange is its native real-time capabilities. Competing tools are counting on third-party packages or Oracle to offer real-time capabilities. However, Informatica has a native ability to scan the data on the file system level and capture the changes almost instantly when I push it to the consumers. The solution has a powerful built-in replication engine.

The major shortcoming of PowerExchange is high availability and failover. None of the versions we've used to date have had the out-of-the-box ability to enable failover and high-availability requirements. This is a significant challenge and risk.

PowerExchange's engine also lacks support for some data types. We are capturing data in a raw format, and there are also some data types like XML structure or big objects that are still hosted, so there are sometimes problems importing data. If it's not supported, you won't be able to build your scenario. Those are two main challenges that hopefully will be covered with any subsequent or new releases.

We've been using Informatica PowerExchange for seven or six years.

PowerExchange's performance is great. The stability is acceptable. Sometimes it fails because of a high resource load, but it's adequate. 

PowerExchange isn't flexible in terms of scalability. This is the nature of the product. For example, you cannot run multiple instances in high availability or active mode. 

Informatica support is good. They are helpful whenever we have a challenge that requires a custom fix.

We work with various solution vendors. For example, we use IBM Confluent for messaging and streaming, Tibco for application and data integration, etc.

I would compare PowerExchange to Oracle GoldenGate for real-time integration. GoldenGate consumes more resources from CPU and memory, but it's more stable, and the performance benchmark is higher.

The investment is bigger than Informatica. Informatica is moving to the cloud, so the investment required for real-time stuff and on-prem integration is not like before. I always compare to GoldenGate when choosing a technical solution. They're doing quite well in real-time integration.

Deploying PowerExchange is average. It's not an easy GUI-based setup, but it's not that complicated, either. It requires some effort, but I wouldn't say it's difficult. The installation took a few days, but full end-to-end implementation takes around a month.

It requires some maintenance because there is no automatic failover and high availability. If it crashes, a qualified engineer has to take care of the instance and turn it on again or manually intervene to start it on a new machine. 

We did it by ourselves. Our team has qualified engineers who can handle the implementation. Some issues required hotfixes from Informatica, and they were cooperating as much as they could.

The cost of PowerExchange is reasonable. It does not rely on complicated formulas or unrealistic equations. The pricing model is straightforward. There is one component, and real-time integration is included. Some other solutions require purchasing additional modules or third-party plugins for this capability.

At the same time, you can't just consider the cost of the license. You also need to dedicate a lot of resources and provide real-time support. It's a journey that must be assessed from different angles, including licensing, maintenance after deployment, operational headaches, etc.  You need to calculate the investment from different angles.

I rate PowerExchange seven out of 10. My advice to people considering PowerExchange is that you need to have a strong business case to justify investing in a real-time solution. 

It has to bring value to the organization because it's not a straightforward journey. Real-time implementation creates a lot of operational headaches. You have to take care of everything to run in real time. You have to run patches and ETLs every hour, every two hours, or every morning.

We use it for referral calls with Salesforce.

I would like the stability to improve.

I've used the solution for about a month.

The product is unstable, but I don't know if it's because of the browser or the tool itself.

There are about 10,000 users in my organization using the solution.

I didn't like the solution very much. It is the cloud version, so maybe that's why it's a little complicated to understand.

I rate Informatica PowerExchange a five out of ten.

The solution can connect to different systems i.e. mainframe, IMS or AS/400 Legacy Systems.

The target system is Legacy Systems.

The solution could be made more user-friendly. The configurations are also quite difficult.

I have been using this solution for a few years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution depending on the environment which it is hosted.

The initial setup was a little difficult to configure.

An annual package license fee is required.

I am a solution architect and PowerExchange is one of the products that I work with. It is used for data integration and we use it to bring together all of the data from our legacy systems.

The most valuable feature is connectivity to data sources. I leverage everything in terms of connectors to big data such as DBMS, RDBMS, and conversion to COBOL format. 

Saving a COBOL Copybook can be difficult and it would be nice if it were simplified. The complexity arises when we use recursive statements and redefined classes.

Technical support can be improved with respect to delays in ticket response time.

I would like to see more implements for big data including ORC file support. This is what most of our clients are now demanding.

I have been working with Informatica PowerExchange for approximately five years. More generally, I have worked with Informatica products for between 10 and 12 years.

This has been a wonderful product and we have had no trouble with stability.

We have been in contact with technical support and there have been delays in terms of responding to tickets. Overall, I would rate support as average.

I have also used Informatica PowerCenter and the main difference is that PowerExchange is mainly cloud-hosted. People can access it from anywhere.

The suitability of this tool depends on the client and their needs. Based on their requirements, this is certainly a solution that I would recommend. For example, if their teams are really diversified and they need a quick solution in terms of integration then this is the right product for them.

So far, I have found this product to be good. That said, we did face some difficulties with respect to data connections where we needed a real-time feed to be consumed.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.