Informatica PowerCenter (legacy) Reviews and Ratings
Rating: 9 out of 10
Score
9 out of 10
Community insights
TrustRadius Insights for Informatica PowerCenter (legacy) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Seamless data integration capabilities: Multiple reviewers have praised Informatica PowerCenter for its seamless data integration capabilities, with users stating that it effortlessly connects to multiple sources and targets. This feature simplifies the complex process of integrating data from various systems, providing a significant advantage in terms of efficiency and productivity.
User-friendly interface: The user-friendly interface of Informatica PowerCenter has been consistently appreciated by reviewers, who find it highly intuitive and easy to navigate. Users state that the application of complicated business rule logic is straightforward, thanks to the intuitive design process for creating ETL mappings and workflows. The minimal learning time and effort required to work with PowerCenter's interface are seen as significant advantages.
Reusability and streamlined development processes: Reviewers have highlighted PowerCenter's ability to capture and share logic in mapplets, enabling reusability and streamlining development processes. This feature contributes to a seamless workflow for developers, making the development and maintenance of code in PowerCenter straightforward. Users value this functionality as it enhances efficiency and promotes consistency across projects.
Informatica PowerExchange Connectors provide access to different sources of data in multiple locations, differente RDB systems and DATA WAREHOUSE environments in the mode SaaS with high performance and security. The platform are used in a cloud-based mode, making access
very simple and without major problems. Also use for transformation data and connectivity with API´s in cloud(Internal and External. The company have more than 20 offcies in the world with differente enviroments and API's locally development.
Pros
Access to different RDB, API's Data (External / Internal)
The connectors access to data from social networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn
Connectors provide access to data in AS400 systems with a minimun development of interface
The dashboard is is completely customizable
for any organization
Cons
Define customer business rulers to put the data in the repository with easy develpoment.
Quickly transfer and integrate data between cloud and local RDB/SYSTEMS
Very simple to navigate between data before and after integration/transformation was made
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
We used Informatica PowerCenter as an ETL to to feed data into Teradata Data Warehouse that houses all data marts of our company.
Mainly used to process semi-structured and unstructured data like web and mobile logs. It has been well tested against large volume of data and it stood up to the expectations.
Pros
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.
Cons
It doesn't have much scheduling options and the tool is not very much capable if we schedule more jobs.
Debugging the workflows and mappings are very hard with Informatica PowerCenter.
Lookup transformation on large tables consumes more Memory and CPU.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Informatica PowerCenter is widely used as an integration tool across many projects. This is being used in specific departments. It lets us connect to endless sources in order to pipe data out into different available repositories. Primarily it feeds our various data warehouse and data marts. Also this is being used in Salesforce implementation project to transfer data from Flat files and Relational databases to Salesforce Objects.
Pros
Extracting, transforming and loading data to and from different databases.
Development, testing and maintenance of code is fairly simple.
Good performance even during processing of large amount of data.
Amazing ability to connect with different types of sources and targets available in the market.
Cons
Performance with ODBC drivers is comparatively slow which ends up in taking a lot of time.
Deployment is bit complex.
Clobs and Blobs datatypes are very difficult to handle.
Likelihood to Recommend
This is an amazing tool to handle large data in multiple batches. Also, this is best suited if you have data in different data sources but if you are looking for a tool to use with single data source then there are multiple tools available in the market which are comparatively cheaper.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Informatica Powercenter is widely used as an integration tool, very commonly across projects as well as across organizations. It addresses a whole suite of data problems, starting with data integration, data quality management, master data management, data masking, data virtualization, etc. The tool is extremely popular for its ability to gather data from disparate sources and homogenize it for consumption. There are several models it can be used in: Integrate data from data sources and landing it in a staging area for consumption, in data migration projects for moving data from legacy systems to newer infrastructure.
Pros
Data integration - Informatica has always been a leader in the data integration space. The company has maintained its position by innovative solutions, keeping pace with technology development, providing connectors to most of the common platforms, and improving on services with time. It has the ability to integrate data from multi-cloud, hybrid, on-premise infrastructure setup. The data integration can happen in batch or in real time. The performance of Informatica data integration is among the best in class.
Data migration - Informatica is widely used as a data migration tool. Lots of enterprises run their software on legacy infrastructure and at some point run into limitations associated with them. The large databases they use at that time make it extremely difficult to switch to the latest infrastructure and have a list of challenges. Informatica is great at addressing these challenges. It allows developers to create rule-based workflows that can be used to migrate any amount of data from old to the new infrastructure. Since Informatica is so successful at this, there is always use cases for reference and trained resources for executing a project.
Application Integration - The corporate world is full of mergers and acquisitions which lead to one company's IT assets being moved/merged to another one. This requires a huge amount of work to homogenize the two systems so they can co-exist without breaking each other. Informatica is great at building pipelines to integrate many disparate applications.
Data warehousing - Informatica is very commonly used for building data warehouse systems to fulfill the needs of enterprises and data marts to service requirements of individual requirements. This helps organizations' ability to use data sets for driving decision making. For example, Sales teams can decide how their previous sales efforts have performed in various geographies by analyzing the data warehouse data for sales.
Cons
Tool Management - Informatica over time has become a behemoth of data integration and warehousing world. It has built a vast array of tools to address various user needs. This does not bode well for the future looking at all the newer technologies which do not have so much of tech burden. Most new tools have a great cloud version where you can hop onto a URL, do your work and deploy it in minutes. With Informatica, you still have multiple client tools just to be able to deploy a single workflow and monitor as it runs. This can be both confusing and overwhelming to users.
Only commercial data integration - There is no open-source version of Informatica PowerCenter so it is not the most useful for small enterprises or individuals that wish to use it but can't afford the maintenance fee that can be quite a burden. Such users head over to open-source competitors that provide data integration services.
Lack of integration with other technologies - It is not very easy to blend in code from other languages like Java, Python, R, etc. Most of the tools these days provide such functionality making lives of users easier. Lack of such capability may cause users to build multiple hops in a data pipeline.
Inbuilt reporting - Although Informatica has been around for the longest time, it has not made the best use of all the data capabilities it has. With the amount of data flowing through power center, it should have been easy to provide some sort of reporting features that add immense value to a user's work. However, Informatica has not made great use of this opportunity.
Likelihood to Recommend
Informatica PowerCenter, being a very mature technology leader, is well suited for large data integration projects where many different data sources exist and multiple departments need to use the data. In such cases, it is best to use a tool like power center to create a data warehouse and datamarts. These organizations usually can have in-house Informatica admins that can take care of software maintenance, contribute to performance improvement, troubleshooting, etc. They are also looking for a long term solution rather than a quick fix for data access issues. The tool may not be well suited for smaller organizations that tend to be more nimble and prefer more flexibility in building their technology landscape rather than being tied to a single tool that may define their overall data warehousing strategies. This also means that organizations do not have to maintain large software and employ dedicated people for doing that.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Informatica Power Center is easy to understand, gives you the opportunity to perform fast development, and also supports a multi-user development environment with a check-out/check-in mechanism. It performs transformation levels of ETL (Extract & Transform & Load) very fast.
Advanced security features also help you to perform administration more easily and with confidence.
Pros
Transformation speed.
Supports a multi-User development environment.
A fast learning curve.
Cons
It needs additional hardware.
Lots of windows sometimes reduce your focus.
It would be better to have a more compact design with the ability to aim toward specific topics.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have many developers who will use Informatica Power Center for more than 80% of their work, multi-user development will reduce your administration effort with less chance of losing code.
When data is loaded to the Informatica Application Server, transformations perform very fast. It also supports push down ETL if your ETL mappings are simple or have average complexity.
We use PowerCenter throughout the organization, under a centralized IT implementation with a decentralized (or divisional) user base. It has been our mainstay and go-to ETL tool for many years. From SAP to Oracle to SQL, it lets us connect to just about anything in order to pipe data out into different repositories. Mainly it feeds our various data warehouse and data marts, but we also use it to extract data from our old CRM system into our Salesforce transition.
Pros
The number of connectors, and the coverage for all the possibilities, are excellent, giving us the comfort that we won’t have to build anything custom.
The flow visualizations are very nice, as we often have to go in and forensically review work done by others who are no longer with the company. This helps us accurately identify source data.
The alert system is a great feature I think is often underutilized. We’ve been able to set up a great communication tree of notifications when a job fails, saving our DBA’s a lot of time sending out emergency communications.
Cons
The pricing on the connectors is inflated, in my opinion. Plus, the fact you have to pay for them twice if you also utilize IICS (Informatica Cloud). I think you should only have to pay once, regardless of what platform from the vendor you are using. This is a big Con for me, as a manager that has to budget for these things.
It requires more in-depth training than some of the other ETL tools we use, including Informatica Cloud. With Cloud, you can guess and be right 99% of the time. With PowerCenter, you need a few weeks of training, and then still have to ask an expert.
Setting up secure agents is always difficult, but I’ve seen it done better with other tools like MULE. With Informatica, you tend to need 12 people in a room from all over the business to troubleshoot why the connection is not working.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think anything where you need to shuttle data in/out of one complex system and into another is a great fit for PowerCenter (on prem). The “Upsert” function of updating and inserting has saved us countless dollars in storage space and the in/out transfer of data to the cloud, so if you are pulling data out of your on-prem systems and moving it to the cloud, this is the tool for you. Coupled with a good Data Warehouse or Data Lake strategy, you can be ELT instead of ETL, as well. Makes feeding your BI Tools fast and easy.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees)
Informatica PowerCenter provides a robust Extract Transform and Load (ETL) engine that is both scalable and flexible. I have implemented informatica PowerCenter for a variety of government agencies to meet a variety of different requirements. Informatica is used to integrate data, build data marts or data warehouses to support decision support systems, disseminate data or even ingest data into COTs applications. It is all about being able to move or transform your data so it is usable by your business.
Pros
Informatica is a proven enterprise ETL tool that scales and provides a graphical interface to code your data mappings.
Reading, Transforming and Loading Data to and from databases.
Process incoming data such as messages in real-time.
Cons
Data Cleansing.
Web Services / Services.
Modeling your data models.
Likelihood to Recommend
Informatica PowerCenter is great for creating data marts or data warehouses in star schema.
Informatica PowerCenter doesn't provide native capabilities for data cleansing, such as USPS zip code validation. You must code this manually.
VU
Verified User
Director in Professional Services (10,001+ employees)
Informatica PowerCenter is the enterprise ETL tool used for all data integration across the organization. PowerCenter is utilized for all on premises data integration including the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system as well as disparate systems including scheduling and time management systems.
Pros
Enforces enterprise wide ETL development standards.
Provides code re-usability with shared connections and objects.
Particularly adept at integrating a wide range of disparate data sources (handles flat files particularly well).
Well suited for moving large amounts of data.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
PowerCenter is well equipped to handle large amounts of data movement in an organization with many disparate sources and a structured development team. It excels in enforcing enterprise development standards through things like metadata manager and the monitoring capabilities (as well as being able to design monitoring rules for everything from naming standards to design practices). It is especially well suited at handling flat-file data in addition to its many connectors and native support for just about any ANSI standard database. For large development teams or the desire to remain flexible at an enterprise scale, Powercenter is a top-tier solution.
For small projects or even smaller development teams with mostly a single data source, expect frustration with being able to quickly test a solution as the design flow is very structured. It is also designed in a way that segregation of duties at a very high level can also cause small development teams to be counter-productive. Each step in the design process is a separate application, and although stitched together, is not without its problems. In order to design a simple mapping for example, you would first need a connection established to the source (example, ODBC) and keep in mind that it will automatically name the container according to how you named your connection. You would then open the designer tool, import a connection as a source, optionally check it in, create a target, optionally check it in as well, and design a transformation mapping. In order to test or run it, you will need to open a separate application (Workflow Manager) and create a workflow from your mapping, then create a session for that workflow and a workflow for those one or more sessions at which point you can test it. After running it, in order to observe, you then need to open a separate application (Monitor) to see what it is doing and how well. For a developer coming from something like SSIS, this can be daunting and cumbersome for building a simple POC and trying to test it (although from the inverse, building an enterprise scalable ETL solution from SSIS is its own challenge).
Informatica Power Centre is primarily used by the analytics team in our organization to build our ETL workflows. Informatica lies at the heart of all our data pipelining, right from sourcing from the databases all the way through loading to visualization tools and supporting business queries. On a larger picture, it provides a very smooth platform for data movement.
Pros
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.
Cons
Setting up Informatica and integrating with your existing services can be a hassle. While the support team is quite helpful, it can still take a considerable amount of time and effort to get Informatica up and running.
Informatica Enterprise Data Integration unavailable for MacOS. This can be a huge problem for a business that primarily uses Apple machines.
Using Informatica PowerCenter for ETL designing can be quite intuitive for basic to moderately complex workflows. However, for achieving advanced tasks, there is not sufficient documentation available.
Likelihood to Recommend
One of the main strengths of Informatica Enterprise Data Integration is its performance. If your business requirements include processing of huge volumes of data, then Informatica is strongly recommended over other tools. I would recommend Informatica over Talend.
On the other hand, if your business primarily works on Apple machines, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration is a resounding NO. Running Informatica on a VM or a Remote Desktop completely kills its efficiency.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
