Day to day user's opinion of PowerCenter
August 03, 2016

Day to day user's opinion of PowerCenter

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PowerCenter

Powercenter is used heavily by the IT processing departments at my organization in support of the end users in various business departments. In short, it is the backend process for a majority of the company, but only a small percentage of employees use the tool itself in a day to day basis.
  • The tool is excellent at pulling data from source systems, modifying it to fit a target system, and then pushing the data accordingly.
  • It handles conversion of datatypes very well
  • PowerCenter is very adapt at applying data filters and 'business rules' to source data before pushing the results to the end user.
  • As a developer/integrator, i feel that PowerCenter could use improvement, and that is in the area of automated deployments. There isn't really any scripting options to automate back end deployments of ETL Workflows from one environment to the next. Instead, everything has to be done via the GUI (Graphical User Interface). And while this is a relatively straight forward process, it can be time consuming.
  • There is no real interface between PowerCenter and programs that manage the encapsulation of password for System Accounts. All connections to source and target systems have to be updated via the Power Center Workflow Manager GUI, and entered manually. There is no interface with encryption programs such as MAC VAULT, and as such, admins are required to have access to passwords that information security departments might otherwise not want them to have.
  • In my role at my company I do not have any insight into the ROI we get out of PowerCenter. I do know however that we recently reuped our contract with the company and installed the more recent version of the product (9.6.1) so I would assume that means we get a fairly good return for our money. And it is used extensively as a component of some of our biggest servicing applications, so that would be a nod in its favor as well.
PowerCenter is very similar to DataStage, in that they both deal with the movement and manipulation of data from one source/system to another. As we use both extensively at my company, I cannot say how it compares beyond that both are well liked and widely used. I would assume that they deal with different types of data sources, but I personally have only worked with Informatica PowerCenter.
PowerCenter is the top of the line tool for migrating data from one source to another. It excels at filtering and modifying data before deploying it into a target environment, usually for end user use.

However, if you are looking for a tool to simply look at data from one source, there are other products out there. This is really designed for aggregating data and filtering/manipulating it into useful information.

Informatica PowerCenter Feature Ratings

Connect to traditional data sources
10
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
7
Simple transformations
10
Complex transformations
10
Data model creation
7
Business rules and workflow
10
Collaboration
6
Testing and debugging
7
Integration with data quality tools
Not Rated
Integration with MDM tools
Not Rated