The Informatica® Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC) is designed to help businesses efficiently handle the complex challenges of dispersed and fragmented data to innovate with their data on virtually any platform, any cloud, multi-cloud and multi-hybrid.
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UiPath Integration Service
Score 5.0 out of 10
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UiPath Integration Service (including technology from Cloud Elements, following UiPath's acquisition of the company in 2021) is a cloud API integration service that uses cooperative
apps to connect an organization’s customers, partners and employees to the
cloud services they use. The vendor says that by using their pre-built
elements, their one-to-many approach connects applications with services, each
through a single API. The organization’s app can instantly share data with
other applications…
Informatica Cloud is an excellent tool for freeing up trapped data in your internal systems and exporting it into a cloud data warehouse or SQL container. Especially if you have any internal SQL query generators that allow you to copy and paste into the Source setup. For example, we use Business Objects internally, and you can build out the query you need inside the firewall with that, then paste it into the query within Informatica Cloud while establishing the Source connection. This way you are not writing all your source parameters by hand, cutting new jobs setup time by 50%. Where Cloud will not suit you well is if you need significant visibility to the health of the system from a tracking, monitoring or error handling standpoint. Cloud will tell you it failed, maybe give you an example error, but has no further troubleshooting or diagnostic assistance to offer.
Informatica Cloud is a great tool for automating data imports. Raw data files can be scheduled to run at designated times, and using pre-built mappings ensures that the data goes into the system accurately each time.
It is also a great tool for converting raw data into specific formatting. For example, configuring the mapping so that the first letter of a first, middle or last name is always capitalized.
Additionally, Informatica Cloud has a built-in field-matching tool so that records that already exist are updated rather than having duplicates created.
I've never had trouble getting into contact with Informatica's support for technical help. I give it a nine because it does pretty well for mid to enterprise-scale workflows.
Having used SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in the past, Informatica Cloud was a huge-step up in functionality, usability and performance. Hands-down, Informatica Cloud is a much more robust product overall. While SSIS is well-suited for specific instances (i.e. SQL Server-specific implementations), Informatica Cloud is a much better product as an overall integration/transformation tool.
MuleSoft is also a similar product to Cloud Elements, but is not available as an option in this form.
Workato and MuleSoft are competing cloud API connector platforms that perform a similar function to Cloud Elements. We chose Cloud Elements over them because CE provided a more robust path to unifying the behavior of connected systems.
Zapier is a workflow automation tool that I feel draws erroneous comparison to Cloud Elements that I need to highlight. Workflow automation tools (Zapier, IFTTT, Microsoft Flow) do provide multiple integrations, but for simplistic scenarios where only a handful of explicitly described steps need accomplished. Cloud Elements is a platform for developers to deliver faster and with higher reliability than making integrations one-by-one in complex systems that solve demanding problems.
Getting data out of various systems such as Salesforce.com or FTP and consolidating it into tables in one central database.
Having the ability to run data transformation tasks (the equivalent of batch jobs in SF or stored procedures in SQL) on a schedule without consuming those resources on the target or source systems.
We are able to build integrations in HALF the time we could build them from scratch.
They allow our development team to spend more hours focused on developing our core product, not connections to other products.
Their large catalog of services to connect to allows us to spend much less time researching other platform integration endpoints and increases our R&D speed a considerable amount.
