Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

Informatica PowerCenter is an ETL data integration platform.

It's all part of the data warehouse's extract, transform, and load process. Data is extracted from all source systems, transformed, and loaded into a data warehouse.

It is very robust, scalable, and simple to use.

It is very comprehensive in terms of connector and transformation capabilities from both a source and target perspective.

I believe that people are shifting to more agile, flexible platforms not only in this era but also in the last two or three years. This is happening not only on data management platforms but also on analytics platforms. Platforms for visualizing data dashboards. We used to have very rigid tools like Cognos and MicroStrategy, but Tableau and Power BI have recently taken over. The same can be said for data management. 

Informatica, in my opinion, is very rigid and not very flexible, whereas platforms like Alteryx or Matillion are very flexible and agile.

I have over 15 years of experience working with Informatica tools, and we have worked with Informatica PowerCenter in the last 12 months.

Informatica PowerCenter is stable. On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate it a ten.

I haven't had any problems with jobs or projects failing or anything like that.

You can definitely scale it as the data volume increases. You have many options for scaling up.

The technical support is great.

They are responsive and simple to contact.

While I have not implemented it, I am familiar with Informatica PIM.

We have also used Informatica Cloud in the last 12 months.

The installation and configuration are both well-documented and straightforward.

I am not sure about the most recent price, but I think it should be $100,000 or more.

It's obviously the best.

I would rate Informatica PowerCenter a ten out of ten.

My experience is in the semiconductor industry with our customers using the Azure supply chain. We have built-in the AIS system, IBM and Db2. We transfer data from SQL Server to MongoDB and transfer the data to Db2.

Security is very important, the solution is deployed to the private cloud. We assigned five people to build the project.

Informatica PowerCenter is built into the technology supply system. I use the solution to transfer the MS data system to the supply chain system.

We use Informatica PowerCenter to transfer the transitional database to and from the data warehouse. This is very efficient as it enables us to quickly find our data reports and the data, so we can build AI models.

In the future, I would like to see Informatica PowerCenter integrate a more powerful dashboard.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for 3 years.

In my experience Informatica is stable, however, it depends on our customer's environment.

This solution is scalable. For example, we have set two data warehouses for one of my customers, we use Informatica PowerCenter to join several PV tables separate to data warehousing. This allows us to divide, separate and exchange our data warehousing to the schema and the people in the schema.

In my last job, I used Pentaho. 

The initial setup of the solution is easier than Pentaho. Informatica was set up by me with the help of two supply chain consultants, in one day. 

To implement Informatica PowerCenter you need to understand your customer's systems first and what their requirements are. It is important to understand their existing system and find the data. By understanding their logic, you can know how to extract the data and transfer the data to the data warehouse.

Informatica PowerCenter is reasonably priced. It is less expensive than Pentaho.

There is a standard version fee in Taiwan. It is a one-time yearly subscription price that is approximately $3,010 US dollars for three users.

This is my first experience with this kind of tool, I would rate Informatica PowerCenter a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the ETL.

They know what they're doing, and it's a more mature tool compared to Talend. They really think about every scenario. For example, if you want to write a data cleansing algorithm and all that is probably rules. It's just easier. There are a lot of provisions in PowerCenter. In terms of the transformation algorithms and all that, there are a lot of operations. It's great.

The solution is stable.

It's a scalable product.

PowerCenter seems to be a little bit higher side of cost. Customers are thinking about alternatives. Talend seems to be a pure Java-based thing, however, there are some technical hiccups there. There are a few finance companies are probably started using Talend as a competition tool for Informatica. Most of the smaller companies are trying to build open-source-based ETL tools.

It should be more cloud-centric than on-prem-centric. That is where the problem with Informatica.

We've used the solution for a couple of years. 

It's a stable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is scalable. 

We have three or four clients we are working with in terms of Informatica.

In terms of technical support, there is plenty of information is available online, however, their tech support is okay.

Snowflake is something that is surfacing. Every customer is now started asking about Snowflake. They're thinking of it being a viable option. When it comes to data warehousing, it's the kind of a solution that you want to deal with huge among this data processing. 

Most startups and probably smaller companies thinking of building a custom open-source pipeline. It could be Pulsar-based, or Kafka-based. And that is what they're looking at. In enterprises, they don't want to go with a hundred percent, the open-source solutions. They like Informatica or probably Talend or probably some of the ETL tools that are available.

It's not a simple setup. It requires a bit of a learning curve, no doubt about it. For example, if you want an index, a three or four-year engineer would need to handle that. If you want to make them as a utility engineer, there is a learning curve involved. 

It took us three to four months to deploy the solution. 

We have 12 to 14 people working on the deployment and maintenance of the solution. 

The pricing could be a bit better. 

For example, if you look at Snowflake, companies are thinking of innovative ways of reducing the price and then transferring the benefit to their customers. 

In terms of innovation, creativity is not there in this solution. It is still an on-prem ETL tool. Informatica is one of the best options today and no doubt about it. However, is it cloud-ready? I don't think so. Therefore, I'd rate the solution a five out of ten.

Beyond cloud readiness (or lack thereof), pricing is an issue. It's relatively high compared to other products on the market. We all have to move from IBM thinking. You sell the customer and then penalize them with the pricing, pricing, pricing. That is where IBM has today become a dead man walking underneath, has become two different companies now. This company should learn from IBM. Pricing cannot be the only way of making money and probably comes with innovation, creativity, making it cloud-ready, and then transferring those benefits in order to sell more licenses. 

I am using Informatica PowerCenter to upskill and learn to use new tools.

I found the map links, work links, and workflows valuable. They are important features.

It would be better if I could do all the work within a single window. If I'm working on any mapping and if I have to switch to sessions, I have to open a new window altogether. If I have to get into workflows, I have to open a new window. It was also very expensive. In the next release, I would like it to be more user-friendly.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for over two years. 

Informatica PowerCenter is a stable solution.

Informatica PowerCenter is a scalable solution. Expanding is easy, and we can execute multiple workflows based on events. I don't see any constraints, and it looks pretty good. We have approximately 50 or more people supporting or developing applications for various clients.

I have experience with SSIS, and I compared the features. They are different, especially on the navigation front and the user interface. The SQL server integration service is always handy in Azure. Most of the time, you'll be using Microsoft products, so their interface is very user-friendly. But in Informatica, it'll be completely different, especially on the mapping side. When you map from the first to the next target, you have to know how to connect the source and targets. But in SSIS, it's easy for a layperson to understand how the data flows.

The price could be better. It's very expensive.

On a scale from one to five, I would give Informatica PowerCenter's price a one.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Informatica PowerCenter a nine.

Informatica PowerCenter is used for data integration.

To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions.

Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use.

Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle.

Areas for improvement in Informatica PowerCenter include scalability and high availability or the clustering configuration because that's still very basic. The elasticity or scaling of the platform needs a lot of improvement. For example, when it comes to DR handling or building an active-active or active-passive cluster, Informatica PowerCenter is still not that powerful.

Automation also needs improvement in the solution. Improving automation leads to some improvement in the stability of Informatica PowerCenter and other aspects related to it.

What I'd like to see in the next release of Informatica PowerCenter is real-time capability because the solution is mainly for patches, and to have real-time integration, you need to count on some additional components from Informatica. I would expect more integration and a complete platform in terms of real-time capability or patching with minimal interventions or minimal components to be aligned together.

I've been using Informatica PowerCenter for six or seven years.

I'm still using it as my company has many solutions that leverage Informatica PowerCenter, though the solution isn't that active nowadays because Informatica has a different strategy to promote the cloud-based data integration offering.

Informatica PowerCenter is still in the market, and what my company is using is the on-premise version.

Informatica PowerCenter is a stable solution, and I would rate its stability seven out of ten. There's a small improvement needed in terms of stability because it's linked to the clustering and high availability. Somehow you'll need a lot of automation to get Informatica PowerCenter to handle the workload, and in certain situations, there could be failures.

I found the technical support for Informatica PowerCenter brilliant. I'm even giving it a rating of four out of five just because I can't give it a five. Informatica support is even awarded for customer satisfaction if I remember correctly.

The initial setup for Informatica PowerCenter was simple. It was a straightforward setup, and it wasn't complicated at all.

Pricing for Informatica PowerCenter isn't cheap, but if I compare it with IBM, it's as expensive as IBM, however, Informatica PowerCenter is more innovative, especially when compared to a giant company such as IBM that has thousands of products.

Informatica PowerCenter is limited only to data management, but it has new features that come out every quarter. Points for ease of use and flexibility go to Informatica PowerCenter, but price-wise, IBM and Informatica are equal because they're both expensive.

I evaluated Talend, which is an open-source data engineering and data integration platform. Comparing the two solutions, Informatica PowerCenter is still more robust and has an extendable platform. You can add other capabilities, such as data quality and so on, but if you'll be focusing only on data integration, Talend, especially coming from an open-source mindset, would be a good competitor.

My preference, because I had experience with IBM and Talend, would be Informatica PowerCenter because of the ease of use, flexibility, and features that come with it.

Informatica PowerCenter is an on-premise data integration solution, but two or three years ago, Informatica introduced a new, intelligent data platform. That new platform is the equivalent of Informatica PowerCenter in terms of capability, but the only difference is that it's a fully on-cloud solution.

Informatica PowerCenter is best for big enterprises. Technically, you can use it for any scale, but practically you will get the most output when you're dealing with high volumes and heavy processing. This is from a technical aspect. Price-wise, it's not a cheap platform, so only enterprises with a bigger data management budget will be able to afford to invest in a data management platform such as Informatica PowerCenter.

My rating for Informatica PowerCenter is eight out of ten. Eight is a fair rating because it's a very stable and very mature product.

My company has a partnership with Informatica and other vendors. I'm a system integrator.

I like the completeness of the way I can build ETL workflows. It's not one feature that stands out. Rather, it's the way everything is working together.

On the matter of data lineage and data catalog and metadata, in particular, several new developments are embedded as options you could use or could buy. The modular structure is very helpful.

What is not that clear, is the usability in the cloud, for example. That's a little bit fuzzy.

The reputation of Informatica is that it is expensive. There are some things which could improve for the customer so that they have the perception that they get more for their money.

I would say that the transparency towards the cloud is a big area for improvement. For example, Microsoft and Oracle, make it easy since they create a cloud and then integrate all the stuff that way that you always have the possibility to work to optimize with. Informatica is a little bit different.  

On-premise should not be eradicated.

I've used the solution for 20 years. 

The solution is expensive.

I'm a developer and architect. I'm not reselling the product.

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration tool.

The most valuable features of Informatica PowerCenter are the ease of use, and development, and is simple to find resources.

Informatica PowerCenter could improve by having a single interface because half of the system is still in the legacy interface and many other elements are moved to the developer client. It would be good if there was a single interface for the end user and developers.

In the next release, Informatica PowerCenter would be beneficial to have run time column propagation. Other solutions have this feature but it is missing in this solution.

I have been using Informatica PowerCenter for approximately 18 years.

Informatica PowerCenter is stable.

The scalability of Informatica PowerCenter is good.

We have approximately seven people using the solution.

The support is good from Informatica PowerCenter and they have been responsive.

I rate the support from Informatica PowerCenter an eight out of ten.

Positive

The implementation of Informatica PowerCenter is easy.

The price of Informatica PowerCenter is expensive, but it does give value.

This is an amazing solution. If I ranked it in terms of all of the data integration solutions, I would rank it first.

I rate Informatica PowerCenter a seven out of ten.

We use Informatica PowerCenter primarily for its processes. We derive dashboards, functionalities and graphs with the information it provides. We create reports, generate excels, and data scientists use the information to generate reports in Tableau, Power BI or other tools.

It is UI friendly and has all the advantages of an ETL tool. In addition, integration is possible between Oracle and SQL.

It is also relatively expensive but is worth the price because the software provides a good experience. The resources we need exist, and the people are available.

We have been using this solution for about six months. It is private on Oracle but available at our data centre.

It is a stable solution, and there are no significant issues. In addition, it is a relatively easy solution for any beginner or intermediate-level person using it. The only problem is that it is moderately expensive, which is essential to emphasize.

Everything in the market is shifting to the cloud, namely Oracle, Azure, and any other cloud. If a company has a solution on a license, they will use something with the cloud on Google, Azure or AWS. It would be good if Informatica collaborated with Oracle, Azure or AWS, allowing for greater functionalities and benefits.

I believe it is a scalable solution, but I do not have all the details on scalability. For example, in AWS, there are databases like PostgreSQL, SQL and Oracle. So, it would be good if, for a specific price, Informatica PowerCenter could be available in Azure or have the ability to use Azure in the ETL tool.

About six to seven developers use Informatica PowerCenter in my company.

The technical support is helpful.

The setup was easy. However, the solution could have better documentation on basic steps or blocks that specify what to do. For example, a particular topic could be described at length in a video so people can understand it.

Installation is also relatively easy, but when we tried to include data warehousing, extraction or ETL functionality, we needed specific configurations and capacity. That is a pain point for users, developers and architects. However, it became easier after several periods.

In terms of costs, it is moderately expensive, but I am unsure of the exact price. It would be good if Informatica PowerCenter incorporated free trails or learnings to help beginners use the solution. There should also be more campaigns similar to other ETL tools.

My advice would be for Informatica to decrease the price. Generally, companies have more customers when prices are lower. So even if the company grows with a lower margin, the number of users would be higher, which would be beneficial.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, it is important that ETL functionalities are readily available and that it is GUI friendly.