Informatica PowerExchange Reviews

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.

We use PowerExchange to track data from the CDC, from sources like Oracle, DB2 or SQL Servers. That is pretty much what this tool is designed for and that's exactly what we use it for.

Overall, it's a good tool. It's currently number one on the market. It pretty much has all the necessary capabilities to pull the incremental data from the source system, technically speaking.

Overall, I am pretty satisfied.

The one place where it could be improved is definitely pricing. That's a very big problem. It depends product to product, but pricing is an issue. They have their own way of pricing it. I'm coming from a technical background, so I don't get myself involved much in pricing.

Additionally, I definitely would love to have a PowerExchange tool without having to connect to the call center, to just to load the data directly into the respective target components. This would be very preferable. 

All in all, they already have a good monitoring tool. It would be better if they could add the feature where we could avoid the call center feed and use PowerExchange directly to our target databases.

I've been working with Informatica for the last 18 years.

Their technical support is good. They have a good system of responding back to queries. Some queries gets resolved immediately and some queries take time to get resolved, but they do get resolved.

PowerExchange is a very good tool to work with. It has the capabilities and compared to other tools, this tool has more features. It collaborates with the call center on more features, so definitely, it's a good tool to work with.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give it an eight.

I would definitely recommend Informatica PowerExchange.

We primarily use the solution for getting the data from the source and loading it into the warehouse by performing data transformation.

We can now update data from several source files from both a database or java source.

The data transformation is the solution's most valuable feature.

The solution needs better integration with other tools. 

The solution needs to be more user-friendly. Right now, a first time user needs to get training before they can use the solution.

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We can include many other sources and load it into the table. The solution can be scaled to various other transformations. We have 100-200 people using the solution currently. We do not plan to increase usage at this time.

We haven't had a reason to reach out to technical support yet.

The initial setup has a moderate amount of difficulty. It's not straightforward, but it's not too complex. Our deployment was a scheduled deployment. We planned it so that it happened incrementally.

We had a team that was specialized in Informatica handle the implementation.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher if it was more user-friendly and had better integration with other tools.