Informatica PowerCenter was data integration technology designed to form the foundation for data integration initiatives, application migration, or analytics. It is a legacy product.
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SnapLogic
Score 7.0 out of 10
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SnapLogic is a cloud integration platform with a self-service capacity supported by over 450 prebuilt modifiable connectors. SnapLogic also offers real-time and batch integration processes for interfacing with external data sources, a drag-and-drop interface, and use of the vendors’ Iris AI.
1.- Scenaries with poor sources of data is not recomended (Very bad ROI). The solution is for medium-big enterprises with a lot of sources of data and users. 2.- Bank and finance enviroment to integrate differente data form trading, Regulatory reports, decisions makers, fraud and financial crimes because in this kind of scenary the quality of data is the base of the business. 3.- Departments of development and test of applications in enterprises because you can design enviroments, out of the production systems, to development and test the new API's or updateds made.
Snaplogic is unique from other IPASS tools if you're very sensitive about data security as they have an on-premise option where your data never needs to leave your data center. And data pipelines can be quickly created if Snaplogic has the requisite connector to your data sources. On the downside, if you're transforming a large amount of data for example in training machine learning models, a tool with elastic compute capability is more appropriate.
Informatica Powercenter is an innovative software that works with ETL-type data integration. Connectivity to almost all the database systems.
Great documentation and customer support.
It has a various solution to address data quality issues. data masking, data virtualization. It has various supporting tools or MDM, IDQ, Analyst, BigData which can be used to analyze data and correct it.
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.
This has been hands down the BEST software company I have ever used and dealt with. I am a 25 year IT veteran at this college. They go above and beyond in soliciting our feedback/input and proactively follow up about bugs, issues, etc. I have given multiple potential clients my thoughts and after seeing the SL demo they all sign up. I appreciate their support model, it's REFRESHING!
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.
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
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.
They can be prompt but they have not been as useful as I've wanted. We had a bug that affected many of our customers through an API connection between SnapLogic and our platform. Eventually they were able to figure it out, but it took a long time of negotiating between our engineering team and theirs. Additionally, we installed the SnapLogic groundplex for our customers and we've run into a bunch of problems of connectivity. If SnapLogic offered to be on those calls with our clients to troubleshoot how to fix these problems, I would give them a better grade here.
While Talend offers a much more comfortable interface to work with, Informatica's forte is performance. And on that front, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration certainly leaves Talend in the dust. For a more back-end-centric use case, Informatica is certainly the ETL tool of choice. On the other hand, if business users would be using the tool, then Talend would be the preferred tool.
We opted for SnapLogic due its ease of use and the flexibility it offers, it was the platform that was strongest in both application integration and data integration and both were use cases we wanted to be able to cover.
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.
