PowerCenter to IICS Automation-Assisted Migration and Optimization
You have been a PowerCenter user for many years and have developed thousands or even tens of thousands of mappings, sessions, workflows, commands, and more. PowerCenter runs ETL jobs for you every day to populate and update your enterprise data warehouse. Fortunately, you don’t need to abandon your PowerCenter assets, processes, and institutional knowledge when you move to the cloud.
Three key benefits of a Migration Factory Approach
The Informatica Migration Factory is a tool set based on a patented technology for completing large-scale migrations to the cloud. The methodology used with this tool set encompasses all the people, processes, and tools that help an organization plan, execute and support workload migrations that blend the technical components of cloud migration with the business and human components. The result is:
Reduced Migration Time
Automated migration utilities
Migration Factory approach
Reduced Time-To-Market
Reduced Migration Cost
Reduced time = lower cost
Higher quality code = less rework
Fewer development resources
Reduced Migration Risk
Code generation = less errors
Predefined scope = less scope creep
Shorter duration = fewer scheduling challenges
Getting Maximum Benefit from your Migration to IICS
Using the power of the Migration Factory technology and associated methodologies it is possible to reliably analyze PowerCenter repositories to identify your mappings, sessions, and workflows. The Migration Factory is divided into two parts – Assess and Migrate. It provides an estimate of the work required to migrate and modernize your mappings and builds the foundation to develop a thorough migration plan. Then the Migration Factory can be applied to automatically convert most of your PowerCenter assets to IICS.
However, to get the most out of your migration investment there are other considerations that should not be overlooked. Often it is helpful to call on an experienced team of data engineering and management experts to be sure that the following steps are not overlooked to assure you are creating a scalable trusted modern data marketplace and platform for the ever-evolving demands of innovation using data science, machine learning and advanced analytics. This team should be tasked with:
Aligning IICS migration with overall data platform modernization efforts
- Cloud data platforms like Snowflake, data fabric, data governance
Consolidating and rationalizing data assets
- Often many PowerCenter assets aren’t being used or are redundant, so no need to migrate
- Identify a significant cost-savings opportunity
Incorporating a “lift/improve/shift” approach rather than a simple “lift/shift” migration to provide value-add to the migration
Identifying solutions or workarounds for use cases and assets ‘out of scope’ for automated migration
- Address those as Identified in the assessment
- Fill functionality gaps between PowerCenter and IICS
- Implement manual mappings where necessary
An example of the steps of our approach to these projects that we use successfully with our clients is shown below.
CTI is an Informatica Platinum consulting partner, certified to deliver PowerCenter to IICS migration services with the Informatica Migration Factory Assessment and Migration technology. We have established and maintain an Informatica Migration Factory Center of Excellence along with the accreditation of a team of consultants skilled in performing migrations.
Harry Kasparian is the Founder and CEO of CTI.