Over the last several years out-of-box Data integration solutions have become a crucial need for IT departments that run hetrogeneous applications. With the evolution of hosted applications IT departments are now required to integrate with outside providers. While integration with an hosted application is not that simple. Many providers in this space such as OpenAir, NetSuite, and SalesForce.com have developed WebServices to help ease this effort.
Traditionally realtime integration space had been dominated by companies such as TIBCO, Vitria, CrossWorlds, Web Methods etc. while Informatica had been used in Data Warehousing implementations extensively??¦ primarily as an ETL tool.
Informatica lately has started positioing itself as a realtime integrator and is approching the data integration space more holistically..and is starting to get success.
Recently Informatica released version 8.1.1 of Powercenter.Some of the latest additions to the product include “Lookups”, “SQL Tranformations”, “Joiners” etc.
Even if I have liked the power of Informatica as a real time integration engine, I would suggest that you test its transformation, session management & massive SQL manupilation capabalities specific to your usecases..in other words test it to with your specific business needs. Highly recommend a POC approach.
I have personally not seen Informatica’s Real Time “Change Data Capture” feature myself, but have heard good things about it.