Great for agile BI teams, complementary to PowerCenter
February 20, 2019
Great for agile BI teams, complementary to PowerCenter
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Informatica Cloud
We use both Informatica Cloud and Informatica Power Center enterprise-wide as our primary ETL tool. It helps manage our internal gateways moving around data from our ERP systems into containers and other tools for extracting into reporting or analytics. Our primary use of the cloud product is to extract data from both our internal systems and our external CRM tools (i.e. Salesforce) into Azure Data Warehouse instances for us to leverage with BI tools and Website personalization tools.
- Once the secure connection is established it’s quite easy to operate and create new jobs. The controls are simple, and we appreciate the fact there are not a lot of complex fine-tunings required. Navigation is also easy, and we enjoy the ability to open multiple tabs in the browser to work on multiple projects.
- The monitoring functionality works well to help track the progress of the jobs, again, without too much complication. In a fast dev environment, speed is essential and we quickly seeing the status/progress of jobs as well as any errors if the jobs fail helps us maintain speed.
- The web interface is a lot easier to interact with than the client/on-prem version. Putting much of the heavy lifting of interacting with the tool onto the shoulders of the browser makes it easier to keep multiple sessions open and get in/out quickly without having to VPN into the office.
- Price is a factor, the charges for each and every connector to various systems can add up, and seem to be annual expenses to account for in budget each year. We switched to just using Cloud between 2 systems so we only have to pay for 2 connectors because the price is pretty high. For other sources we’ve begun building out in Mulesoft to keep the budget in check.
- Access to customer service is not the greatest. When running into problems the first line of defense for cloud is that it is not a Cloud issue and they cannot help. They are correct, of course, but could at least offer some support services to help us track back through permissions and secure agent setup to help identify and fix our issues, not just brush us off.
- Updates to the Cloud product seem to hit without too much communication or follow through. While some of this could be prevented by our internal Administrator, I do think the level of communications from Informatica to the Admin are very thin as well. New features should be broadcast when you log in, and changes should be communicated within the app, and that does not happen with Informatica Cloud.
- Because Cloud is not as advanced as On-Prem, you may need to have both which can double your costs. If that is the case try to split them out so you don’t have to pay for the same connectors for both products. You would think buying a connector for one would let you have it for both products, but that is not always the case, with any software I suppose.
- Speed to get data out and into a cloud container is worth every penny. If you have a capable BI team, they can run ahead of or even fully without any Informatica developers to build the ETL. Once you set up the secure agent and have the end container stable, any worthwhile analyst can extract and push their data to the cloud. Very helpful for lean teams using tools working both sides of the firewall.
- The ability for the BI team to manage their own integrations has had tremendous savings on the personnel budget by reducing the need for Informatica developers. Now we can get by with just 1 or 2 developers monitoring and shoring up integrations and let the BI Analysts pick and choose their own data sets to manage.
- Mule ESB, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration, Informatica Data Explorer, Alteryx Connect, Talend Cloud Integration, Actian DataConnect, Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service and PowerCenter
Informatica is a proven name in this space, and while Cloud does not have all the exotic features that Powercenter has, it is fast and light, working well for a very agile team that cannot always wait for the dedicated Informatica developer to fully build out an integration. This is a tool that speeds development by letting the BI Team do their own I&A and requirements definition in a fast and agile format, then pass along to the trained developer to button up the integration after it has already proved it's value in use.