IBM DataStage vs. Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud

Excellent Cloud data mapping tool and easy creating multiple project data analytics in real-time and the report distribution are excellent via this IBM product. Easy tool to provide data visualization and the integration is effective and helpful to migrating huge amounts of data across other platforms and different websites insights gathering.

Incentivized

Informatica Cloud is an excellent tool for freeing up trapped data in your internal systems and exporting it into a cloud data warehouse or SQL container. Especially if you have any internal SQL query generators that allow you to copy and paste into the Source setup. For example, we use Business Objects internally, and you can build out the query you need inside the firewall with that, then paste it into the query within Informatica Cloud while establishing the Source connection. This way you are not writing all your source parameters by hand, cutting new jobs setup time by 50%. Where Cloud will not suit you well is if you need significant visibility to the health of the system from a tracking, monitoring or error handling standpoint. Cloud will tell you it failed, maybe give you an example error, but has no further troubleshooting or diagnostic assistance to offer.

Incentivized

• Very reliable in handling data extraction, data transformation and loading
• Flexibility in connecting to different type of databases, relational or non-relational
• Great features such as parallel processing, hash handling, etc.
• You can also take advantage of its FTP functions, and scheduling features if you need to.

Incentivized

• Informatica Cloud is a great tool for automating data imports. Raw data files can be scheduled to run at designated times, and using pre-built mappings ensures that the data goes into the system accurately each time.
• It is also a great tool for converting raw data into specific formatting. For example, configuring the mapping so that the first letter of a first, middle or last name is always capitalized.
• Additionally, Informatica Cloud has a built-in field-matching tool so that records that already exist are updated rather than having duplicates created.

Incentivized

• You must understand and know the algorithms, since the wrong use of them generates more time in processing.
• Metadata. You need to develop with connectors, and taking all the Metadata from the menu, all the data that you complete manually, you can't track it.

Incentivized

• The User Interface can be a bit difficult to get in initial stages.
• Error messages are hard to understand which sometimes takes a lot of time for the resolution
• Cannot Implement complex SQL queries which should be fixed in future release.

Incentivized

Because it is a flexible tool that can manage many flows and create a strong solution with a interesting use of variables. Easy to scale up as you can copy jobs arleady build and modify them. SQL queries allow to be fast in development and have the pushdown feature, but you loose a little of user friendly look. Metadata management is not strong as a visual feature, but can be determine by job codes.

Incentivized

It could load thousands of records in seconds. But in the Parallel version, you need to understand how to particionate the data. If you use the algorithms erroneously, or the functionalities that it gives for the parsing of data, the performance can fall drastically, even with few records. It is necessary to have people with experience to be able to determine which algorithm to use and understand why.

Incentivized

IBM offers different levels of support but in my experience being and IBM shop helps to get direct support from more knowledgeable technicians from IBM. Not sure on the cost of having this kind of support, but I know there's also general support and community blogs and websites on the Internet make it easy to troubleshoot issues whenever there's need for that.

Incentivized

I've never had trouble getting into contact with Informatica's support for technical help. I give it a nine because it does pretty well for mid to enterprise-scale workflows.

Incentivized

No, it wasn’t my decision to use such an ETL product. I’m just the administrator at this point. I’ve heard there are other products there that are even on cloud support. That is much easier to use, more agile, and user-friendly. That doesn’t have that barrier from user to administrator to the developer standpoint.

Having used SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in the past, Informatica Cloud was a huge-step up in functionality, usability and performance. Hands-down, Informatica Cloud is a much more robust product overall. While SSIS is well-suited for specific instances (i.e. SQL Server-specific implementations), Informatica Cloud is a much better product as an overall integration/transformation tool.

Incentivized

• Not directly related to ROI or cost figures. Only comment here is that IBM tools tend to be more costly than average ETL tools, but it depends on if the company is an IBM shop.
• One positive aspect is the company has had not a need to switch ETL tool for years.
• Upgrading to newer versions of the tool brings flexibility in the tool and up-to-date features in relation to other applications.

Incentivized

• A positive impact is bringing more projects.
• Getting data out of various systems such as Salesforce.com or FTP and consolidating it into tables in one central database.
• Having the ability to run data transformation tasks (the equivalent of batch jobs in SF or stored procedures in SQL) on a schedule without consuming those resources on the target or source systems.

Incentivized