Informatica’s Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) platform is a solution for synchronizing and integrating cloud and on-premise applications. It offers prebuilt connectors and actions between applications and programs, allowing for data transformation within the program, as well as case-specific services.
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Zoho Flow
Score 7.2 out of 10
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Zoho Flow allows the user to integrate business apps to automate a workflow.
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.
Zoho Flow helps us greatly in connecting other Zoho apps. We use Flow to connect Zoho Creator with Zoho Books so an invoice is created when a record is entered into Zoho Creator. We use Zoho Flow when certain fields containing data in Zoho CRM to send that data over to the Zoho Creator record. We use it to add a contact from the Zoho Creator record to a list in Zoho Campaigns. Zoho Flow has proved very worthwhile.
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.
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.
I've reached out to the support team several times with assistance requests in Zoho Flow. Each time the team has answered my questions promptly and accurately. And because we are mainly integrating other Zoho apps their teams are perfectly positioned to solve our problems.
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.
I've used Zapier and both programs are similar. Zapier has deeper integrations or more apps to integrate with but considering Flow's association with other Zoho apps this does it for us!
It's part of our Zoho One package, so it's hard to comment on this one.
Assuming we did pay full price, I would say the ROI would be justified. For our example of sending invoices to Books from Creator saves us a great deal of time.
It takes a bit of time to configure each Flow but once you get the hang of it the flows really do save time and ensure data quality.
