We performed a comparison between IBM Cloud Pak for Data and Informatica PowerCenter based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Integration solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features of IBM Cloud Pak for Data are the Watson Studio, where we can initiate more groups and write code. Additionally, Watson Machine Learning is available with many other services, such as APIs which you can plug the machine learning models."
"Cloud Pak's most valuable features are IBM MQ, IBM App Connect, IBM API Connect, and ISPF."
"The most valuable features are data virtualization and reporting."
"You can model the data there, connect the data models with the business processes and create data lineage processes."
"DataStage allows me to connect to different data sources."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine or ten out of ten."
"It is a scalable solution, and we have had no issues with its scalability in our company. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten."
"One of Cloud Pak's best features is the Watson Knowledge Catalog, which helps you implement data governance."
"Among all the solutions I have used, I found Informatica PowerCenter to be much more stable in terms of application."
"The setup is very simple."
"I found the map links, work links, and workflows valuable. They are important features."
"The most valuable features are the dynamic reading of the file metadata profile, and the ability to define business rules that are used to verify and validate the uploaded files."
"The most valuable aspects of Informatica PowerCenter are the many features, ease of use, and user-friendliness."
"It reduces a lot of legacy coding."
"The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the flow designer functionally. It is the best out of any ETL tool. Additionally, the solution is reliable and trustable in dealing with large data sources anytime. When we're using billions of data transactions, it's smooth."
"The ability to scale through partitions helped us to improve the performance."
"One thing that bugs me is how much infrastructure Cloud Pak requires for the initial deployment. It doesn't allow you to start small. The smallest permitted deployment is too big. It's a huge problem that prevents us from implementing the solution in many scenarios."
"The solution could have more connectors."
"The solution's user experience is an area that has room for improvement."
"The product must improve its performance."
"The product is trying to be more maturity in terms of connectors. That, I believe, is an area where Cloud Pak can improve."
"There is a solution that is part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data called Watson OpenScale. It is used to monitor the deployed models for the quality and fairness of the results. This is one area that needs a lot of improvement."
"The interface could improve because sometimes it becomes slow. Sometimes there is a delay between clicks when using the software, which can make the development process slow. It can take a few seconds to complete one action, and then a few more seconds to do the next one."
"One challenge I'm facing with IBM Cloud Pak for Data is native features have been decommissioned, such as XML input and output. Too many changes have been made, and my company has around one hundred thousand mappings, so my team has been putting more effort into alternative ways to do things. Another area for improvement in IBM Cloud Pak for Data is that it's more complicated to shift from on-premise to the cloud. Other vendors provide secure agents that easily connect with your existing setup. Still, with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, you have to perform connection migration steps, upgrade to the latest version, etc., which makes it more complicated, especially as my company has XML-based mappings. Still, the XML input and output capabilities of IBM Cloud Pak for Data have been discontinued, so I'd like IBM to bring that back."
"PowerCenter could be improved by having more big data components. Normally, we prefer Informatica as a relational database, but nowadays, companies are trying to understand and use big data components. I think it would be useful if we had more chances to create a hub ecosystem because customers try to use some data integration tasks by SQL, Spark and Spark codes, and Scala, but at the end of the day, the company will understand that we need to trace all the steps. An ETL tool is a must for that company, if we're talking about the regulated industries like finance, telcos, etc. If Informatica's biggest ecosystems feature were okay, I would prefer to use it."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve on the documentation for the implementation. The documents provided are not very good for a new user."
"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."
"The performance of Informatica PowerCenter could improve."
"We had to take on a large volume of data from the legacy Sybase system. This was taking a very long time, i.e., more than a day. We were trying to improve it with partitions to gpload, but we were told that we can't go more than four partitions."
"The initial setup is not straightforward. You need expertise to do it."
"Informatica are very rigid when it comes to cloud migrations which discourages customers in moving their solution to the cloud."
"The solution can improve by providing more connectivity by having native ODBC or JDBC connections available. It will be easier and more people could start using it."
IBM Cloud Pak for Data is ranked 17th in Data Integration with 11 reviews while Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews. IBM Cloud Pak for Data is rated 8.0, while Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Cloud Pak for Data writes "A scalable data analytics and digital transformation tool that provides useful features and integrations". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Informatica PowerCenter writes "Stable, provides good support, and integrating it with other systems is very fast, but its pricing is expensive". IBM Cloud Pak for Data is most compared with IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Azure Data Factory, Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Palantir Foundry and Talend Data Fabric, whereas Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, Databricks and AWS Glue. See our IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. Informatica PowerCenter report.
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