Alooma vs. Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud

Very appropriate for managing an ELT stack -- Alooma handles the 'E' and 'L' pieces very well. Due to the way transformation is setup, it is more on the lightweight side of things and thus works for this kind of stack. For more traditional ETL stacks, Alooma would probably not be the right fit.

Incentivized

Informatica Cloud is a great tool for use when data must be formatted consistently. Once configured, it is very robust and reliable. It is also well-suited for an organization without a robust IT staff to maintain a full server infrastructure. It offers a cost-effective approach to high-quality data integration for even the largest organizations. Organizations without staff experienced in data analytics may find it challenging to take advantage of the more complex results of this tool.

Incentivized

• Transformation of data before entering the data warehouse -- allows for a consistent/understandable schema for analytics teams.
• Adding of additional data sources: Alooma has a large library of pre-built, common 3rd party vendors for which data is often needed to be ETL-ed.

Incentivized

• Once the secure connection is established it’s quite easy to operate and create new jobs. The controls are simple, and we appreciate the fact there are not a lot of complex fine-tunings required. Navigation is also easy, and we enjoy the ability to open multiple tabs in the browser to work on multiple projects.
• The monitoring functionality works well to help track the progress of the jobs, again, without too much complication. In a fast dev environment, speed is essential and we quickly seeing the status/progress of jobs as well as any errors if the jobs fail helps us maintain speed.
• The web interface is a lot easier to interact with than the client/on-prem version. Putting much of the heavy lifting of interacting with the tool onto the shoulders of the browser makes it easier to keep multiple sessions open and get in/out quickly without having to VPN into the office.

Incentivized

• More tools on managing the data warehouse itself. Although great on the ingest and transformation of data, more help provided by the tool on managing the outputs would be welcome.
• Increase possibilities in the transformation step, rather than single event transformations.

Incentivized

• The User Interface can be a bit difficult to get in initial stages.
• Error messages are hard to understand which sometimes takes a lot of time for the resolution
• Cannot Implement complex SQL queries which should be fixed in future release.

Incentivized

I've never had trouble getting into contact with Informatica's support for technical help. I give it a nine because it does pretty well for mid to enterprise-scale workflows.

Incentivized

Haven't used the alternatives, since Alooma was one of the earlier ones to the market. From a cursory viewing, however, the features seem to match relatively similarly.

Incentivized

First, the wizard is easy to use making the learning curve for simple ETL tasks nice. Second, since Informatica is mature there are a good variety of connectors available. Finally, we have driven some fairly complex ETL solutions using only the cloud.

Incentivized

• Allowing for additional data sources to more automation capability around monitoring the business is a huge ROI

Incentivized

• Cut costs on the number of staff we need for data import.
• Cut costs for automation that can be done for data that no longer has to be manually imported.
• We've saved countless dollars by eliminating duplicates in our system with this tool.

Incentivized