Power Center 7 from Informatica

PowerCenter 7 from Informatica An extract from the Bloor Research Data Quality report Informatica PowerCenter 7 Informatica PowerCenter 7 Fast facts Informatica PowerCenter 7 consists of the traditional data movement tools for which Informatica is well known (PowerCenter itself; PowerCenterRT, which provides real-time capabilities; and PowerMart, which is a depart- mental version of PowerCenter), together with a new data profiling capa- bility that extends PowerCenter by offering data discovery and analysis. In addition, a limited use license of Informatica PowerAnalyzer, the company’s business intelligence product, is bundled with PowerCenter 7 to provide quality reporting and it is also used for metadata analysis. While not a part of PowerCenter 7 it is also worth noting the availability of SuperGlue, which Informatica introduced in summer 2003 as a stand-alone product. This is an implementation of the OMG’s Common Warehouse Metamodel standard and it provides the ability to assemble, relate and visu- alise metadata from various independent metadata repositories. Informatica PowerAnalyzer is also available to enhance visualisation in conjunction with SuperGlue. The other major features of release 7 are substantial additional perform- ance capabilities (in particular, support for on-demand, grid computing), extended security capabilities, support for Web services, new facilities for supporting remote and team-based development, and the ability to capture incremental changes in source data as a further approach in addition to the existing batch and real-time capabilities. An additional focus in this release is on data stewardship, built on its data profiling capabilities and the facili- ties provided by SuperGlue for monitoring and assessing data quality, plus a partnership with Firstlogic for provision of that company’s Information Quality Suite for data cleansing and matching. Key findings In the opinion of Bloor Research the following represent the key facts of which prospective users should be aware: • As far as we know, PowerCenter is the only product in its class that can be used to design the target database schema. This has an important consequence for the data movement process itself because it means that the system has detailed and ongoing knowledge of the target da- tabase. Informatica has leveraged this information with its dependency analysis facility (which we especially like) that allows you to examine the effects of any change. These facilities have been enhanced in Power- Center 7 so that you can visually inspect the lineage of a field through a data flow, and control and execute the ripple of a change going forward in that flow. © Bloor Research 2004 Page 1 Data Quality • We are pleased to see the introduction of change data capture as an alternative to batch and real-time data capture. By no means all companies require true real-time capabilities and, for those that don’t, change data capture can provide much more timely information with much better performance, but without the overhead of a real-time en- gine. Note, in particular, that there are many legacy environments that currently have no way of doing this. • We particularly like the analytic workflow capability of Informatica PowerAnalyzer, though we would prefer it to have a graphical icon- based interface. We understand that Informatica intends to implement this in a future release. This analytic capability allows you to define a path through an analysis or query so that even the inexperienced can quickly perform root cause analysis. In this release, that capability has been extended to provide guidance through data profiling. Note, how- ever, that an additional licence for PowerAnalyzer will be required if you want to use it beyond metadata analysis and quality reporting. • For a first release, the data profiling capability in Informatica Power- Center is quite impressive. The only major feature that it currently lacks is the ability to automatically identify redundant columns. Note that we do not expect to see the product sold simply for this purpose: data pro- filing is seen by Informatica as an extension to discovery prior to data extraction and, indeed, in PowerCenter 7 the resulting profile rules can be directly used downstream to speed the development of data trans- formations. • We like SuperGlue. It is often the case that when companies introduce stand-alone products that can integrate with their other products, the possibilities of the former are outweighed by the latter. However, we felt from the start that SuperGlue was sufficiently robust to be of interest to companies that are not otherwise Informatica users. We understand from Informatica that this is, indeed, proving to be the case. The bottom line Release 7 is the latest generation of PowerCenter and it has some notable additional features in this release, not least of which is the new data profil- ing capabilities. The close integration with data movement (to all intents and purposes it is a single product) is a significant advantage compared to some competitive approaches. The other most important enhancements are those that pertain to performance. Informatica now feels that it has the highest performing data movement engine on the market: something that it concedes has not been the case for the last few years. If it can demonstrate this fact, then Informatica should be able to increase its share of a market in which it is already a dominant player. Page 2 © Bloor Research 2004 Informatica PowerCenter 7 Vendor Information Background information Informatica was founded in 1993 as a services company specialising in helping its customers to migrate to a client/server environment. It was not until 1996 that it introduced its first product, Informatica PowerMart, which was followed by Informatica PowerCenter in 1998. In 1999 the company acquired Influence Software, an organisation that focused on analytical applications and these were launched as Informatica Applications in 2000. This represented a significant extension to Informatica’s capabilities and led to the introduction of the Informatica Warehouse (as a packaged environment supporting the applications) and Informatica Power- Analyzer, which was originally developed as a front-end to the analytic applica- tions. However, once the strength of Informatica PowerAnalyzer was realised, the company introduced this as a stand-alone business intelligence product. The analytical applications and the warehouse that supported them are no longer being developed by Informatica and they are now marketed via third party System Integrator organisations. However, Informatica PowerAnalyzer remains a core component of the company’s product suite, and has now been embedded into the data integration platform to provide both metadata reporting and data profiling, in addition to being used as an extension for metadata management in SuperGlue. In addition, the company has recently acquired Striva, a specialist in providing data connection and batch, change data capture and real-time data movement to/from legacy and mainframe data sources, whose technology was previously OEM’d for use in Informati- ca’s PowerConnect products.