Informatica PowerCenter is a metadata driven data integration technology designed to form the foundation for data integration initiatives, including analytics and data warehousing, application migration, or consolidation and data governance.
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Winshuttle
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Winshuttle is an SAP-focused data management and robotic process automation platform. It is designed to enable the building and adaptation of Excel and SharePoint-based interactive forms and workflows for SAP without programming.
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.
Winshuttle is well suited to help any company who has data that needs to move from SAP to 'somewhere'. The output file can be Excel, Text, or Access. Query has been greatly expanded in its ability to use SQL statements directly in the product at the 'pre-download' point. For example, you want to have one column do calculations on the data that is being pulled out of SAP via the Query and placed in a specific cell - this can be done - right in the Query script and the result will be produced in your receiving Excel file. I have another small scenario I call 'On the fly" uses. When our asset team had to change their depreciation on a very large number of assets mid-year, Winshuttle Transaction was very helpful. The update would have taken DAYS and lots of shredded nerves to update.
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.
"Training" I feel Winshuttle was extremely easy to learn' my team and I went to a week long training class on the uses of the software upon finishing the course we all became internal (company) support as well as expert functional users.
"Ease of use" once a user learns the basics processes of the software it is functionally very easy to use and if there are problems with in the processing that cannot be supported internally Winshuttle community and support quickly helped clear up those issues, "if they occurred"
"Processes data FAST" once the transaction is mapped and recorded the user can move through (process) large amounts of data very quickly, saving lots of time by eliminating manual steps.
"Data Error Correction" through the transactional processing of large amounts of data, nothing is ever perfect, usually during data migration process if a single line fails the process stops, the correction is made to the data and the process starts all over again. Winshuttle data migration process doesn't stop it will provide a list of exceptions upon completion of the data load. It does this by only processing the "good" data and when bad data is encountered it is skipped and an error message is created and added to the data sheet. With this process the user now only has to worry about exceptions that didn't load and also knows why the line failed so making correction are easier and faster.
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.
The use of Winshuttle is particularly helpful with systems where data volumes are always very high. If data volumes are not an issue, the use of Winshuttle for cut-over activities might not result in a significant perceivable difference in time savings.
For businesses and sectors that rely on business processes that are complex and tedious with a lot of manual interventions, Winshuttle comes in real handy. However, in situations of fairly straightforward business cases, it would be hard to see perceivable gains from the use of Winshuttle.
At times, the use of complex business process with multiple fields from one transaction needs to be fed into the next for further processing, if the screen sequence changes based on each set of information, the processing could fail. However, these could be overcome by grouping similar screened transactions into one chunk and others into another.
Fantastic tool and honestly the best out there for the particular need. I cannot think of any reason we wouldn't renew as it truly offers the perfect solution to what is often a supremely difficult process. Also, I believe that from a cost perspective it is quite agreeable given the amount of benefit/ROI received
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.
- I have used Winshuttle Transaction and Direct and the interface is simple, intuitive and easy to understand. - Not much technical knowledge of SAP is required before loading the data. - Data can be loaded for any sheet of an Excel spreadsheet - Output messages from Winshuttle are very clear and can be used to as an input to other data loads that use these output data
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.
The winshuttle staff are some of the best in the business. I have been working with them for several years and always have had a positive interaction. There support staff are very knowledgeable. There product managers are very supportive as well and always open to hear feedback on how you like the product and any gaps that you would like to find a solution to better improve the products.
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.
Winshuttle works better with SAP than UiPath does in terms of performance and stability. The time to deploy a Process in Winshuttle is faster and less complex. It doesn't require coding skills as much as for UiPath. Winshuttle excels in batch input operations and also has a useful query reporting tool.
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.
