Informatica PowerExchange Reviews

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 work with Informatica PowerExchange for a very big trial for data warehousing and loading data for various systems. They work off transformation, creating a data warehouse. We also made part of the administration for that client. 

They wanted to load data continuously, so the jobs were run twenty-four hours per day because the volume of data was huge. The big transformations were made in a data warehouse for this project and it was very fitting to do this. So the transformation work called for Informatica PowerExchange. It was easy to work with this and very stable.

Integration with the largest number of databases and other systems would be important. We worked a lot with this ETL tool and in my opinion, it is the best on the market and what we missed in Informatica, compared with ETL. For example, each component in parallel with a configurable parallel made on the same machine or even on different machines. It's that kind of thing that I don't think Informatica PowerExchange can provide at this moment. In Informatica PowerExchange we ran jobs in parallel but not components with a parallel degree.

We had two or three training meetings at the time it was set up with Informatica and after that, we kept the link with them so in case we had any issue, we could ask them. The support was very good.

The setup was straightforward and not very complex.

I would rate Informatica PowerExchange at a nine on a scale of ten. I would recommend it. I would not rate it a ten because I have seen better tools.

Our primary use case is for carrying out data integration and transformation from across different types of sources, different types of data stores and types of data. Our goal is to bring in data from diverse sources at a very fast pace and in very large volumes. It has to diversify and we have to strike a balance between the two. We partner with Informatica and I'm practice head of data analytics. 

We have brought in a lot of value to our customers leveraging this technology, large customers featuring 100 Millions of customers and beyond

A valuable feature is the way it utilizes a push down optimization. This teradata is a fantastic combination of BDO and I think is one of the features which has really been very prominent and very effective. You're using the Hadoop ecosystem to do a significant amount of necessary processing and you're using the internal transformation engine of Informatica to do that. 

Another feature of the solution is coupling up and seamlessly driving the underlying stock jobs or scoop jobs which are essentially executable within the Hadoop ecosystem. This provides a significant amount of control over the landscape and overall implementation. 

A further element is the underlying metadata and the monitoring and auditing components which Informatica provides. If you're running a complex next gen, powerful analytics and modern BI analytics platform or an ecosystem, then I think these three things along with the integration with external sources and external components is seamless in terms of an SMS engine or an email or even offering integration with WhatsApp.

Along with that, Informatica has been trying to spread its tentacles across stuff like Data Life Cycle Management and a lot of things in MDM, etc. Overall it's a rich toolkit and covers a very wide aspect of data management.

I think Informatica could be improved if they were to get into the data exploitation side of things. The value chain of exporting, reporting, visualizing, etc. That seems to be a blind spot for Informatica. If it were to diversify a little more, maybe with the reporting and visualization utility, it would be an add-on to PowerExchange. From a product strategy, Informatica seems to be getting fragmented by diversifying to various product lines and then going into the market. 

If I were to have any additional features, it would be diagnostics and reporting visualization.

I've been using this solution for more than a year. 

Informatica is possibly the world leader in this field and has been for the last several years.  It has features and functionalities which has made it the world leader for such a long period of time. It's a fully equipped and compatible solution with big data and it's able to drive and achieve the best of both worlds. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

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.

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.

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.

We use Informatica PowerExchange for all of our ETL and data warehousing tasks. 

PowerExchange is something to be used in conjunction with Hadoop. It provides the native features and you can connect to the HDFS system.

The performance when doing data transformations is good.

The user interface and user experience are perfectly all right.

Informatica is very expensive in all aspects, so the pricing is something that could be improved.

We are using many other tools for data ingestion that are part of the Apache family, NiFi. When we see that we have some challenges we then use other tools.

We have been using PowerExchange for about two years.

This is a very stable solution and we use it on a daily basis.

This is a scalable solution. My team is the only one in the company who uses it daily, and there are approximately 10 people in the group.

We have not been in touch with Informatica technical support for this solution. However, we have dealt with them in relation to other products. I would rate them a seven or eight out of ten. Overall, they are pretty good.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup and deployment were very simple for us. It takes approximately a week's time to complete.

Our development team manages the environment.

The implementation was done primarily by our own team members. We did have a contracting company who helped us with this, and they formally interact with Informatica.

I would say that this is one of the best tools for any data ingestion mechanism. It has tremendous capabilities for data movement from one environment and multiple environments, and it can also be used for providing API services.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features are functionality and support.

I would like to have easier integration with cloud platforms.

I have been using PowerExchange for a few years.

This is a stable solution.

PowerExchange is easy to scale. We have about 20 users, who are mostly developers.

We are very happy with the technical support.

I have used a number of similar solutions including other Informatica products such as Enterprise Data Catalog and PowerCenter.

This product is easy to install and it can be done in a few hours.

Overall, it is good and I recommend it, but it still has gaps in terms of functionality.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.