Informatica → Azure
What actually gets retired, and what replaces it
Most estates carry more than PowerCenter: a B2B exchange, a managed file transfer layer, a synchronous web-services tier and change data capture, each with its own licence line and its own reason nobody has opened it in five years. This is the component-by-component map we work from — including the part that goes wrong if nobody plans for it.
| What you are retiring | What it did | What replaces it | The part that bites |
|---|---|---|---|
| PowerCenter batch ETL | Reusable mappings and sessions moving data between ERPs, plants and databases on a schedule, licensed per CPU core. | Logic Apps Standard workflows connecting to the same databases, and local code at the edge where a site has to keep running when the link to it does not. | Reusable mapplets and shared transformations have no direct equivalent. They become a shared workflow library, and deciding what belongs in it is a design job, not a conversion job. |
| B2B Data Exchange | X12 translation, document routing, endpoint profiles and transaction logging for trading-partner traffic. | Integration Account X12 encode and decode, plus one shared translation library holding the maps, the flat-file conversions and control-number issuing. | Control numbers. They are stateful, partners reject out-of-sequence documents, and the issuing logic is usually undocumented inside the translator being retired. |
| B2B Managed File Transfer | AS2, SFTP and FTPS partner transport with PGP, keystores, MDN handling and landing folders. | Integration Account partners and agreements behind API Management, with certificates and keys in Key Vault and rotation as a platform operation rather than a server task. | Every partner has to re-point or re-agree at the network edge. That is a scheduling problem across dozens of external organisations, and it is the long pole on the plan. |
| Web Services Hub | Synchronous SOAP services exposed to business applications so they could call integration logic directly. | API Management fronting a gateway workflow that dispatches to the same backends — with operation names and contracts preserved. | Preserving the contract exactly. Get it right and no consuming system changes; get it wrong and the migration spreads into every application that calls it. |
| PowerExchange change data capture | Licensed change data capture out of CRM and midrange databases, feeding master data downstream. | Native change events onto Service Bus topics, with session-ordered consumers writing into the downstream ERPs. | Ordering. The old CDC guaranteed it per source; a topic only guarantees it per session, so the session key has to be chosen per entity and got right first time. |
| Scheduler, repository and log analyzer | Job scheduling and dependencies, repository export/import promotion between environments, and session logs read after the fact. | Platform recurrence and event triggers, Azure DevOps pipelines with environment-parameterised settings, and platform monitoring with alert rules and per-run action history. | Promotion by repository export is how environments drift. Replacing it with pipelines is the change that makes everything after it repeatable — and it is usually the one nobody has been sold before. |
A per-core licence versus a metered platform
| Informatica, on-premises | Azure, cloud-native | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost model | A fixed licence per CPU core on a multi-year commitment. You pay for peak capacity every hour, used or not. | Metered plans plus consumption. Resize or retire within a month, and size non-production down without a licence conversation. |
| Environments | Production plus one licence-limited development lab. QA competes for the same cores. | Full DEV, QA and PROD parity. A new environment costs a plan and a storage account, not a licence. |
| Release management | Repository export and import, hand-carried between environments. Drift is hard to see and harder to prove. | Git and pipelines with environment-parameterised settings — repeatable, reviewable, and diffable against what is actually running. |
| The people who run it | A PowerCenter skillset that is scarce, expensive and thinning every year. | Mainstream Azure, JSON and DevOps skills your existing team can be brought onto. |
That last row is a second clock, and it runs faster than the vendor’s. Extended support ends in March 2027; the market for people who can keep a PowerCenter estate alive is thinning now.
Where our numbers come from
We do not publish a figure we cannot show you the source of. Workflow counts come from the platform’s own management API, not from folder listings, which include years of leftovers. Run volumes come from platform metrics over a stated window, with the window stated. Licence costs come from the invoices, not from a list price we assumed you were paying. Cloud costs come from metered consumption where it is metered and from the published rate card where it is not — and where a line is an estimate, we mark it as an estimate and tell you how much of the total it moves.
It is the parity gate, pointed at money
We prove the migrated pipeline produces the same rows. We report the business case the same way. It is also why our savings figures are sometimes smaller than ones you have been shown elsewhere — we would rather hand you a number that survives your CFO than one that survives the meeting.
You get the unfinished list too
Every status artifact we ship carries an open-items section: what is not done, what is blocked, what is deferred, and who owns it — in the same document as the good news, not in a separate conversation once someone asks the right question. A programme with nothing outstanding is a programme whose reporting is not looking hard enough.
We will not discuss another client’s estate
We do not publish our clients’ costs, their systems, their partners or their banks — which is the same answer you would want us giving about you. What we will do is walk your architect through the method in as much depth as they want, on your estate.
This work was led personally by one of our founders, as data integration architect and lead data engineer on the client’s own programme, leading a team of their developers and a business analyst — before DataCode was formed. DataCode was not the contracting party. It is a founder’s own record rather than a corporate one, and the person on that record is the person who would lead your engagement. Both founders are named on the About page, and where we put a specific person on a specific engagement we name them, with their record attached.
Start with the assessment.
Three weeks, fixed fee, and you finish it knowing what your estate contains — every component above, classified — what it costs to move, and what it costs to stay.
Or email hello@datacode-ai.com.