We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, Quest SharePlex, and webMethods Integration Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."The technical support is excellent."
"The setup is straightforward."
"It is very comprehensive in terms of connector and transformation capabilities from both a source and target perspective."
"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"I like the completeness of the way I can build ETL workflows."
"PowerCenter performs well during data transformation and optimization."
"We can scale the product."
"It's a complete package, which is why we use this solution."
"I like SharePlex's Compare and Repair tool."
"The core replication and its performance. Performance is crucial, and SharePlex is by far the fastest. The way it handles replication to multiple targets along with basic filtering, as well as from multiple sources to a single target, is very efficient."
"The core features of the solution we like are the reliability of the data transfer and the accuracy of data read and write. The stability of the solution is also excellent."
"Because of the volume of the transactions, we heavily use a feature that allows SharePlex to replicate thousands of transactions. It's called PEP, Post Enhancement Performance, and that has helped us scale tremendously."
"There are some capabilities within SharePlex where you can see how the data is migrating and if it still maintains good data integrity. For example, if there are some tables that get out of sync, there are ways to find them and fix the problem on the spot. Since these are very common issues, we can easily fix these types of problems using utilities, like compare and repair. So, if you find something is out of sync, then you can just repair that table. It basically syncs that table from source to target to see if there are any differences. It will then replicate those differences to the target."
"The stability is good."
"The messaging part is the most valuable feature."
"Ease of implementation and flexibility to hold the business logic are the most valuable features."
"It is a bundled product stack for A2A and B2B usage. It is one of the best products which I have used during my integration career."
"It frankly fills the gap between IT and business by having approval and policy enforcement on each state and cycle of the asset from the moment it gets created until it is retired."
"The main assets are its flow language, debugging, and Broker. Flow language is far better and more flexible for debugging."
"I feel comfortable using this product with its ease of building interfaces for developers. This is a better integration tool for integrating with various applications like Oracle, Salesforce, mainframes, etc. It works fine in the integration of legacy software as well."
"The tool supports gRPC."
"Compared to solutions offering similar functionalities, Informatica PowerCenter is not very flexible regarding customized integrations."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve on the documentation for the implementation. The documents provided are not very good for a new user."
"Lacks ability to calculate cost of the product."
"Areas for improvement in Informatica PowerCenter include scalability and high availability or the clustering configuration because that's still very basic. The elasticity or scaling of the platform needs a lot of improvement. For example, when it comes to DR handling or building an active-active or active-passive cluster, Informatica PowerCenter is still not that powerful. Automation also needs improvement in the solution. Improving automation leads to some improvement in the stability of Informatica PowerCenter and other aspects related to it. What I'd like to see in the next release of Informatica PowerCenter is real-time capability because the solution is mainly for patches, and to have real-time integration, you need to count on some additional components from Informatica. I would expect more integration and a complete platform in terms of real-time capability or patching with minimal interventions or minimal components to be aligned together."
"PowerCenter could be improved by having more big data components. Normally, we prefer Informatica as a relational database, but nowadays, companies are trying to understand and use big data components. I think it would be useful if we had more chances to create a hub ecosystem because customers try to use some data integration tasks by SQL, Spark and Spark codes, and Scala, but at the end of the day, the company will understand that we need to trace all the steps. An ETL tool is a must for that company, if we're talking about the regulated industries like finance, telcos, etc. If Informatica's biggest ecosystems feature were okay, I would prefer to use it."
"PowerCenter could integrate better with cloud applications. We had to do a lot of configuration work using API integrations to connect with cloud applications. Informatica Cloud Data Integration has a generic connector that you can use directly, so it's much easier."
"Integrating new tools can be tricky and challenging."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve the data threshold for large sets of data. Additionally, they should add real-time integration."
"For its function in relation to replication (i.e. filtering), I'd give it a six or seven out of 10. GoldenGate has much more functionality by comparison."
"I would like more ability to automate installation and configuration in line with some of the DevOps processes that are more mature in the market. That would be a considerable improvement."
"The reporting features need improvement. It would be very good for users to have a clear understanding of the status of replication."
"I don't know how easy it would be to change the architecture in an already implemented replication. For example, if we have a certain way of architecting for a particular database migration and want to change that during a period of time, is that an easy or difficult change? There was a need for us to change the architecture in-between the migration, but we didn't do it. We thought, "This is possibly complicated. Let's not change it in the middle because we were approaching our cutover date." That was one thing that we should have checked with support about for training."
"I would like the solution to have some kind of machine learning and AI capabilities. Often, if we want to improve the performance of posting, we have to bump up a parameter. That means we need to stop the process, come up with a figure that we want to bump the parameter up to, and then start SharePlex. Machine learning and AI capabilities for these kinds of improvement would tremendously help boost productivity for us."
"Large file handling is pretty hard comparatively to other middleware tools."
"For code version control, you need to use some external software."
"It is quite expensive."
"Documentation needs tuning. There is a lot of dependency with SoftwareAG. Even with the documentation at hand, you can struggle to implement scenarios without SAG’s help. By contrast, IBM’s documentation is self-explanatory, in my opinion."
"Forced migration from MessageBroker to Universal Messaging requires large scale reimplementation for JMS."
"We got the product via a reseller, and the support from the reseller has been less than desirable."
"The certifications and learning resources are not exposed openly enough. For instance, they have a trial version which comes with only a few basic features, and I think that community-wise they need to offer more free or open spaces where developers can feel encouraged to experiment."
"I'd like to see the admin portal for managing the integration server go up a level, to have more capabilities and to be given a more modern web interface."
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