We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerExchange, and SAS Data Management based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."It provides everything I need. Nothing is missing. PowerCenter is a good tool for on-premise databases."
"Informatica PowerCenter has been implementing mapping design, data flow, and workflow execution for years."
"The most valuable features are the metadata repository and the data warehouse application console."
"It has helped us monetize."
"Ease and speed of building integrations, especially integrations between different applications, such as our Hospital Information System."
"It's very easy to use it to develop mappings and workflows."
"It has good standard features for ETL development."
"The technical support is excellent."
"This product is easy to install and it can be done in a few hours."
"The user interface and user experience are perfectly all right."
"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."
"Provides a significant amount of control over the landscape and overall implementation."
"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 transformation work called for Informatica PowerExchange. It was easy to work with this and very stable."
"Mainstream integration and real-time integration are the best features."
"The scalability is excellent."
"In terms of which features I have found most valuable, I would say the importing and exporting features. Additionally, the data sorting, categorizing and summarizing features, especially how it can summarize based on categories. These are the key features."
"The technical support is excellent."
"If you compare it to SQL, the memory and development times are very quick."
"Its robustness is valuable. It is a full-fledged suite. We have a data warehouse model, and there are also a lot of data quality management tools. The repository and all other tools are there. So, it is a full package in terms of reporting tools."
"I am impressed with the tool's ability to customize."
"The tool is reliable, quick, and powerful."
"The solution is very stable. We haven't faced any issues with glitches or bugs. We haven't had any crashes."
"The product offers very good flexibility."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve by having a single interface because half of the system is still in the legacy interface and many other elements are moved to the developer client. It would be good if there was a single interface for the end user and developers."
"In the future, I would like to see Informatica PowerCenter integrate a more powerful dashboard."
"Its interface can be modernized. It is an old product. I have been working with it for 14 years, and it still looks the same. It hasn't been modernized much. It also needs to handle more modern formats, such as JSON files. It works with the old text files and databases, but it does not always work with the newer, modern stuff. You need to make your own programs to support that kind of stuff. Support is also a kind of difficult with Informatica. They don't do direct support and rely on using their distributors around the globe for support, which means that you kind of have to go through this layer of different companies before you get help."
"Lacks ability to calculate cost of the product."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve on the documentation for the implementation. The documents provided are not very good for a new user."
"I found it is kind of weird that not all of the mapping changes are treated as true changes."
"In terms of performance improvement and tuning, there should be a bit more guidance and documentation."
"Unstructured data handling is an important area with a shortcoming that needs improvement in the solution."
"Apache Spark has a machine learning algorithm, an area where Informatica PowerExchange lacks."
"Informatica is very expensive in all aspects, so the pricing is something that could be improved."
"Integration with the largest number of databases and other systems would be important."
"V10.2 is very stable, but we are still struggling to make V10.5 stable. We found services that were down, and PowerExchange stopped working."
"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."
"The one place where it could be improved is definitely pricing. That's a very big problem. It depends product to product, but pricing is an issue."
"I would like to have easier integration with cloud platforms."
"The product's high costs can be an area of concern where improvements are required."
"With SAS Data Management, you have to purchase an external driver, configure all of the tables for all of the data that you will extract from Salesforce. It's not a straightforward process."
"Very little needs to improve but perhaps a nicer graphic interface and remaining competetive in the growing field of data analytics."
"We find we often have to go back and re-train users when there are changes made to the solution because the changes are not intuitive."
"I would like the tool to include the ability to automate the modifications of the integrations."
"The solution could use better documentation."
"The pricing of the solution needs to be improved. They need to work to make it more affordable."
"We implemented it a while ago, and we are trying to improve the data delivery performance. We are looking into how to get faster and automated reporting. We would need better designs and workflows."
"One problem is accessing the data using a solution other than SAS. The SAS data, which we create in the SAS, cannot be accessed by other tools. We can't open those data in other applications. So we need to have that application in place."
