Informatica has a simple visual interface. You do most of the work by simply dragging and dropping with your mouse in the Designer. This graphical approach makes it also very easy to understand what is going on (it is "self-documenting" in a sense). Informatica can communicate with all major databases, can move/transform data between them. It can move huge volumes of data in a very effective way. It can throttle the transactions (do big updates in small chunks to avoid long locking and filling the transactional log). It can effectively do joins between tables in different databases on different servers. The tasks are performed by Informatica Server (Unix or MS Windows). You get a client application called "Server Manager" to work with the server.
