Informatica PowerExchange [EOL] Reviews

We are a system integrator. My experience is primarily around solution consulting, designing, and proposing it in the right perspective so that its features are best utilized, and we are able to provide the best value for our customers.

From the product feature or product capability perspective, the aspects around integration, transformation, and standardization are valuable. It's fairly easy to use. It has a GUI-based interface.

There are elements related to the fast-paced movement of data. If you combine PowerExchange with Change Data Capture (CDC), in a very fast-moving batch, PowerExchange does a good job, although it doesn't quite support that in real-time. 

The transforms and the objects that are a part and parcel of PowerCenter help speed up the development and design and also help with better performance. If you are able to club it with a very high-performing database underneath, then you get the best of both worlds through a pushdown optimization mechanism. You can exploit Informatica's innate and native transformation capabilities. You can also exploit the underlying databases, scalability, and fast processing capabilities. These things come seamlessly with PowerExchange. PowerExchange has implemented this in PowerCenter on Teradata very effectively. It's one of the best combinations for pushdown optimization where you utilize the transformation engine of Informatica, and you have a very powerful Teradata underneath. The entire Teradata construct and architecture is quite strong in terms of processing, fast movement, etc. You are able to establish the best of both worlds.

Price competitiveness is an area for improvement. That's something not very good for PowerExchange, and that's an area that Informatica should focus on as a strategy.

They should make it quick and easy for use of citizen data integration or for people or integrators developing at the customer side. They could be development teams within the business team. For them, the product owners can consider making it a little bit more seamless and a little bit more democratized. However, it's difficult to democratize data integration and ETL technology in the way you can do with data visualization technology. It's much more difficult, but it's an improvement area.

Real-time data processing is another area where it's falling short, and it can certainly do better there.

I have been working with Informatica products since early 2003. The PowerExchange product came on board about five years ago. I have direct experience with it for two to three years, and that has been mainly around solution consulting. I don't do any coding.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

The company I work for has fairly large customers. They are mostly medium to large customers.

It's able to handle quite large volumes. Especially in a big data ecosystem, it isn't a problem. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability.

I'd rate their support a seven out of ten. The knowledge is very much there, but it's a question of availability. If they're available at the right point in time, that's good.

For on-prem deployment, the installation and configuration aren't a tall order. They can be done within three weeks for each environment. That's not a problem. One can do the configuration by following the best mechanisms and the best configuration parameters, etc. That's not an issue. The challenge is the actual implementation. For a data warehouse of medium size, the implementation timelines would be around 9 to 10 months with proper integration and proper standardization. For a big data warehouse, it'd be slightly more. If you want to do it quite quickly, within 3 months or so, then you would not possibly go for technology as costly as Informatica. You can go for it, but you may want to choose other technologies in the market.

I have not faced much of a challenge with its implementation. The issue comes only when a person doesn't know how PowerCenter has to be set up with the repository, the underlying metadata structures, etc. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of the ease of the setup.

It's expensive. In fact, nobody would buy any product of Informatica if the price was the only consideration. It costs money, and it doesn't come cheap, but it provides value for money in many ways.

If the customer has money, I'd recommend Informatica PowerExchange. If the customer doesn't have money, I'd recommend a PoC. I'd certainly suggest trying it once.

Overall, it's a fairly comprehensive technology, and it has been one of the earliest movers in this space. It has been there right at the top in the Gartner quadrants and other platforms. It has been used by a significantly high number of customers across the globe.

I'd rate Informatica PowerExchange a nine out of ten.

We are using the solution for real-time integration. Sometimes there are some complex requirements for real-time reporting, and  it'll be maybe for CDC, change data capture.

One of the most important beneficial values has been reducing the impact on the source systems. For example, rather than having batch mode scenarios, it will be in real-time. It will provide minimal impact on the source system, thereby offering better performance to the application users. 

It is also helping the top management and decision-makers to make real-time decisions rather than waiting for one or two days to make a decision. It can tell them the information on the fly and they can decide based on what they have in front of them.

The change data capture is the most important feature of this product.

It offers a simple initial setup.

The scalability is excellent. 

It's stable.

Technical support is great. 

The connectivity with T24 core banking could be improved. This is the only downside I can see.

The solution could beef up its support. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years.

It's quite a stable, reliable product. I would rate it nine out of ten in terms of stability. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze.

We have found the product to be quite scalable. I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten. 

We're providing the solution to 20 to 25 customers in the region. 

Support is very reliable. They are responsive and knowledgeable. We are very satisfied with the level of assistance we receive. 

Positive

I've used a variety of Informatica solutions. 

The solution is straightforward to set up. I'd rate the simplicity of implementation nine out of ten. 

It only takes a couple of hours to deploy the solution. 

The deployment can be done by one person. However, it usually requires a team, depending on the size of the department.

We handled the deployment ourselves, in-house. 

There is an ROI. However, it's not tangible per se. It comes from giving users the ability to make better, smarter decisions, and that level of value is hard to quantify. I'd rate the ROI eight out of ten.

The pricing is moderate. I'd rate them five out of ten in terms of affordability. 

I am using the software, I'm a distributor of the software. 

I'm managing the distribution of Informatica technology, so I have many customers, and a lot of them are using the latest version. However, the version can vary from customer to customer.

Overall, I would recommend this product to others. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it for referral calls with Salesforce.

I would like the stability to improve.

I've used the solution for about a month.

The product is unstable, but I don't know if it's because of the browser or the tool itself.

There are about 10,000 users in my organization using the solution.

I didn't like the solution very much. It is the cloud version, so maybe that's why it's a little complicated to understand.

I rate Informatica PowerExchange a five out of ten.

We use PowerExchange for operational analytics. Some customers need us to collect data events in real time and push them into some central place like an operational hub or database and build insights on top of it. It gives us business insights into whatever is happening in the organization in real time.

We have around 20 to 30 engineers enabled on the real-time and PowerExchange products.

The main benefit of PowerExchange is its native real-time capabilities. Competing tools are counting on third-party packages or Oracle to offer real-time capabilities. However, Informatica has a native ability to scan the data on the file system level and capture the changes almost instantly when I push it to the consumers. The solution has a powerful built-in replication engine.

The major shortcoming of PowerExchange is high availability and failover. None of the versions we've used to date have had the out-of-the-box ability to enable failover and high-availability requirements. This is a significant challenge and risk.

PowerExchange's engine also lacks support for some data types. We are capturing data in a raw format, and there are also some data types like XML structure or big objects that are still hosted, so there are sometimes problems importing data. If it's not supported, you won't be able to build your scenario. Those are two main challenges that hopefully will be covered with any subsequent or new releases.

We've been using Informatica PowerExchange for seven or six years.

PowerExchange's performance is great. The stability is acceptable. Sometimes it fails because of a high resource load, but it's adequate. 

PowerExchange isn't flexible in terms of scalability. This is the nature of the product. For example, you cannot run multiple instances in high availability or active mode. 

Informatica support is good. They are helpful whenever we have a challenge that requires a custom fix.

We work with various solution vendors. For example, we use IBM Confluent for messaging and streaming, Tibco for application and data integration, etc.

I would compare PowerExchange to Oracle GoldenGate for real-time integration. GoldenGate consumes more resources from CPU and memory, but it's more stable, and the performance benchmark is higher.

The investment is bigger than Informatica. Informatica is moving to the cloud, so the investment required for real-time stuff and on-prem integration is not like before. I always compare to GoldenGate when choosing a technical solution. They're doing quite well in real-time integration.

Deploying PowerExchange is average. It's not an easy GUI-based setup, but it's not that complicated, either. It requires some effort, but I wouldn't say it's difficult. The installation took a few days, but full end-to-end implementation takes around a month.

It requires some maintenance because there is no automatic failover and high availability. If it crashes, a qualified engineer has to take care of the instance and turn it on again or manually intervene to start it on a new machine. 

We did it by ourselves. Our team has qualified engineers who can handle the implementation. Some issues required hotfixes from Informatica, and they were cooperating as much as they could.

The cost of PowerExchange is reasonable. It does not rely on complicated formulas or unrealistic equations. The pricing model is straightforward. There is one component, and real-time integration is included. Some other solutions require purchasing additional modules or third-party plugins for this capability.

At the same time, you can't just consider the cost of the license. You also need to dedicate a lot of resources and provide real-time support. It's a journey that must be assessed from different angles, including licensing, maintenance after deployment, operational headaches, etc.  You need to calculate the investment from different angles.

I rate PowerExchange seven out of 10. My advice to people considering PowerExchange is that you need to have a strong business case to justify investing in a real-time solution. 

It has to bring value to the organization because it's not a straightforward journey. Real-time implementation creates a lot of operational headaches. You have to take care of everything to run in real time. You have to run patches and ETLs every hour, every two hours, or every morning.

The solution can connect to different systems i.e. mainframe, IMS or AS/400 Legacy Systems.

The target system is Legacy Systems.

The solution could be made more user-friendly. The configurations are also quite difficult.

I have been using this solution for a few years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution depending on the environment which it is hosted.

The initial setup was a little difficult to configure.

An annual package license fee is required.

Our primary use case is for carrying out data integration and transformation from across different types of sources, different types of data stores and types of data. Our goal is to bring in data from diverse sources at a very fast pace and in very large volumes. It has to diversify and we have to strike a balance between the two. We partner with Informatica and I'm practice head of data analytics. 

We have brought in a lot of value to our customers leveraging this technology, large customers featuring 100 Millions of customers and beyond

A valuable feature is the way it utilizes a push down optimization. This teradata is a fantastic combination of BDO and I think is one of the features which has really been very prominent and very effective. You're using the Hadoop ecosystem to do a significant amount of necessary processing and you're using the internal transformation engine of Informatica to do that. 

Another feature of the solution is coupling up and seamlessly driving the underlying stock jobs or scoop jobs which are essentially executable within the Hadoop ecosystem. This provides a significant amount of control over the landscape and overall implementation. 

A further element is the underlying metadata and the monitoring and auditing components which Informatica provides. If you're running a complex next gen, powerful analytics and modern BI analytics platform or an ecosystem, then I think these three things along with the integration with external sources and external components is seamless in terms of an SMS engine or an email or even offering integration with WhatsApp.

Along with that, Informatica has been trying to spread its tentacles across stuff like Data Life Cycle Management and a lot of things in MDM, etc. Overall it's a rich toolkit and covers a very wide aspect of data management.

I think Informatica could be improved if they were to get into the data exploitation side of things. The value chain of exporting, reporting, visualizing, etc. That seems to be a blind spot for Informatica. If it were to diversify a little more, maybe with the reporting and visualization utility, it would be an add-on to PowerExchange. From a product strategy, Informatica seems to be getting fragmented by diversifying to various product lines and then going into the market. 

If I were to have any additional features, it would be diagnostics and reporting visualization.

I've been using this solution for more than a year. 

Informatica is possibly the world leader in this field and has been for the last several years.  It has features and functionalities which has made it the world leader for such a long period of time. It's a fully equipped and compatible solution with big data and it's able to drive and achieve the best of both worlds. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

The most valuable features are functionality and support.

I would like to have easier integration with cloud platforms.

I have been using PowerExchange for a few years.

This is a stable solution.

PowerExchange is easy to scale. We have about 20 users, who are mostly developers.

We are very happy with the technical support.

I have used a number of similar solutions including other Informatica products such as Enterprise Data Catalog and PowerCenter.

This product is easy to install and it can be done in a few hours.

Overall, it is good and I recommend it, but it still has gaps in terms of functionality.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Informatica PowerExchange for all of our ETL and data warehousing tasks. 

PowerExchange is something to be used in conjunction with Hadoop. It provides the native features and you can connect to the HDFS system.

The performance when doing data transformations is good.

The user interface and user experience are perfectly all right.

Informatica is very expensive in all aspects, so the pricing is something that could be improved.

We are using many other tools for data ingestion that are part of the Apache family, NiFi. When we see that we have some challenges we then use other tools.

We have been using PowerExchange for about two years.

This is a very stable solution and we use it on a daily basis.

This is a scalable solution. My team is the only one in the company who uses it daily, and there are approximately 10 people in the group.

We have not been in touch with Informatica technical support for this solution. However, we have dealt with them in relation to other products. I would rate them a seven or eight out of ten. Overall, they are pretty good.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup and deployment were very simple for us. It takes approximately a week's time to complete.

Our development team manages the environment.

The implementation was done primarily by our own team members. We did have a contracting company who helped us with this, and they formally interact with Informatica.

I would say that this is one of the best tools for any data ingestion mechanism. It has tremendous capabilities for data movement from one environment and multiple environments, and it can also be used for providing API services.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The connection layer Informatica uses to get the data from different sources can change. for traditional systems like databases, Oracle, for example, this is something that is managed by a protocol change. But there are two other key areas. One is integrating with legacy systems, mainframes, and for this one, there are some PowerExchange components. Another important one is getting data in real-time using CDC concepts. For these, there is PowerExchange for CDC. So, it's the three main use cases, legacy data integration, real-time integration, and traditional relational systems integration. PowerExchange is not about users. PowerExchange is something that you deploy on one system and it will give the data in real-time and feed it to multiple consumers. So, in the end, you don't need to have multiple users dealing with PowerExchange. It's one engine to deploy on a specific system and its core function would be to continuously feed the information from that system.

Mainstream integration and real-time integration are the best features.

Real-time has not been enhanced that much over the past few years. There have not been as many features added like they did before. When comparing Informatica PowerExchange to other competing technologies, like Oracle GoldenGate, GoldenGate is selling more features and adding more functions. It's why PowerExchange is still behind GoldenGate for certain functions. The higher availability and fill over capabilities is not that strong, so it needs to be enhanced more. It's not an issue, it's a limitation. Like some new data types that are not supported at all by PowerExchange, some new Oracle table types, like some IUT tables, for example. So, it's missing some features. GoldenGate, for example, is supporting everything in Oracle. It's not a good product in the end. However, Informatica is maybe supporting 80% of the things in Oracle systems. So, it is still missing some functions and some features still need to be supported. For example, if you have data stored like XML content and Oracle table, you cannot get it in real-time using PowerExchange. Supporting all the different data types which are still not supported by the product. Adding more flexibility and what I call administration utilities to manage the product in some graphical way, or some new easy way to use, enhancing the high availability and fill over capabilities of the products.

We have been working with Informatica PowerExchange for six years.

Stability is good, not bad, but it needs to be improved as well. For example, the higher availability and fill over capabilities is not that strong, so it needs to be enhanced more.

Informatica PowerExchange has what they call vertical scalability. For other integration techniques like integration that is deploying multiple parallel agents, and each agent would be collecting the data in parallel. So, you're doing horizontal scalability, adding more horizontal components, and all of them are running in parallel to process the same data. However, in PowerExchange, you can increase the processing power by adding more CPU or adding more resources to increase the capacity.

The support is very good. We always get immediate support. 

It's easy to set up, but it's not that flexible to maintain. It does not have easy interfaces to use, to manage the product. Setup was a little stressful, but the operational tasks and the developer tasks need to be improved as well. It took about a month to deploy.

We have our own team who built our facilities. So, we can manage it from our side without difficulty.

With Informatica PowerExchange it's all about capacity. If you are increasing the processing power, you need to buy additional licenses. So, for example, if you have traffic to be integrated and you need some integration layer or power to some CPU cores, or if you want to increase the capacity to handle additional load, you need to buy additional licenses to increase the platform processing power. So, it's about capacity.

You need to get prepared very well before using it. If you just go with the initial default configuration, it will end up with very poor performance. You need to spend some time getting the technical details and the technical workarounds for the product itself. You need some time to master the product. I would rate Informatica PowerExchange at a seven out of ten.

We work with Informatica PowerExchange for a very big trial for data warehousing and loading data for various systems. They work off transformation, creating a data warehouse. We also made part of the administration for that client. 

They wanted to load data continuously, so the jobs were run twenty-four hours per day because the volume of data was huge. The big transformations were made in a data warehouse for this project and it was very fitting to do this. So the transformation work called for Informatica PowerExchange. It was easy to work with this and very stable.

Integration with the largest number of databases and other systems would be important. We worked a lot with this ETL tool and in my opinion, it is the best on the market and what we missed in Informatica, compared with ETL. For example, each component in parallel with a configurable parallel made on the same machine or even on different machines. It's that kind of thing that I don't think Informatica PowerExchange can provide at this moment. In Informatica PowerExchange we ran jobs in parallel but not components with a parallel degree.

We had two or three training meetings at the time it was set up with Informatica and after that, we kept the link with them so in case we had any issue, we could ask them. The support was very good.

The setup was straightforward and not very complex.

I would rate Informatica PowerExchange at a nine on a scale of ten. I would recommend it. I would not rate it a ten because I have seen better tools.