COZYROC vs. Informatica PowerCenter

[COZYROC] is a powerful tool and [extends] what you are able to do when it comes to ETL. It allows you to accomplish a lot of things that are very common now, but very difficult to implement with the out of the box functionality of SSIS.

Incentivized

Informatica Powercenter is the centerpiece of our overall enterprise data warehouse strategy. It's a critical enablement to ensure we can feed in multiple data stream and transform them into digestible data within our data warehouse. With its flexible capabilities and API availability, we were able to feed in industry standard data format as well as home grown data structure. Overall, we are very pleased with their capability and contribution to our data warehouse strategy.

Incentivized

• Dynamic SOQL is very advantageous with Salesforce source task.
• Connecting to SharePoint is simple and seamless.
• Script Component Plus is also a very good task that we can do a lot through, that what we can't do with Script Task.

Incentivized

• Informatica has a wide range of support for databases. Pretty much every mainstream DBMS is compatible here.
• Designing ETL mappings and workflows is a very intuitive process, and takes minimal learning time and effort even for a beginner.
• Informatica's biggest strength is its sheer performance. It is unmatched in terms of handling large volumes of data.

Incentivized

• Smaller set of useful transform tasks than some competitors
• Upgrade process could be smoother (though similar to others in this space)

Incentivized

• There are too many ways to perform the same or similar functions which in turn makes it challenging to trace what a workflow is doing and at which point (ex. sessions can be designed as static or re-usable and the override can occur at the session or workflow, or both which can be counter productive and confusing when troubleshooting).
• The power in structured design is a double edged sword. Simple tasks for a POC can become cumbersome. Ex. if you want to move some data to test a process, you first have to create your sources by importing them which means an ODBC connection or similar will need to be configured, you in turn have to develop your targets and all of the essential building blocks before being able to begin actual development. While I am on sources and targets, I think of a table definition as just that and find it counter intuitive to have to design a table as both a source and target and manage them as different objects. It would be more intuitive to have a table definition and its source/target properties defined by where you drag and drop it in the mapping.
• There are no checkpoints or data viewer type functions without designing an entire mapping and workflow. If you would like to simply run a job up to a point and check the throughput, an entire mapping needs to be completed and you would workaround this by creating a flat file target.

Incentivized

Our team enjoys using Informatica and feels that it is one of the best ETL tools on the market.

Easy to use and easy to implement into ETL solutions with Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services.

Incentivized

Positives; - Multi User Development Environment - Speed of transformation - Seamless integration between other Informatica products. Negatives; - There should be less windows to maintain developers' focus while using. You probably need 2 big monitors when you start development with Informatica Power Center. - Oracle Analytical functions should be natively used. - E-LT support as well as ETL support.

Incentivized

PowerCenter is robust and fast, and it does a great job meeting all the needs, not just the most commercially vocal needs. In the hands of an expert power user, you can accomplish almost anything with your data. It is not for new users or intermittent users-- for that the Cloud version is a better fit. Be prepared for costly connectors (priced differently for each source or destination you are working with), and just be planful of your projects so you are not paying for connectors you no longer need or want

Incentivized

Their support is fast and responsive. Their devs work on resolving the issues quickly. We usually will have a release of a fix within a few days.

Incentivized

Informatica power center is a leader of the pack of ETL tools and has some great abilities that make it stand out from other ETL tools. It has been a great partner to its clients over a long time so it's definitely dependable. With all the great things about Informatica, it has a bit of tech burden that should be addressed to make it more nimble, reduce the learning curve for new developers, provide better connectivity with visualization tools.

Incentivized

We tested several other SSIS add-on packages as well. Only a few had DB2 support. And from those few COZYROC's support was the most responsive and helpful. They practically added the functionality we needed if it was not already there.

Incentivized

PowerCenter is the industry leader when it comes to interfacing with multiple source and target systems. The graphical interface increases employee productivity while reducing human resource expenditures and training requirements. These other tools offer some similar capabilities, but lack the range and depth when compared with the PowerCenter platform.

Incentivized

• It is my belie that I have thrown away $3.7k

• The data pipeline automation capability of Informatica means that few resources are needed to pre-process the data that ultimately resides in a Data Warehouse. Once a workflow is implemented, manual intervention is not needed.
• PowerCenter did require more resources and time for installation and configuration than was expected/planned for.
• The lack of or minimal support of unstructured data means that newer sources of dynamic/changing data cannot be easily processed/transformed through PowerCenter workflows.

Incentivized