Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

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.

• 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.

As all ETL tools in general, it does not include a good data reporting feature. Another one is the component called "Union" which includes some bugs:

• Adding new groups, the field-names are lost
• Adding new fields, the field type should be reset for all fields in the "Union" or the mapping validation will fail.

There is no possibility of handle non matching records in a "joiner" as in DataStage.

4-5 years, different versions.

No

No

No

I used other tools like IBM DataStage. The final decision is made by my clients but what I see is that clients using DB2 prefer to use DataStage over Informatica as both (DB2 and DataStage) are IBM products.

Very straightforward.

In-house

• 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.

• It is very expensive. High end. • We provided training of SQL to our staff before using this product. Because a good understanding of SQL is mandatory for using Powercenter. • GUI: Lack of clarity and consistency created problems for our staff. So it requires some improvements. • We used the services of highly skilled persons for installation of powercenter. Novice staff can’t install this product properly.

Our organization is using it because it is one of the leading data integration tools available in the market and supports large data volumes and meets our demands for security and performance. PowerCenter is serving as the data integration foundation for our enterprise integration initiatives including data warehousing, data governance, data migration, SOA), and MDM. Powercenter in my opinion has the best data transfer technologies including its standard, advanced, big data, real time, data virtualization and cloud editions.

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.

Our primary use case is to process semi-structured and structured files using business rules to create CSV files for data warehouse loading and reporting.

This solution has allowed my client to see the real benefits of dynamically reading the profile to verify the file structures.

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.

The developer tool documentation can be enhanced with a more clear explanation of each utility, accompanied by relevant examples, so that developers are able to create programs with ease.

More than five years.

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.

I would like to see it be able to import data from NoSQL.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for approximately three months.

It's a stable product.

We are using this solution for seven to eight hours per day. We are using it frequently.

Informatica is scalable, it's perfect. There are no changes required for this solution.

We have not had any issues with technical support. They are fine.

I started coding in SQL, then looked up Informatica directly.

The initial setup is not that complex.

It takes less than a day but more than an hour to deploy this solution.

We are satisfied with the pricing. The licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would definitely recommend this to my friends as well as anyone who is interested in using this solution.

I would rate Informatica PowerCenter a ten out of ten.

Private Cloud

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.

I have been using this solution for three years.

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.

I've been using the solution for nine years.

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.