Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Informatica PowerCenter

Informatica PowerCenter

Overview

What is Informatica PowerCenter?

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.

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

PowerCenter is widely used across organizations for a variety of use cases. Users have found the product to be instrumental in addressing …
Continue reading

Amazing ETL Tool

9 out of 10
December 01, 2020
Informatica PowerCenter is widely used as an integration tool across many projects. This is being used in specific departments. It lets us …
Continue reading

Good ETL Platform

8 out of 10
April 06, 2017
Incentivized
Our company bought Informatica PowerCenter around 5 years ago, when we initially set up the BI team in the IT department. After that it …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 11 features
  • Connect to traditional data sources (18)
    9.0
    90%
  • Business rules and workflow (18)
    9.0
    90%
  • Simple transformations (18)
    8.0
    80%
  • Complex transformations (18)
    7.0
    70%
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing
N/A
Unavailable

What is Informatica PowerCenter?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

92 people also want pricing

Alternatives Pricing

What is Clear Analytics?

Clear Analytics is a business intelligence solution that enables non technical end users to perform analytics by leveraging existing knowledge of Excel coupled with a built in query builder. Some key features include: Dynamic Data Refresh, Data Share and In-Excel Collaboration.

What is Vertify?

VertifyData is a cloud-based integration platform with core integration capacities, including a drag-and-drop interface and real-time synchronization. It also offers over 80 prebuilt connectors and templates, plus customizable integrations for scaling businesses.

Return to navigation

Product Demos

#Informatica #Source #Qualifier Online #Tutorial For Beginners - Part 14

YouTube

#Informatica #Client Tools #Training Session For Beginners- Part 4 || Video Course

YouTube

INFORMATICA ONLINE TRAINING Session | Free Tutorials | Materials | ETL Tool

YouTube
Return to navigation

Features

Data Source Connection

Ability to connect to multiple data sources

8.5
Avg 8.3

Data Transformations

Data transformations include calculations, search and replace, data normalization and data parsing

7.5
Avg 8.4

Data Modeling

A data model is a diagram or flowchart that illustrates the relationships between data

8.2
Avg 8.1

Data Governance

Data governance is the practise of implementing policies defining effective use of an organization's data assets

9
Avg 8.2
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Informatica PowerCenter?

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.

Informatica PowerCenter Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Connect to traditional data sources and Data model creation and Business rules and workflow highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Informatica PowerCenter are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(92)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

PowerCenter is widely used across organizations for a variety of use cases. Users have found the product to be instrumental in addressing their data integration needs and solving challenges related to data quality management, master data management, data masking, and data virtualization. With PowerCenter, users can easily extract, transform, and load data from various sources such as SAP and Salesforce into their data warehouses and data marts. They appreciate how the product optimizes data for reporting tools and facilitates the generation of accurate reports.

Another common use case for PowerCenter is integrating data from disparate sources and migrating data from legacy systems to newer infrastructure. Users have found the product to be efficient in automating ETL processes and ensuring timely and efficient data loads. They also value its advanced security features, which make administration easier. Many users have praised PowerCenter's ease of use, fast development capabilities, and multi-user development environment with a check-out/check-in mechanism that supports collaborative work.

Overall, PowerCenter has become a mainstay ETL tool in organizations due to its scalability, flexibility, and robustness as an ETL engine. From loading data into data warehouses and data marts to feeding information into COTs applications or Teradata Data Warehouses, PowerCenter has proven to be an indispensable tool for enterprise-wide data integration across a range of industries including marketing, healthcare, finance, and more.

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.

Lack of Documentation: Several users have expressed frustration with the limited availability and insufficient documentation for Informatica PowerCenter. This has made it challenging for users to achieve advanced tasks and work with complex workflows, hindering their ability to fully utilize the software.

Complex Installation and Configuration: Many reviewers have encountered difficulties during the installation and configuration process of Informatica PowerCenter. The software consists of multiple components that require significant time and resources to set up effectively, causing inconvenience for users.

Limited Integration Capabilities: Some users have found it difficult to integrate code from other languages like Java, Python, or R into Informatica PowerCenter. This limitation forces users to build multiple hops in a data pipeline, resulting in additional complexity and potential inefficiencies in their workflow.

Users recommend Informatica PowerCenter for various tasks such as data migration, ETL, and data integration. They find it to be a reliable tool with strong support and powerful mapping and visualization capabilities. Additionally, users mention its ability to connect and fetch data from different source systems, as well as its capabilities for processing and transforming data. Informatica PowerCenter is highly recommended for companies dealing with large amounts of data and those in need of real-time data integration. Users also mention its plugins for integrating with other applications. While some users acknowledge that Informatica PowerCenter is more expensive than other software, they still recommend it as the best ETL tool in the market.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-7 of 7)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 01, 2020

Amazing ETL Tool

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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.
Jody Gitchel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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).
April 06, 2017

Good ETL Platform

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company bought Informatica PowerCenter around 5 years ago, when we initially set up the BI team in the IT department. After that it became one of the core platforms in IT for data-level workflow and reporting purposea.
  • It is quite flexible to handle different type of data formats like DB objects or Tables
  • Good performance when processing lots of data in batch
  • Easy to learn and use
  • The client is quite heavy in terms of size and function
  • Better way to upgrade
  • Test and deployment automation needs to be improved
DB level or flat file for reporting or analysis
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PowerCenter is being used to automate our ETL processes. We have implemented data pipelines to ingest and transform data from our clients. PowerCenter work flows also load data into a DBMS platform and create SAS data libraries.
  • PowerCenter processes input files, performs specified transformations, and maps the input data format to the output data format very quickly. The PowerCenter backend implementation seems to be optimized to process and map structured input records to structured output records and load the records into a database. One of the strengths of PowerCenter is performance of processing petabytes of structured input data files.
  • PowerCenter does not require a software development experience or education. After providing initial hands-on training, the data consultants (who are statisticians, subject matter experts) in our organization were able to implement data ingest and data transformation tasks fairly easily.
  • PowerCenter supports multiple DBMS technologies (for example, Oracle, Netezza). This flexibility allows it to be used by multiple departments within our organization.
  • One of the challenges of PowerCenter is the lack of integration between the components and functionality provided by PowerCenter. PowerCenter consists of multiple components such has the repository service, integration service, metadata service. Considerable time and resources were required to install and configure these components before PowerCenter was available for use.
  • In order to connect to various data sources such as Netezza database or SAS datasets, PowerCenter requires the installation and configuration of separate plug-ins. We spent considerable time trouble-shooting and debugging problems while trying to get the various plug-ins integrated with PowerCenter and get them up and running as described in the documentation.
  • PowerCenter works well with structured data. That is, it is easy to work with input and output data that is pre-defined, fixed, and unchanging. It is much more difficult to work with dynamic data in which new fields are added or removed ad-hoc or if data format changes during the data ingest process. We have not been as successful in using PowerCenter for dynamic data.
  • One of the challenges of learning PowerCenter is that it is difficult to find documentation or publications that help you learn the various details about PowerCenter software. Unlike SAS Institute, Informatica does not publish books about PowerCenter. The documentation available with PowerCenter is sparse; we have learned many aspects of this technology through trial and error.

PowerCenter is well suited for processing of large amounts of data that is structured and pre-defined. It is well-suited for large organizations that have the resources to install, configure and support PowerCenter. It is well suited for large organizations that have a large number of data consultants/analysts that do not have a software development/programming background.

PowerCenter is not a good fit for smaller, agile organizations that work with unstructured data and changing/dynamic data.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Informatica enterprise data integration tools have been used in my company across different departments for enterprise data warehouses, data marts, data movements etc. It addresses or provides data for different business purposes for my company such as BI reporting and real data dashboards etc.
  • Informatica Power Center tools are very effective on extracting, transforming and loading bulk data such as hundreds of millions of database rows or raw data flat files, XML files etc., out of or into all kinds of platforms such as databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL server, MySQL, any database that you can name it), OS (UNIX, Linux, Windows), web services, and real time such as IBM MQ.
  • A single toolset to be used for all kinds of platforms, for bulk data loads, for real-time loads, or web services.
  • The Informatica web service interface can be improved from a performance point of view and also from a troubleshooting point of view.
Informatica Enterprise data integration tools are well suited in extracting/loading/transforming large amounts of data as batch loads. It can also be easily integrated with Hadoop on big data applications. But its real-time integration with MQ or Tibco may be a little overlapped with them for the functionalities.
Sadu Kurahatti | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our firm provides consultancy to several federal government clients. Currently we are using Informatica Powercenter for aDHS - USCIS client to perform ETL on daily basis (both initial full load and incremental load) into various data marts. It helps in moving data from one source to another, mainly to a data warehouse to help generate reports.
  • Data migration from multiple sources. It handles any type of source data including RDBMS, flat files, XML, mainframe etc.
  • Implementing data migration rules is very easy and efficient and reusable.
  • Development and maintenance of code is very easy. Design, development and scheduling of full load and incremental load is very easy.
  • Provides lot of features for developers to implement any kind of business rules.
  • Not worth doing simple data migration using powercenter.
  • Licensing cost.
  • Handling Blobs and clobs data types.
PowerCenter is ideal where there is a need to implement complex data migration rules and perform incremental data load. It is very efficient, easy to maintain and modify the code. It is also very efficient in connecting to data sources including XML, Flat files, spreadsheets, RDBMS, mainframe etc.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PowerCenter is being used across the organization for all our ETL needs, be it generating flat files from different sources or loading data from legacy systems into data warehouse or integrating multiple systems for reporting needs.
  • Ability to work with different types of sources and targets.
  • Version control of the code.
  • Ability to integrate with LDAP for security.
  • Ease of use.
  • Performance with ODBC drivers can be improved.
  • Memory utilization is very high during ETL execution.
  • Improved scheduling capabilities for in built scheduler.
In scenarios where we have to integrate data from heterogeneous sources into targets PowerCenter is the best tool as it can extract as well as load data by using native drivers of each of the different databases with a performance that is not matched by any of its competitors. By bringing power exchange, data quality, metadata management and data discovery under one instance, Informatica has simplified PowerCenter integration with above mentioned tools as well as maintenance of the instance.
Return to navigation