PowerCenter Standard Edition

High-Performance Data Integration Platform

Informatica PowerCenter is a unified enterprise data integration platform for accessing, discovering, and integrating data from virtually any business system, in any format. PowerCenter Standard Edition (SE) is a highly available and scalable enterprise data integration platform that consists of:

• A high-performance data integration server
• A global metadata infrastructure
• Visual tools for development and centralized administration

Key Features

Universal Data Access

• Implement a single approach to accessing data in a wide variety of systems and formats
• Incorporate data including structured, unstructured, semi-structured, relational, mainframe, file, standards-based, and message queues through PowerCenter, complemented by the entire suite of PowerExchange products

Data Integration Services

• Access, transform, and deliver data across the enterprise without generating code or having to hand-code data integration procedures
• Take advantage of the server’s flexibility and high-performance processing capabilities to deliver data at any latency
• Leverage this platform’s scalability to support large volumes of data over multiple concurrent sessions

Global Metadata Services

• Store and manage data models, transformations, workflows, and other artifacts to easily define, modify, and reuse data integration procedures
• Achieve optimal execution with a global metadata infrastructure that combines metadata-driven data integration logic with a high-performance transformation engine

Data Smart Parallelism

• Execute optimal parallel sessions by dividing data processing into subsets which run in parallel and are spread among available CPUs in a multi-processor system
• Leverage visual controls for a wide range of partition schemes
• Achieve high performance and unlimited linear scalability supported by pipeline and data partitioning parallelism

Object-Based, Visual Development Environment

• Maximize developer productivity with a codeless, object-oriented development environment
• Use built-in parallel processing transformations, a robust expression language, and extensible interfaces in addition to a visual debugger

Robust, Rich Transformation Objects

• Create and extend context-independent, reusable integration objects from a comprehensive transformation library that provides field, set-based, and multi-step transformation objects
• Easily expand the existing set of pre-defined expressions and create user-defined functions with the help of an extensive expression library

Visual Debugger and Error Handling

• Speed iterative development with robust debugging
• Minimize error recovery logic for design and runtime environments

Integration Workflow

• Manage and track the complex flow of data across transactional systems, databases, and other data sources through visual tools
• Schedule and execute data integration processes unobtrusively to business operations, with a built-in, time- or event-based scheduler enabling automated, “lights-out” operation

Connectivity Through Web Services

• Access data, metadata, and PowerCenter workflows within your service-oriented architecture (SOA) stack through Web services protocols including XML, WSDL, and SOAP
• Deliver data to consuming applications in the correct form, with the appropriate semantics, through the PowerCenter Web service hub

Global Administration Console

• Centralize all administrative, operational, and service monitoring tasks in a Web-based console designed for distributed environments

Reusable Mapping Templates

• Design business/transformation logic as reusable templates in a modeling tool, such as Visio
• Automatically generate PowerCenter mappings to reduce repetitive tasks 

New and Enhanced in PowerCenter 8.5

Improved Unified Administration

• Simplify administration of users, groups, privileges and roles across PowerCenter repositories
• Reduce IT costs by simplifying user and security management

Enhanced LDAP Integration

• Support secure authentication of users and groups through an Enterprise Directory System
• Choose to use either PowerCenter or LDAP for authentication

Enterprise-Grade Security

• Ensure security, particularly across large, globally distributed teams, with granular privileges and flexible permissions management
• Limit PowerCenter users’ access to only the minimal functionality and data they need, reducing the risk of potential security breaches
• Simplify the administration of privileges through customizable role-based security

Operating System Profiles

• Ensure secure access to file system resources by PowerCenter workflows executed by different departments and users
• Track and monitor usage by specific groups within a shared environment, such as an ICC
• Facilitate departmental chargebacks

Simplified Web Services Development and Deployment

• Use a built-in WSDL editor and Web services testing tool to reduce delivery time
• Lower administrative overhead with centralized monitoring and reporting capabilities from within the PowerCenter Administration Console

Dynamically Scalable Data Services

• Ensure that Web services deployments can automatically scale to support a large number of concurrent workloads, typical in a shared services ICC environment
• Deploy multiple Web service hubs for additional scalability

Extended Variables and Parameterization

• Take advantage of flexible access to design and runtime metadata within the data mapping, session, and workflow logic
• Improve reusability and developer productivity

Pre-Defined Wizards and Templates

• Reduce repetitive tasks with more pre-defined wizards and templates for common data integration scenarios, such as slowly-changing dimensions and incremental loads
• Increase productivity and accelerate time-to-market by leveraging best practices

Fail-Safe, “Exactly Once” Real-Time Message Delivery

• Ensure that messages will be processed only once and in order, even in failure scenarios

"As a company with IT teams spread across multiple locations around the world, the unified user management capabilities in PowerCenter 8.5 significantly streamline security administration." - Furio Lanzoni Global BI - Informatica Shared Services, HP read the full story

Product Literature

PowerCenter SE Datasheet
PowerCenter Brochure