PowerCenter Informatica

Traditionally seen as the market leader

Informatica’s PowerCenter is traditionally seen as the market leader together with IBM’s Information Server. Informatica is a pure data integration company concentrating on various kinds of data integration like consolidation, synchronization, migration and data warehousing. Their product is constantly being enhanced both by their own developments and by technology they acquire by buying other software companies.

Under more and more pressure

As probably the largest player in the ETL/Data Integration marketplace Informatica are under more and more pressure from both the database suppliers and the BI suppliers in the data warehousing business, which is good at least for their customers who benefit from the product improvements and the new features which they add to stay competitive. This very broad range of functionality makes them difficult to compare to other products, they have so much functionality that we question if it is all necessary.

Reusability

This gives them a high rating on functionality, but their product appears to have been designed for the expert IT user making it difficult to use for less IT oriented people. PowerCenter is an engine-based ETL tool that supports all of the tasks that are essential for data integration. It was one of the first ETL tools to recognize that reusability is an important issue, to ensure, for example, that the definition of product prices is the same throughout the ETL process. This is supported by letting the developer define maplets, reusable components.

Informatica is realizing its new conceptual framework called “intelligent data platform”. The reference architecture will be generally available end of 2014 / start of 2015.

For more information: informatica.com.