I want to thank eWeek for the moment of truth it offers in its article: Informatica Launches Data Integration Service in the Cloud. To my knowledge, it’s the first article that discusses Informatica’s fee structure!

At last, the leader of proprietary data integration communicates its licensing prices via Girish Pancha, Informatica’s Vice President and General Manager of Data Integration.

What do we learn from this article? Truly, nothing new! But we do get official confirmation that Informatica’s products are expensive and out of reach of most enterprises’ budget - $165,000 “base price” for their solution! And that’s without considering connectors, additional CPU runtime licenses, and all the extra stuff they charge for throughout the life of your project.

Commercial open source software vendors like Talend are positioning their products along other lines that simple economics. The question of budget is important, of course, but openness, high performance, scalability, community-driven, etc, are other strategic attributes. Of course, with this kind of article all our efforts go up in smoke…
Bertrand