and not PowerCenter—for Your Modern, Cloud-Native Analytics Environment

Digital transformation changes expectations: better service, faster delivery, with less cost. Businesses must transform to stay relevant, and data holds the answers.

As popular as PowerCenter is, it is not optimized to meet modern cloud data integration requirements. An interim solution, such as re-pointing PowerCenter to the cloud, may seem to be an easy fix. However, this scenario comes with its challenges, including:

• Migration project cost overruns and higher production costs
• Difficulty in optimizing for performance and cost efficiency
• Longer development times, lower productivity, and delays in time to value
• Complex, labor-intensive processes to change code and increased maintenance overhead
• Higher risk, more workarounds, more upgrades, and brittle integration

As part of migrating legacy databases and on-premises data warehouses to the cloud, overall data management should be designed to meet increased demands for efficiency, performance and lower administrative, operational, and infrastructure costs. However, as popular as PowerCenter is, it is not optimized for the cloud.

It makes sense that organizations planning to modernize their on-premises data warehouses to next-generation cloud data warehouses (CDW) like Snowflake, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery should also modernize their data management platform.

That’s why we recommend migrating from PowerCenter to Informatica’s cloud-native data management platform: Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS). There are a host of reasons why you want a cloud-native data management platform like IICS.

1. In the on-premises world, major upgrades are a fact of life that are time-consuming, expensive, and risky. IICS eliminates these upgrades for organizations because Informatica performs them as new software releases become available.
   
   
2. As a cloud-native platform, IICS makes it easy for organizations to explore and try new capabilities and services as Informatica introduces them, rather than requiring them to install new software versions in their on-premises environments.
   
   
3. It’s much easier to democratize data integration tasks to a broader range of users in a cloud-native platform like IICS compared to an on-premises software environment like PowerCenter.
   
   
4. Some specific cloud data integration use cases are much better suited to IICS. For example, you may want to stage data from an Oracle on-premises database to a landing layer in Snowflake or an Amazon S3 bucket in AWS. In PowerCenter, you would run a classical extract, transform, load (ETL) mapping from Oracle to Snowflake with an engine processing it one record at a time. However, this is very inefficient.

However, with IICS, you would use a modern data warehouse practice of bulk ingesting data as-is into the landing layer. You would then apply transformation and curation logic afterward. The result: a three times faster load due to mass ingestion efficiencies and faster processing with push-down optimization (PDO), leveraging the native system commands and limiting data movement.

These are just some examples of why a cloud-native platform like IICS has distinct advantages over PowerCenter.

Harry Kasparian is the CEO and Founder of CTI.