Informatica PowerExchange Reviews

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.

I use the solution in my company for data integrations and building a data warehouse or data lake. It is mainly used for the integration of common data services. The tool gets used based on the requirements related to the data lake or data warehouse, which were needed by Informatica.

Informatica PowerExchange is used in our organization for the integration of some of the planning tools.

The product's functionality attached to the logs is an area of concern where improvements are required. Sometimes, the product takes time to identify certain gaps in scenarios where pipelines are broken. The product fails to provide clear visibility to help users maintain the pipelines, making it an area where improvements are required.

The product's high costs can be an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Informatica PowerExchange for a couple of years. My company takes care of the implementation of the product for our clients.

It is a stable solution. It is one of the most trustworthy products in terms of data integration.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Improvement is required in the product since it should provide users with more visibility in terms of log maintenance so that the developers can easily identify the need to monitor the pipelines, whether the pipelines are broken, and if it is easy to configure certain pipelines while being able to identify the performance offered. The aforementioned areas should be easily identifiable to avoid bottlenecks during the processing phase.

The product offers good scalability. The scalability features are supported as the product is available on the cloud

Hardly one or two people from my company's customer list use the product. There are very few people who use the features provided by Informatica PowerExchange since most cloud services nowadays have their own native tools.

My company doesn't have to communicate with the product's support team since we have expertise related to the tool.

The product's initial setup phase was not complex. The tool is easy to install onto any of the servers, and you can integrate it.

The deployment process includes steps like identifying how much capacity the tool would require, dataflows, the kind of services required, and the platforms on which you need certain services.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The time required to deploy the solution depends on the kind of servers users want to use with the product. Sometimes, the deployment needs to be planned out properly when you need more servers in your environment. If you have to deal with only simple use cases in your company, you just need to install the product onto any of your servers or nodes and run it in your environment. If you need to deal with simple or straightforward use cases, the product can be deployed in your environment in a day or two. Depending on whether you need to deal with simple or complex use cases, the product's deployment process may take time, as multiple products need to be integrated with the server on which Informatica PowerExchange is deployed.

An admin from Informatica's team is required to help our company with the installation process. An integrator or consultant would be required to take care of the product's installation process.

Many users don't prefer to use the product, considering the high costs attached to the licensing part of the solution.

The product helped streamline our company's batch data processing workflow in a good way since it provides us with all the information, consisting of details like what kind of configurations need to be carried out, which can help maintain the pipelines that connect two different systems and the area from where you can push data from point A to point B.

The problem is not attached to the solution's ability to provide support and have the ability to respond to security threats, but it's terms from the fact that Trend Micro is more focused on Apex One. When you contact Trend Micro for Worry-Free Services Suites, the type of support provided for the product is similar to the one provided to those who possess some basic licenses. In general, it takes a lot of time to get a response from the product's support team when you face any problems.

The product supports our company's data governance because it is an established solution in the market that supports all the cloud-based features. The product supports features that allow the distribution of data across nodes. The product also offers high performance and supports high scalability features. The tool attempts to follow some of the best practices through the development to ensure how the design has been implemented. The tool also looks at the best features that you will implement during the designing phase in the development process. The tool looks into the configurations from the hardware point of view. The tool considers factors like how much configuration is required based on the capacity and requirements of users. The product follows best practices in areas like hardware and design.

To those who plan to use the solution, I suggest that they look into the prices and the use cases they want to handle on the cloud. Informatica offers an old product named Informatica PowerCenter, which was the renowned and standard product preferred by clients considering its availability at a global level. The marketing of Informatica PowerExchange has not been done properly, owing to which people are not aware of its existence in the market.

The data quality part of the solution is more about the design and not about the product. The tool has the capability to support the data quality features, and it is something that is taken care of from the design and development point of view. You can implement data quality to figure out how to design or handle the best practices in the solution. There should be a focus on the design and development part of the solution since the product has a lot of capabilities.

I rate the overall tool a nine 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 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 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.

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.