Item: Astera Centerprise
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it primarily for publishing to a data warehouse. Another production application creates and exchanges XML files with a federal regulatory agency, and as a 1-off, we are using Centerprise to validate an Oracle-to-SQLServer migration.

Pros and Cons

Of the six mid-tier ETL/DI tools I studied, Centerprise is the most intuitive to use.
Customer support is email-centric, but nonetheless solid. Astera happily does conference calls when the need arises.
Wide range of features.
Expression transformation uses SQL-ish (as opposed to Java-ish or MS-ish) commands. Simple to use, and select/paste helps.
Love the PowerCenter-style expression transformation.

Documentation explanations are in video and text format. While most explanations are relatively clear (or even very clear), in my opinion, the documentation is a bit haphazardly-organized. It takes me longer than I'd like to find something, although I usually do.
Look-ups transformation certainly works, but it could be more robust. (There are ways around that.)

Return on Investment

It's difficult to measure. We had a slower start with it and we are picking up speed. Our best ROI is to come.

Alternatives Considered

From honing the web I made a long-list of about 25 products, leaving off the big (and expensive) 4 as well as clearly inferior products. Then, due to the nature of our organization, I excluded cloud-specific solutions. That got us to about 15. I read reviews and was persuaded to reduce the shortlist to eight, which somewhat unfairly I arbitrarily cut to six because eight was just too much to deep-dive. I took a deep dive including vendor product demo with all six. From that study, two emerged, and I recommended both to my management as excellent choices. My management preferred Centerprise because it is not Java-based, and we are not a Java organization.

Support Rating

I wish support was less email-centric, but I have to agree that response is adequately prompt, usually a few hours or less. They certainly are courteous, and they try hard to make sure that our questions are answered.

Key Insights

Do you think Astera Centerprise delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Astera Centerprise's feature set?

Yes

Did Astera Centerprise live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Astera Centerprise go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Astera Centerprise again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

It does not have the horsepower of much more expensive Fortune-200 tools like PowerCenter, Ab Initio, DataStage, and that ilk. And it is much too sophisticated and powerful for a mom/pop shop. Our organization is in the 500-1000 user range, so it's a good fit. It scales to organizations larger than ours—t's a matter of licensing more co-processing threads and having servers to support it. It supports a wide (and gradually growing) range of sources and targets. It's a good choice for combining the data of heterogeneous data sources.

Solid choice for mid-sized organizations

Overall Satisfaction with Astera Centerprise