Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

We receive the data files from insurance carriers. We load the data, do some processing, and then make the data available to their internal systems. We apply some business transformations and data validations and share the data in the healthcare domain and EDI B2B exchange.

Its version varies based on the customer, but when it comes to the cloud, we have the latest version. We have been using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) for two years. We have used IICS for two purposes. One is for data integration, and the other one is for application integration.

Complex transformations can be easily achieved by using PowerCenter. The processing layer does transformations and other things. About 80% of my transformations can be achieved by using the middle layer. For the remaining 15% to 20% transformations, I can go in and create stored procedures in the respective databases. Mapplets is the feature through which we can reuse transformations across pipelines. Transformations and caching are the key features that we have been using frequently. 

Informatica PowerCenter is one of the best solutions or products in the data integration space. We have extensively used PowerCenter for integration purposes. We usually look at the best bridge solution in our architecture so that it can sustain for maybe a couple of years. Usually, we go with the solution that fits best and has proven and time-tested technology.

Its licensing can be improved. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise. A bundle will definitely be costly. In addition, we might use one or two features. That's why the pricing model should be based on the features. The model should be flexible enough based on the features.

Their support should also be more responsive to premium customers.

We have been dealing with this product for around 20 years.

It is stable.

It is easy to scale. It has the concept of a grid, but it is too costly because you also need Informatica big data edition. Informatica PowerCenter has its own software licensing called big data edition. So, whenever we want to scale to a huge volume, we need to go with big data. It has horizontal scaling, which always impacts the price. I can go for a four-node cluster grid or an eight-node cluster grid, which will have an impact on the price.

We have scaled it for one of our enterprise customers, and we had a little bit of complexity in setting it up, but we were able to achieve the desired goals with respect to the performance.

We have been in touch with Informatica support. They should be more responsive. They should react quickly to premium customers.

Different products are suitable for different use cases. One unified product cannot address multiple use cases. For example, Informatica may not be suitable for real-time integration, but it may be helpful for batch integration. Similarly, MuleSoft caters to low latency, but it doesn't get into high latency, which means it is not suitable for larger data processing systems. That's why we need to have a combination of technologies. For example, I may say that I have a resource or a person who has a primary skill and a secondary skill. Primary skill is specialized, and then secondary skill is complementary to that. Similarly, every product has a primary thing and a secondary thing. For Informatica, it is the batch processing, not the real-time data processing. It only processes the structured data, but it does not process unstructured data. For unstructured data, you need to go for a different product. For the cloud version, they have introduced IICS specifically for catering to the application integration requirements.

It is a simple process because we have a pool of experts in our team. Some manual work could be required. We did have challenges while setting it up, but we could also resolve those challenges. 

We provide development, integration, operations, and maintenance services for Informatica solutions to the customers. We do ETL monitoring, and we monitor the daily loads and resolve and manage the pipeline features. 

We also handle the change requests coming from the customer and performance optimization. We may sometimes also look at the transformations optimization, caching, and all those things.

It is for big enterprises. We have leveraged Informatica for big enterprises but not for small and medium enterprises because it is a very costly product as compared to other products. We propose this solution only for enterprise customers. For small to medium enterprises, we would propose the Microsoft solution.

Its licensing is currently bundle-wise. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise.

It is a very mature product, but now everyone is moving to the cloud. They need to give more attention and focus more on the IICS rather than PowerCenter. PowerCenter on-premises will cater to one or two industries, and they should give more features in IICS. It can cater to only 70% of the features of Informatica PowerCenter. The data integration is currently not as mature in IICS. It doesn't have Mapplets, and we have faced some constraints. We have already logged a service request for this.

I would rate Informatica PowerCenter a nine out of ten.

I am using Informatica PowerCenter to upskill and learn to use new tools.

I found the map links, work links, and workflows valuable. They are important features.

It would be better if I could do all the work within a single window. If I'm working on any mapping and if I have to switch to sessions, I have to open a new window altogether. If I have to get into workflows, I have to open a new window. It was also very expensive. In the next release, I would like it to be more user-friendly.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for over two years. 

Informatica PowerCenter is a stable solution.

Informatica PowerCenter is a scalable solution. Expanding is easy, and we can execute multiple workflows based on events. I don't see any constraints, and it looks pretty good. We have approximately 50 or more people supporting or developing applications for various clients.

I have experience with SSIS, and I compared the features. They are different, especially on the navigation front and the user interface. The SQL server integration service is always handy in Azure. Most of the time, you'll be using Microsoft products, so their interface is very user-friendly. But in Informatica, it'll be completely different, especially on the mapping side. When you map from the first to the next target, you have to know how to connect the source and targets. But in SSIS, it's easy for a layperson to understand how the data flows.

The price could be better. It's very expensive.

On a scale from one to five, I would give Informatica PowerCenter's price a one.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Informatica PowerCenter a nine.

Informatica PowerCenter is used for data integration.

To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions.

Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use.

Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle.

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.

I've been using Informatica PowerCenter for six or seven years.

I'm still using it as my company has many solutions that leverage Informatica PowerCenter, though the solution isn't that active nowadays because Informatica has a different strategy to promote the cloud-based data integration offering.

Informatica PowerCenter is still in the market, and what my company is using is the on-premise version.

Informatica PowerCenter is a stable solution, and I would rate its stability seven out of ten. There's a small improvement needed in terms of stability because it's linked to the clustering and high availability. Somehow you'll need a lot of automation to get Informatica PowerCenter to handle the workload, and in certain situations, there could be failures.

I found the technical support for Informatica PowerCenter brilliant. I'm even giving it a rating of four out of five just because I can't give it a five. Informatica support is even awarded for customer satisfaction if I remember correctly.

The initial setup for Informatica PowerCenter was simple. It was a straightforward setup, and it wasn't complicated at all.

Pricing for Informatica PowerCenter isn't cheap, but if I compare it with IBM, it's as expensive as IBM, however, Informatica PowerCenter is more innovative, especially when compared to a giant company such as IBM that has thousands of products.

Informatica PowerCenter is limited only to data management, but it has new features that come out every quarter. Points for ease of use and flexibility go to Informatica PowerCenter, but price-wise, IBM and Informatica are equal because they're both expensive.

I evaluated Talend, which is an open-source data engineering and data integration platform. Comparing the two solutions, Informatica PowerCenter is still more robust and has an extendable platform. You can add other capabilities, such as data quality and so on, but if you'll be focusing only on data integration, Talend, especially coming from an open-source mindset, would be a good competitor.

My preference, because I had experience with IBM and Talend, would be Informatica PowerCenter because of the ease of use, flexibility, and features that come with it.

Informatica PowerCenter is an on-premise data integration solution, but two or three years ago, Informatica introduced a new, intelligent data platform. That new platform is the equivalent of Informatica PowerCenter in terms of capability, but the only difference is that it's a fully on-cloud solution.

Informatica PowerCenter is best for big enterprises. Technically, you can use it for any scale, but practically you will get the most output when you're dealing with high volumes and heavy processing. This is from a technical aspect. Price-wise, it's not a cheap platform, so only enterprises with a bigger data management budget will be able to afford to invest in a data management platform such as Informatica PowerCenter.

My rating for Informatica PowerCenter is eight out of ten. Eight is a fair rating because it's a very stable and very mature product.

My company has a partnership with Informatica and other vendors. I'm a system integrator.

Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration tool.

The most valuable features of Informatica PowerCenter are the ease of use, and development, and is simple to find resources.

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 next release, Informatica PowerCenter would be beneficial to have run time column propagation. Other solutions have this feature but it is missing in this solution.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for approximately 18 years.

Informatica PowerCenter is stable.

The scalability of Informatica PowerCenter is good.

We have approximately seven people using the solution.

The support is good from Informatica PowerCenter and they have been responsive.

I rate the support from Informatica PowerCenter an eight out of ten.

Positive

The implementation of Informatica PowerCenter is easy.

The price of Informatica PowerCenter is expensive, but it does give value.

This is an amazing solution. If I ranked it in terms of all of the data integration solutions, I would rank it first.

I rate Informatica PowerCenter a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for regular ETL access. All our warehouses are built through Informatica. We also use Informatica to build data marts.

It's very easy to use it to develop mappings and workflows.

Informatica are very rigid when it comes to cloud migrations which discourages customers in moving their solution to the cloud. I cannot simply move my code from on-premise to the cloud. There is a conversion process and that conversion process has to be done by Informatica. They charge a huge amount for their professional service. 

Informatica is not as mature when it comes to cloud solutions and cloud connectors and still they want to charge for cloud IACS adoption. If I compare Informatica with Oracle, Oracle provide almost double the licenses when we move onto a cloud solution, regardless of what on-prem license we have. The migration is free of charge.

In a future release, we would like to have cloud connectors.

We have used this solution for more than 15 years.

This solution is not scalable.

This solution is stable.

The customer support is not great. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

We have not previously used a different solution. We chose Informatica because we needed an enterprise solution. The problem with Informatica data capture is that it is not an end-to-end solution. We have a different automation solution called Oracle GoldenGate. 

The setup is straightforward but we have been doing it for 15 years. A good feature they offer is the backward compatibility which makes the setup seamless.

We did it in-house. 

I would rate the pricing for this solution a six out of ten. The exact pricing depends on various products that you have. We have various Informatica products and it varies from automation to automation.

Informatica is so rigid and so we were trying to look for other partners for our entire ETL process. Modern data solutions are more cost effective and mature with the latest data basis or cloud awareness. We are going to decrease our usage of Informatica.

If you already have Informatica and plan to move to the cloud solution, then you have to evaluate other solutions based on compatibility and do a thorough cost analysis. They have been the market leaders for more than 15 to 20 years. They could use their experience to make better products for modern cloud adoption. 

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

The solution is basically used for anything and everything that we process, for example, from the SQL Server, from other application sources like Oracle, from Flatfiles, or loading into these kinds of sources. We use it for pretty much everything.

It's the best ETL tool that one can have.

The initial setup is easy.

It's stable.

We can scale the product.

Support has been helpful in the past.

If we could have the option of performance improvement within Informatica, and if it could have more features, that would be ideal. For example, we have a DTM buffer, and sometimes we face issues where we are creating the cache in Informatica, and it keeps on adding onto that particular directory. Even though we deploy code to remove that cache, somehow Informatica DTM does not remove the cache, and it keeps on piling up, filling up the whole server unless we manually remove that.

There are some functionalities in Informatica, however, after some time, they stopped working. That has been an issue that has added up to operational costs. If we could have the consistent working of all the functionalities that Informatica offers, not just during the start of the project or for around six months, that would be ideal. We find that it stops working due to some issue, due to some process not getting started or getting in a hung state.  

From 10.1, to 10.1.1, to 10.5.1, there is a feature in the expression transformation where users have the option to evaluate the expression. It works only when you do not have variables in that, yet only some values (hard-coded values). For example, if you have column one and column two and put in column three, then when you evaluate the expression, and you only get column one plus column two, and it even does not work. It says you can't pass the variables, pass the values, and then that feature that was introduced is of no use. 

I've used the solution for almost 14 years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. I'd rate it 9.5 out of ten in terms of stability. There are no bugs or glitches.

The solution is scalable. However, it depends on the server. 

You can scale unless the server on which it is hosted does not have enough resources to handle the additional load.

In our organization, most developers are on the product. There are around 50 people at least using it. 

I have not used technical support yet in this organization. That said, in my prior organizations, I have. When we had a new tool, for example, we had OneConnect for an SAP Field Glass Connector and we were not sure how to connect to it. Therefore, we had some connectivity-related questions that we were not able to explore on our own since there wasn't much online expertise available. We had to reach out. All questions were addressed and answered by Informatica.

The level of assistance we received was as expected. We were happy with their response time and their answers provided solutions to our questions.

The initial setup takes time sometimes. It can take around two days if you have a prior code. That said, if you are starting it from scratch, then more than four hours, so it is easy - if someone has experience in it, of course, and the proper manual to follow.

I don't recall the exact cost o the solution. That said, it is one of the costliest products that one can have. They are costly ETL products. When it comes to Oracle, we have cheaper options since Oracle provides its ODI fee of cost if someone buys any of their modules for business intelligence. That is something that Informatica does not have.

Still, if you have large data volumes and you do not want to be at risk for your daily loads, then it is worth the money.

I'm an end-user.

I'd advise new users to go through proper training and get at least one to two years of proper work experience in it before they actually go to customers to suggest its implementation - especially if they will be the primary point of contact.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Informatica PowerCenter is outdated and would benefit from modernization. They should have a very good migration strategy from Informatica PowerCenter to AACF. Informatica PowerCenter there is no point in using it, you have to use a cloud version.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for approximately 17 years.

The technical support for Informatica PowerCenter is good.

I rate the support from Informatica PowerCenter a four out of five.

I would not recommend anyone use this solution.

I rate Informatica PowerCenter a one out of ten.

In the company I work for, we provide a lot of solutions. I've been working with a lot of clients. The last client I worked with was a big hotel company, and we used this solution for integration.

It's a very powerful tool you can use to load data, get data, do the drawing between the tables, and put it into the packet in a very fast way.

So for this client, we are using the MDM (Master Data Management), and the PowerCenter will be very helpful in building data and merging all the data between the different systems they have. They have a lot of systems that contain the same information and we want to put that into a single place. This is the most valuable feature of this solution which has been of great help to us.

To be honest, we didn't find big issues with this tool. All the issues we found, we were able to fix. We don't have any issues with the tool so far.

I would like to see this solution change the way it creates workflows. In Alteryx, for example, it's easier to build the workflow because of the way it was built, while PowerCenter was built in a more complex way to be able to process a large number of roles. The way PowerCenter creates the workflows is much more complex than the others, but nothing big. It's just that it's the old way. It would be good to recreate the entire interface to make it easier for users to build workflows. This is what I'd like to see in the next release.

I've been using it for 10 years.

The solution is stable. No complaints.

I believe this solution is scalable.

That's a tricky question because it's always complex. For the business logic, it's complex. They had a lot of systems and we had to do the integration between the source. I've been working with this solution for a lot of years, so to me it's straightforward. So that's a tricky question. I would say that for professionals, it's straightforward.

I evaluated Alteryx.

It's Informatica PowerCenter I work with a lot of times, but I also have knowledge on Informatica Data Quality. Now on my last project, I'll be working with MDM, but I'm not an expert on MDM, as I've mostly been working with PowerCenter.

I've been working with this solution since 2010 on a lot of projects which I don't have on top of my head right now. I live in Brazil and I've been working for the government for healthcare where I used this solution. I also worked with PowerCenter for an insurance company. I used this solution during integration where we also created a web API. This is a feature in Informatica that can deploy and make APIs available for third parties or vendors so they can do acquisitions, restore API, and get data. These are what we created in PowerCenter as well.

All the projects were deployed on-premise. I never work on the cloud, but I would love to. Deployment took six months for this project.

We have 30 to 50 people using this solution. If the project goes well, if there are more resources to implement this solution, and more features to improve the analytics of the company, then we will plan to increase usage of this solution.

I'm a PowerCenter guy, so I'm rating this solution a ten.