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.
Informatica PowerExchange Connectors: the data with quality and reliability for the enterprise
Old yet powerful ETL Tool
Mainly …
Amazing ETL Tool
The data integration leader
Informatica Power Center review
PowerCenter outpowers the cloud version
Informatica PowerCenter, an Enterprise ETL Tool
A powerful ETL solution which focuses on enterprise scalability, flexibility, and code re-usability
Sheer Performance (but not for MacOS!)
Licensing flexibility and skills availability in the market
Informatica Review
Good ETL Platform
PowerCenter works well with large, structured data files
My personal view of Informatica Enterprise Data Integration tools based on my 10+ years of user experiences.
Day to day user's opinion of PowerCenter
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
- Connect to traditional data sources (18)9.090%
- Business rules and workflow (18)9.090%
- Simple transformations (18)8.080%
- Complex transformations (18)7.070%
Pricing
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
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Product Demos
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#Informatica #Client Tools #Training Session For Beginners- Part 4 || Video Course
INFORMATICA ONLINE TRAINING Session | Free Tutorials | Materials | ETL Tool
Features
Data Source Connection
Ability to connect to multiple data sources
- 9Connect to traditional data sources(18) Ratings
Ability to connect to traditional data sources like relational databases, flat files, XML files and packaged applications
- 8Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL(14) Ratings
Ability to connect to non-traditional data sources like Hadoop and other big data technologies, and NoSQL databases
Data Transformations
Data transformations include calculations, search and replace, data normalization and data parsing
- 8Simple transformations(18) Ratings
Simple data transformations are calculations, data type conversions, aggregations and search and replace operations
- 7Complex transformations(18) Ratings
Complex data transformations are data normalization, advanced data parsing, etc.
Data Modeling
A data model is a diagram or flowchart that illustrates the relationships between data
- 9Data model creation(15) Ratings
Ability to create and maintain data models using a graphical tool to define relationships between data
- 8Metadata management(16) Ratings
Automated discovery of metadata with ability to synchronize and share metadata with other tools like Master Data Management
- 9Business rules and workflow(18) Ratings
Ability to define and manage business rules and workflows
- 6.1Collaboration(16) Ratings
Collaboration is enabled by a shared repository of project information and metadata
- 9Testing and debugging(17) Ratings
Tool to debug and tune for optimal performance
Data Governance
Data governance is the practise of implementing policies defining effective use of an organization's data assets
- 9Integration with data quality tools(15) Ratings
Integration with tools for cleansing, parsing and normalizing data according to business rules
- 9Integration with MDM tools(13) Ratings
Integration with master data management tools to ensure data consistency across the organization
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Informatica PowerCenter?
Informatica PowerCenter Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(92)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
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
(1-2 of 2)Amazing ETL Tool
- 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.
- Connect to traditional data sources
- 90%9.0
- Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
- 80%8.0
- Simple transformations
- 100%10.0
- Complex transformations
- 90%9.0
- Data model creation
- 80%8.0
- Metadata management
- 80%8.0
- Business rules and workflow
- 90%9.0
- Collaboration
- 80%8.0
- Testing and debugging
- 80%8.0
- Integration with data quality tools
- 90%9.0
- Integration with MDM tools
- 90%9.0
- Reduced time for transforming data.
- Multiple projects are being handled.
- Availability of easy resources in the market to employee.
The data integration leader
- 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.
- 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.
- Connect to traditional data sources
- 90%9.0
- Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
- 70%7.0
- Simple transformations
- 90%9.0
- Complex transformations
- 80%8.0
- Data model creation
- 70%7.0
- Metadata management
- 90%9.0
- Business rules and workflow
- 90%9.0
- Collaboration
- 70%7.0
- Testing and debugging
- 70%7.0
- Integration with data quality tools
- 70%7.0
- Integration with MDM tools
- 80%8.0
- In large implementation projects, the biggest contribution of Informatica has been to standardize the way things are done, get everyone across the organization on the same page in terms of what to expect, how long will the data processing takes, what data quality is to be expected, etc.
- In projects with hundreds of data pipelines, Informatica makes it easy to define data pipelines that can be auto-configured instead of building one for each table. This greatly reduces the development effort and enables flexibility in massive data migration projects.
- Informatica provides connectors to a multitude of database systems. It's connectors with Redshift, SAP/HANA have gone a notch beyond in order to tailor the data as per the needs of target systems and makes use of their strengths.
- A negative impact has been that departments across the boards are highly dependent on the Informatica setup to deliver their data. Given the usually large scope of projects, the lead time for delivery of a solution can be significant causing losses, monetary or otherwise.