Survey Report Informatica PowerCenter Express Right-Sized Data Integration for the Smaller Project 1
Introduction The business department, smaller organization, and independent developer have been severely underserved with self-service data integration software products for sometime. This is a big oversight as these smaller data integration projects are often the beginning of creating new business insight, stimulating new creative ideas, and identifying new market opportunities. Smaller data integration projects are often a mere blip on IT s radar. And if they do make it on the radar screen, the smaller project is always going to lose to the larger project for resources and scheduling. So what is a smaller data integration project supposed to do? Typically, the path has been to manually hand-code the data integration requirement, but we all know the pitfalls with that approach. Hand-coding doesn t scale, it s difficult to troubleshoot, it s very inconsistent, difficult to maintain, and there is never enough time to meet the deadlines. Therefore, providing right-sized tools and capabilities to the right users is an important factor to the agility and differentiation of a company, so they can be self-sufficient and innovative with smaller data integration projects.
Survey Report The Informatica PowerCenter Express survey report captures the initial experiences and insights of PowerCenter Express users. During the survey a number of participants volunteered testimonials and a few of these are featured throughout the report. At the end of the report a brief overview of PowerCenter Express and resource links are provided. And finally, a big thanks to all of the PowerCenter Express users who downloaded the software product from the Informatica Marketplace and participated in this survey. 9 out of 10 Recommend PowerCenter Express
Why PowerCenter Express? With any new software product the first question often asked is why did someone download it and how are they going to use it? 56% Testing, Prototyping and Proof of Concept One common scenario we see is where an organization wants to have a separate sandbox for a new initiative or project. Development done with PowerCenter Express is easily transitioned to the Informatica PowerCenter Enterprise or Informatica Cloud environments. This transition allows new ideas to be evaluated freely without any negative production impact, and with added assurance of ease of integration into daily business operations. Another popular scenario is where a business department, smaller organization, or individual user is looking for a low-cost data integration product with little set up time.
Data Source Types The most common data source types ingested by users include flat files and relational databases. 87% Ingest Flat Files With out-of-the-box support for social media, PowerCenter Express can combine customer data from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and integrate them with traditional data sources. Although the results show the use of social media data sources as low, there is expectation that this percentage will rise significantly over time as users grow their methods of analyzing data sources. In order to understand how social media is influencing your customers purchase behavior, you need to integrate it with your traditional data sources so you have the complete picture even for smaller projects.
Number of Data Sources Users who have smaller projects tend to have fewer data sources to integrate, although the data they are processing can be just as important or critical to them as a large data integration project. 83% Use 1-5 Data Sources Over time businesses will look to leverage a product like PowerCenter Express in more and innovative ways, and the smaller project will grow to incorporate more and more data sources. PowerCenter Express development is portable across Informatica data integration products and the Informatica Platform which includes Vibe, the world s first and only embeddable virtual data machine. Vibe abstracts the development from the deployment. Developers can be unlocked from a specific deployment architecture and allowed to focus on integration logic with confidence it can be deployed on a variety of environments, including on premise, Cloud, or Hadoop.
Data Records Processed Daily We asked PowerCenter Express users how many data records they were processing on an average daily basis. 77% Average 200,000 Records or Less This is typical for the use cases we see for PowerCenter Express and is ideal for the smaller project or proof of concept. Interestingly, 23% of the respondents are using PowerCenter Express to process more than 200,000 data records on a daily basis. That s potentially over 73,000,000 data records being processed on average, per year, with one instance of PowerCenter Express. As a company s ability to capture more data improves and the desire to ingest more data increases, every organization will grow its taste for processing larger volumes of data to gain better business insight -- from small acorns we grow tall trees.
Business Use Cases IT organizations provide data integration services to the business departments they support, but are often challenged to meet the desired deadlines for smaller projects. 47% Internal IT Usage With PowerCenter Express, IT has more options. Developers can use fewer computing resources to test, validate, or prototype data integration projects PowerCenter Express allows the department to be self-sufficient and develop smaller data integration projects themselves Logic for the corporate production environment can be optimized by departmental development without having to recode. These options provide an accelerated path to meeting desired deadlines. Business departments can be empowered to be selfsufficient and focus on data integration logic, while IT can focus on scalability and reliability. Clearly, a win-win scenario for both teams.
Project Acceleration Survey respondents were asked to estimate how much they accelerated their projects by using PowerCenter Express. 60% Accelerated Projects by >25% A 25% project improvement can be significant to achieving faster time to results. It can allow developers to reiterate requirements quicker, create better end results, and increase the lifetime impact of a project. Some productivity features provided by PowerCenter Express include: A graphical drag-n-drop interface Embedded training videos Quick start templates Cheat sheets These features allow developers to quickly create data integration requirements, share development across new projects, and reuse existing development.
Differentiated Capabilities Survey respondents were asked to rate five PowerCenter Express capabilities from a range of Not-Differentiated to Highly- Differentiated versus similar products. Consistently Rated Differentiated and Above Downloadable software is expected to install quickly -- PowerCenter Express can be downloaded and installed in 10 minutes. In addition to ease of use, performance, and overall value, a key feature of PowerCenter Express is that profiling is included. Including profiling in a data integration software product creates high-value because developers can profile data sources from the same interface without requiring an additional software product. Profiling data sources is where every data integration project should start big or small.
PowerCenter Express Personal Professional PowerCenter Express is an entry-level data integration software product that can start small, run in a small footprint, includes a number of out-of-the-box features, and can grow to support large volumes of data. Data Integration Design & Development Edition Yes Edition Yes Business departments, smaller organizations, and independent developers now have a right-sized data integration software product that allows them to take more control of their destiny. PowerCenter Express Personal Edition is designed for the single user and smaller projects that have lower volumes of data to process. It s made freely available to everyone. PowerCenter Express Professional Edition can process an unlimited amount of data, supports up to 5 developers sharing the same system resources, and has an annual user subscription. Data Profiling Column Profiling Column Profiling Number of Users 1 5 Users Per Server Shared Repository Number of rows 250K Unlimited Per Day Simultaneous Jobs 1 1 Resource Links Connectivity Relational, FF, XML, Relational, FF, XML, Unstructured, Social Media Unstructured, Social Media Download PowerCenter Express PowerCenter Express On-Demand Training PowerCenter Enterprise Editions Informatica Cloud Informatica Vibe, Virtual Data Machine Central Management Yes Yes & Monitoring Message Boards & Support Message Boards 1:1 Web Based Price Free $8k Per User, Per Year