Information Server - A world class Integration Platform
April 26, 2018

Information Server - A world class Integration Platform

Gonzalo Angeleri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Modules Used

  • InfoSphere DataStage
  • InfoSphere Information Server for Data Quality
  • InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog
  • InfoSphere Information Analyzer
  • Pack for SAP Applications

Overall Satisfaction with IBM InfoSphere Information Server

InfoSphere Information Server is used primarily as a corporate data integration platform. It allows not only integrate data from different systems but also analyzes the quality of the data and improve it. Additionally, it allows managing metadata from end to end allowing a general overview of the data integration environment. Regarding the use cases, it is a cross-industry integration platform covering the need for data movement, improvement of data quality, metadata management of any integration project.
  • ETL capabilities, integrating data from any source system to any destination.
  • MPP Processing Engine
  • Data Profiling & Data Cleansing capabilities with multi-country support for common data such as names and addresses
  • Metatada management capabilities not only within the platform but also with 3er party tools like BI tools
  • I would be nice to have a new web development environment for DataStage.
  • Connectivity Packs such as Pack for SAP Application are a little pricey.
  • It is confusing for new developers the possibility of developing jobs using different execution engines such as Parallel or Server.
  • Information Server can positively impact the costs of companies by increasing the productivity of development and therefore reduce their time and costs. It is estimated that DataStage can increase a developer's productivity by 40% on average.
  • Better data governance
  • Improve data quality and reduce bad data impacts
Information Server and Informatica PowerCenter are the two leading integration platforms worldwide. Information Server has a better integration with other IBM products such as MDM or Cognos but the decision to use one or another platform is more a price decision and quantity of installed base and knowledge in each country or region. For example in Latin America, the installed base and knowledge about Information Server is far superior to the knowledge that there is about Informatica PowerCenter.
It can contribute a lot of value to any project that requires data integration either in batch or near real-time mode. You can manage the quality of the data as they are moved from a data source to the various destinations. It also allows managing the metadata of the entire environment and is especially useful to cover the requirements of a data governance program.

Maybe it is not the most appropriate platform to integrate data in real-time mode.

IBM InfoSphere Information Server Feature Ratings

Connect to traditional data sources
10
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
8
Simple transformations
10
Complex transformations
9
Data model creation
8
Metadata management
9
Business rules and workflow
8
Collaboration
7
Testing and debugging
8
Integration with data quality tools
10
Integration with MDM tools
8