Informatica, being a software development company offers different products for data integration. The products that are offered solves the purpose of data masking, ETL, data virtualization, data quality, master management of data, data replication and many other things. The data integration tool of Informatica is the most widely used tools and commonly it is referred to as the Informatica Tool for ETL. The tool is generally used for the integration of data. It not only provides the ability to connect, but also allows to fetch data from the different heterogeneous sources and also helps to process data. With its help, one can connect to the different server databases, integrating the data into another system.

Overview of Informatica 

The latest version that is available for the Informatica Power Center is the 9.6.0. While, the different editions for the same are:

     Standard Edition

     Premium Edition

     Standard Edition

It is generally used by the companies that are shifting to a new system of the database from the existing ones. This migration is easily performed by Informatica. The organizations that are looking forward to set up their own data warehouse, can be helped by the ETL tool as it will help in moving the data to the warehouse from the production system. Data can be integrated from different heterogeneous systems with the tool of Informatica. It can also be used as a tool for data cleansing.

Major Features of  Informatica 10

In the modern market, Informatica is much better than all of its competitors as it offers a variety of products along with their different editions. This helps the user in understanding his requirement and get a specific edition, which will furnish all his needs. In the listing of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Informatica is known to be the product leader in data integration. Being available on all the prevalent platforms, it offers the cloud based services so that the different industries can make use of this tool along with a minimal setup. Some of the major features of Informatica are:

     Real time data integration

     Integration of Web services

     B2B or Business to Business data integration

     Management of Master Data

     Big Data edition

     Social Media Connectors

     Salesforce

According to Forbes, Informatica is equal to the next Microsoft. This information is enough to reflect the dominant position of Informatica over its other competitors.

 Advantages of Informatica

The issue of using Informatica is raised whenever companies are having an available data system and being at the backend, certain operations on data are to be performed. These operations can involve modification of data, cleaning of data etc., based on a definite set of rules or loading bulk data from a single system to another one. Informatica offers:

     Operations on data on row levels

     Integration of data from multiple structures

     Systems that are semi structured or unstructured

     Scheduling of the data operation

     Metadata which preserves the data operations and the process about the same.

Disadvantages of Informatica

Some of the spheres where Informatica is weak are:

     Recovering of failed sessions midway, may not be possible.

     Lack of Sorting in the Monitor’s Workflow

     Moving objects from a single folder to another

     Importing the XML Export Files

     Mappings and the Development of the Workflows.

Organizations using Informatica

The popular clients of Informatica are Allianz, U.S. Air Force, ING, Samsung, Fannie Mae etc. Recently EnterpriseWorx has partnered with Informatica in order to deliver the solutions of data management. With the help of such organizations, Informatica can provide their customers with the solutions of data integration which helps them in maximizing their own data assets besides increasing their competitive advantage.

Being a major data integration tool, it has also got different client tools. But for the beginners, there are three tools that are the most important. They are Informatica Powercenter Designer, Workflow Manager and Workflow Monitor. The tools help in building the mappings so that the movement of transformed data from the source to the targets are specified.  The source definitions are created along with the target definitions. The transformations are also created for building the mappings. The multiple tools that are available can be worked together and working in the multiple folders is also possible at the same time. The windows helps in viewing the folders and tasks. Configuration of fonts and background colors can also be performed. For every designer tool, one can configure the needed settings for the specific tool.  Informatics has helped a lot of companies and due to the advantages it provide, more small and big enterprises are adopting its tool. People seeking jobs in this sphere needs proper training in the same.