Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud vs. SAP Integration Suite vs. LinkApi, by Semantix

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

In our case to have a such a poweful middleware in the cloud, give us a lot of benefits such as maintenance and support. In the integration part to be able to connect SAP and Non SAP applications makes SAP Integration Suite a good investment when our master data in this case is in S4HANA. Less appropriate is that sometimes the updates in production tenant failed and they have to downgrade or repair the issues. Affecting the usage of the tool. I guess SAP team have to be more aware of performing the changes and tested well on development environments and then when they know for sure that is the correct way to go with the update put it in production.

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

• Enhanced API management features that allow now the integration with a multitude of data feeds and rating agencies
• Immediate evaluation of potential issues and configurable thresholds and automatic notifications.
• The application will monitor all aspects of compliance and update them automatically for several jurisdictions at time

• 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

• Provide more pre-built integrations to use within SuccessFactors or other modules instead of everything having to be custom built
• Support is unable to provide advice on custom builds so you often have to engage a 3rd party partner
• Works best when you have the functional and technical teams working together. Otherwise, the system is too technical for a functional user to create integration and a technical user not always understand the functional perspective

Incentivized

It is in place, our system integrators are familiar with it, and it fits into the ecosystem. A better user interface, flow build and debugging experience would see it grow, many technical staff do not enjoy using it for this reason, however it is quite capable and powerful behind this one shortcoming.

Incentivized

The user interface is messy and not intuitive. It has a steep learning curve, and flows developed around are easy to make a mess with layout and can be difficult to follow. The debugging is also quite difficult, it takes some time to figure out how to follow the flow and examine data. Error handling is also difficult and not intuitive, it is better to let some errors leak and monitor through ALM.

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

The support for SAP Integration Suite is satisfactory. We leverage SAP support through our manage services partner. So far, we have not had many major issues. One concern, to make our rating a ten, would be turnaround time on high priority incidents. SAP Integration Suite drives our key business functions forward. Without a reasonable service level agreement on turnaround, we sometimes find us running into issues running pay, etc.

Incentivized

Work with an SAP implementation partner, if possible.

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

SAP Integration Suite was already part of our SAP stack, part of Business Technology Platform, with out-of-the-box integration with S/4 HANA transactional and ERP system that we are using as our main back-end. Thus, we are achieving significant Total Cost Optimization benefits or running both solutions on the same platform, hosted on Azure cloud.

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

• In the long run will enable us to undeploy our on premise solution
• As long as integration suite doesn't support all capabilities PO has complete migration is hard
• Will probably be cheaper than our on premise solution when we are completely migrated

Incentivized