Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We use Informatica MDM for master data maintenance across our organization. We have multiple departments, like material real estate, trading, and supply. We use it for consolidation, harmonization, and central master data maintenance. We are also integrating it with the nonrecipient systems.

I like that Informatica MDM has robust matching technology. Informatica MDM is also porting the external Java applications for validations. I can consider that a must-have. It is also exposed to Rest API calls, and we can engage in real-time integrations with any third-party systems.

The configurations could be better. It is a bit confusing because we must develop two tools when building a data model in Informatica MDM. Even though Informatica MDM is a single tool, we have our hub console plus the provisioning tool within that. Whatever data model we are building in the hub console, we have to develop it in the provisioning tool again. It is double the work to create a data model. 

We are also using external calls or the Java custom plans functions. This can be both positive and negative. Since MDM as a client does not support any complex validation, we have to depend on the external call or a Java call. Every time we deployed, the entire solution was impacted if something went wrong. 

I have been using Informatica MDM for four years.

Informatica MDM can be more stable. There are some issues and some crashes, and sometimes, with the data load, we usually feel like we are doing an initial data load for any project. Sometimes, it could also be down to the production environment.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a six.

Informatica MDM is a scalable solution. We probably have 1000 direct and indirect users with multiple use cases. But people solely working with Informatica MDM might be around 200 or 300. Most users are from business IT data support.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give scalability an eight.

Technical support is very responsive.

Positive

I was using SAP MDM, which is currently end of its life, so we migrated from SAP MDM to Informatica MDM.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have to make a jar file which we have to download from the link and download it as a client in our local mission. However, there are some challenges if we deploy Informatica MDM with IDQ on-premises. The deployment time depends on the use case. One or two people can maintain this solution.

We have seen a return on investment. From a business perspective, there have been many improvements since we migrated from SAP MDM.

I would recommend Informatica MDM to potential users. Even though Informatica MDM does not come with data quality, Informatica as a whole has some of the right tools. We have embedded the MDM with the IDQ informatic data quality in ways we can interact. It is the best fit for non-SAP systems.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Informatica MDM an eight.

A lot of times, we use it for basic profiling. That's its most common use case. Currently, we are also in the process of establishing a set of ongoing processes around Data Quality that would feed into and augment our current metadata. So, from that standpoint, our usage is primarily around some of the basic dimensions of data quality, such as completeness, conformity, consistency, timeliness, accuracy, etc. We measure each of those or at least create quality rules that measure each of those aspects. We're in the process of doing this for all of the data that's currently feeding into our analytics engine. These are some use cases that we're currently doing on a daily basis.

There are a couple of valuable features. One is that it is very quick on the profiling. So, you get a very fast snapshot of the type of data that you're looking at from the profiling perspective. It can highlight anomalies in the data.

The other valuable feature of the Data Quality tool is the flexibility of using their Analyst tool to create a mapping specification, which allows you to join multiple sources of information. You can then create rules within that data set. You can apply aggregations and all other types of functions, and then you can feed that into the profiling tool. From the profiling tool, you can then create your scorecards. It can be two-step where you're using that mapping engine to integrate multiple sources. If you don't have a need for that, you can do a lot more sophisticated mappings inside their Developer tool, and then maybe do an analyst type of mapping engine. So, you can do straightforward data quality within the Analyst tool, or you can do more sophisticated data quality within the Developer tool, at least as far as the rules are concerned.

Their UI needs improvement. Their scorecards and reporting also need improvement. Their data quality reporting, especially their dashboards and scorecards, is lackluster at best. Its reporting capabilities are limited. If you want to do anything beyond its limited reporting capabilities, then you're going to have to use an external reporting tool such as Power BI or something like that.

It has a few glitches that they haven't fixed. For example, while creating a new scorecard, when you get up to a point, you have to stop and save what you've done. You have to exit and then go back into the tool to finish up your work. From the development aspect, using their scorecard tool has a couple of glitches in it. This might be a tool that they're going to eventually phase out. So, they're just not doing a lot of work on it. I've been living with it for a few years now. I've learned that I got to save my work, and then I got to get back into it to finish up what I was doing.

I have been using this solution for at least five years.

It is pretty stable.

As far as I know, it scales pretty well. The part of the problem that we have is with the way it saves the results. When it saves the result, it creates a physical copy of some of the data results and stores it. So, when we're processing, for example, 500 million rows of data, depending on the type of rules that we have and how we're doing it, it can quickly use up a lot of space. We've had some issues with some of the space and storage. It scales, but you still have to be careful how you configure it so that you don't use up all your resources. We've added a lot of disk space, and we still occasionally have problems.

Currently, we have maybe half a dozen heavy users, but we're probably going to scale that up to 20 to 25.

It is straightforward.

I would rate it a six out of ten.

We are using it to understand the assets that we have from their technical metadata perspective, but we're also using it to align our business glossaries with the actual physical data location where the data is stored. Using their Claire or AI engine helps facilitate that. We've been doing that for a while.

The other thing we're trying to do is extend that metadata capability to include extended lineage and provenance attributes. We're trying to incorporate those into the existing EDC environment, and hopefully, when we get Axon, we'll try to figure out how we would expose that to the customer. We will figure out whether we're going to expose that directly or whether we're going to have to augment Axon with an additional UI layer.

From my standpoint, Informatica offers a pretty robust set of scanning tools that can scan a variety of sources of information. It offers a central repository that you can go to for interrogating and finding data. You can find the data that you're looking for based on enhanced metadata.

The other thing that we're working on is extending the existing Informatica data quality capabilities within the EDC so that we have a more robust understanding of not only what the data is and where it is located but also the quality of that data. We are doing this so that when people are looking for data, they see not only where they can find the data, but they also feel confident that the data is going to meet their needs.

The capability of the tool to scan and capture the metadata from a variety of sources is one of the capabilities that I find most useful. The central repository into which it is going to put that captured metadata is the best.

The model is somewhat flexible. There are certain aspects of the model that are not as flexible as we would like. It doesn't do certain things to a great level of depth. So, in situations where we want to drill in to do something specific, we have to essentially copy that data into our own structures in order to add that additional layer of flexibility.

Robust process management or workflow management, like Bonita, should be incorporated into the Informatica tool stack because it offers very simplistic workflow capabilities. If we had more dynamic and robust workflow capabilities, we could make use of that a lot more. Currently, we have to do a lot of pre-work outside of the Informatica tools before we can get the data loaded and start using it because they're UIs. I haven't dealt with Axon. So, I don't know exactly how that's going to change things, but with the EDC tool, I can't say the user interface is useless, but people don't use it because they find it cumbersome.

Its UI, without considering Axon, is probably their least desirable part. It has some interesting capabilities, but it is not what I would call cutting edge or super. It is not as intuitive as I would've expected. Its UI is probably prior to Axon. It is a little dated, and even Axon has been out there for a while now, but it is a little dated. That's probably why they went out and bought the company that originally made Axon.

I have been using this solution for five or six years.

It is very stable.

We're using it for our enterprise. We are not the largest enterprise in the world, but we're a pretty good size. We have 20,000 people working here and petabytes of data flowing through various systems. It is less about the people using it directly as opposed to the systems using it. It is really a matter of the system interfaces that are automating. We're trying to automate the metadata as much as possible so that when people are looking at their data, they can also see the associated metadata. Sometimes, we have to pull the metadata out of EDC and feed it into other systems so that as they're using these other systems, they can see the metadata flows with it.

I haven't dealt much with them directly, but I've had colleagues create tickets all the time. Generally, they're pretty good. 

I'm more from the end-user perspective. From a system standpoint, there is a different team that sets things up on the server and establishes various types of configurations. I do work with them, but I'm not actually doing that work. 

They have three people that are actively managing the system, and they are system administrators. There are also various people who might be testing things at any one point in time, and then there are various analysts who might be creating data to feed into the system, such as definitions of business terms. The same people may review the results once it gets into the engine. When it starts to process that data and makes the associations between the terms and the actual metadata where it is linking the two up, somebody has to go in and validate that, especially the exceptions or the ones that don't have a high enough matching score. So, there are probably three or four system admin folks, and those are more technical folks, and then you have maybe 20 people who might be putting in data, validating the data, and so on. Those are still primarily an IT function. They have subject matter expertise, but they're still reporting up through the IT group, and then, we'll eventually get to the point where we have a more robust set of business users who are reviewing and vetting that information.

I have no idea what the price actually is. It is probably not going to be the cheapest, but it is a pretty stable and robust platform from the backend standpoint. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We were trying to publish a compendium of all our various assets using an Oracle-based data warehouse. We also had vendor-based solutions like Epic for electronic medical records on an SQL Server base. We had many research systems on various platforms because it's a cancer research institution. 

We wanted to pull together a comprehensive data catalog to show people all the different assets we had and where they could go to find things. If there were vendor-based definitions of things, we'd pull in the definitions and various attributes. It's a heterogeneous environment data-wise. We get a lot of value from a comprehensive enterprise catalog.

It's available on our intranet through a data governance portal. You could go there for a catalog, quality reports, etc. In a year, there may have been 500 unique visitors. It was my job to publicize it, but I didn't necessarily do a good job. I worked with research groups and clinicians to get their stuff on it, and they would tell other people about it. The nice thing about Informatica is that it was easy to link from our internal web portal to their catalog. I had excellent developers working for me. It didn't require much development, and it took less and less as time went on. 

I like EDC's self-service capabilities. You can put the catalog on the intranet inside the organization, so users can search for something. People in the research world have specialized systems, and you might find data from various places that sound similar. 

The purpose of the Enterprise Data Catalog was to build an internally searchable catalog of stuff. You may not have permission to see this data but at least you could find out where it was and contact the person who owns it. 

Interoperability is one area where EDC has room for improvement. It was challenging when the faculty took over the data world and had specific vendors they wanted to use, and some were not particularly open platforms. 

It was a challenge to promote data visibility while also jumping through hoops to take some of the proprietary things and make them part of the calling, especially when the vendor doesn't necessarily support interoperability. You need to export things from a vendor program and import them again. 

We used Informatica for a lot of the data governance stuff I worked with when I joined the company, including things like cataloging and profiling data. The organization has really changed a lot in the last year and went with Informatica EDC. They're moving from the on-prem version to the cloud.

Informatica is a strong company, and EDC is a solid platform. 

The scalability is excellent. Informatica really knows what it's doing. They're smart people and great engineers. 

Informatica's customer service and support were decent. They listen to their customers. If something is missing or wasn't working, they will put it on their roadmap. They were listening to customers for roadmap stuff. 

We wound up building a staging database to pull stuff out of the EDC, stage it, and then access that. It was open, so we would often have an intermediary layer at Oracle. If we wanted to show, for example, data quality over time, we would have a weekly quality process that would run. We staged that in an Oracle database, and the portal could access that.

We had to build Informatica pipelines and do some Azure work to feed data to them. With data warehousing, you typically have static data that is timestamped daily or weekly and sometimes monthly or annually.  We were trying to get real-time data, like blood pressure monitoring and stuff like that. That was a lot of work. I didn't do it. The integration team. 

When I joined the company, it was an Oracle-based solution. Then Epic took over, which was SQL Server-based. After that, they went to Azure. Now, all the analytics are supposed to be on this platform, and it's not particularly open. 

Setting up Informatica EDC is usually pretty straightforward. The challenge is working with vendors like Oracle and Microsoft, which have APIs for integrating things. You can query what they have. They want it to play well with other vendors because they know customers don't only have one brand of product. In some cases, you get vendors in there that are, "No, we're not going to do that because we're so special." It was a challenge. The platform of choice for data initiatives at the cancer research institution is Palantir. 

We didn't look for an alternative, but Azure has its own catalog.

I rate Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog nine out of 10. It's a great solution, and I was happy with it. It did everything I wanted, and Informatica dramatically increased the integration points over time. When we started, it was like Oracle and SQL Server, but now they're adding NoSQL databases and others.

Informatica has user groups and listens to user input. One of the people that worked for me hosts an annual Informatica user group in Houston. You can try to build your own Oracle-based or SQL-based solution. They listened to the market, and they're working on improving the interoperability. Maybe it works better with Palantir since I left, but they work across all platforms. They're making it Cloud-based. I didn't know anything about them before I got here. I was dropped into a department where Informatica had been for at least five or six years, and it was a good choice.

We use Informatica MDM for various clients for integration, removing duplicates, and centralizing data in one place.

It has improved our organization because it has made our data more reliable. Data is the most important asset these days, and in order to trust your data, you need these tools to make sure that your data is clean and reliable.

The match and merge function is good.

New machine learning could be added to Informatica MDM because the solution is outdated and is not moving with the current trends. The solution is good, but it definitely needs a lot of improvement and needs to speed up as per the market.

Artificial intelligence is something which they should add to the solution.

They need to do MDM on real-time data as well.

The price is a big factor. We try to convince our clients to go for Informatica, but the cost is too high, and they choose another product.

I've been using this solution for 15 years.

It's a reliable and perfectly stable solution.

It is scalable but to a certain limit.

I'm satisfied with the technical support.

Previously, I used IBM MDM, Orchestra Networks MDM, SAP MDM, and Oracle MDM. I have used a lot of MDM tools, and I've found that Informatica is the best solution out of all of them in terms of the architecture and user-friendliness. Also, the graphical user interface is very simple to use.

The initial setup is not very straightforward but not very complex either. It's somewhere in the middle.

Deployment can take six to seven months to a year or two years. It depends on the number of domains and the number of data sets you need to implement.

A team of eight to nine people can usually handle the deployment.

We mostly deploy on-premises and sometimes on the cloud. Informatica is very weak on cloud-based computing though.

We implement the solution for our clients.

Based on my clients' feedback, they have seen a return on investment in the long-term. After five or six years, they can definitely see that the value of their data is growing.

Informatica MDM is very expensive. Apart from licensing fees, they have broken down their products into multiple products, and they charge for each and every product. If the data is huge, they charge for the data. At times, we have to use third party services for data cleaning, and they charge for that as well.

If you are choosing Informatica, then you need to employ the right kind of service provider. If you don't have good implementers, you'll not be able to leverage the product. So, choose your consultant and service provider wisely; then, you will not have any issues when implementing Informatica.

I would rate Informatic MDM at eight on a scale from one to ten.

The most valuable features of Informatica MDM are it is cloud-enabled and has all the elements that are supposed to have in terms of MDM as a solution. All the features that are there. It is very well-integrated with any of the SAP and non-SAP applications. It is quite user-friendly. The user experience that you receive in Informatica MDM is quite good.

From multiple masters that are there in Informatica MDM, we can improve the financials.

I have been using Informatica MDM for approximately four years.

The stability of Informatica MDM is good.

Informatica MDM has very good scalability. When we say scalability it refers to the ability to add custom fields as per the requirement and then upgrade the overall data model the way you want for the client. 

The scalability is one of the most important features because the clients do not want to use a common data model. They want to have scalability so that they can upgrade the data model the way they want.

We have approximately 25 people using this solution in my organization. The users of the solution include data stewards, business data owners, data sponsors, technical architects, and testers. All kinds of people are using the solution.

There are certain challenges with the support from Informatica MDM, however, I did not directly contact them. It was somebody in my team who did.

I rate the support from Informatica MDM a three out of five.

I did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup of Informatica MDM is complex but is okay if you have experience. The full deployment took approximately five to six months.

Where one is the easiest and five is the most complex, I rate the complexity of the initial setup of Informatica MDM a two out of five.

The deployment of Informatica MDM was done by a whole team, approximately eight to ten people involved, and they had multiple roles. Each person looked after a different section, such as data, validation, and testing.

My advice to others is they need to first ensure that the functions of the solution are stable and the people who are supposed to implement it should have a good functional understanding. It is important that the team that is working on, in terms of standardization and data quality check, that it is a robust team, a strong team to take care of the solution. If we upload data in the system and then the data is not correct, then it becomes a very difficult job to clean afterward.

I rate Informatica MDM an eight out of ten.

Informatica MDM is used for all data management practices use cases, such as centralized master data, cataloging, and metadata management.

The most valuable features of Informatica MDM are its reliability, match functions, and integration capabilities. The out-of-box functionality of deduplication and built-in data models ensure faster implementation.

Informatica MDM could improve the interdependency with integration. The solution sometimes becomes a bit difficult to change considering a lot of interdependency with the integration. There can be some improvement in the workflows and they can introduce more artificial intelligence.

In a future release, Informatica MDM could improve the UI and create an easier way to change the existing setup.

I have been using Informatica MDM for approximately 20 years.

Informatica MDM is stable.

Informatica MDM is scalable. However, sometimes it becomes difficult to perform the change. When it comes to volumes, it's fantastic and very fast.

We have an entire organization of approximately 80,000 using the solution.

The technical support from Informatica MDM is good.

I have previously used IBM, SAP MDG, and Parallels.

If an organization has a quite complex setup with different systems then I would recommend Informatica SAP MDM because of the integration capabilities. If the organization only has one ERP, then it's not advisable to use Informatica MDM because SAP MDG is quite integrated with SAP.  The IBM solution I use quite a long time before, but I don't know how they are doing today.

The setup of Informatica MDM is easy.

We have two people that do the development and maintenance of the solution.

Informatica MDM recently changed its pricing model. It's usage-based but I don't have much insight into the current pricing.

Whether to use Informatica MDM or not is highly depends upon what is the use case and the core structure you have in the organization. If you have a small company with limited systems, then you use something lightweight MDM. Where you have more than one ERP, all technology interacting with each other, then I would suggest a solution, such as Informatica MDM, it is a good deal.

I rate Informatica MDM a seven out of ten.

It can be used for different kinds of use cases. You can use it for data deduplication purposes for any industry. For example, in the pharma, healthcare, or life science sector, often a lot of medical data gets duplicated across different business functions of the enterprise. As a result, the sales and marketing channels may face a lot of challenges in marketing their medicines to the right physicians. In such a scenario, Informatica MDM could be really helpful in standardizing the data and creating a golden copy of it, which can then be published to the sales and marketing channel so that the sales representatives have accurate data to market their medicine or product. This is one of the use cases.

Its deployment depends on the project and client requirements. I don't have Informatica MDM deployed for my organization. We build solutions for our clients by using Informatica MDM. So, it entirely depends on what a client wants. For some of the projects, it is deployed on-prem, and for some of the projects, it is deployed on the cloud. In the most recent scenarios, it is mainly on the cloud. Informatica, just like other MDM solutions, is also moving toward the SaaS platform. So, I'm sure that going forward, for any kind of project opportunity, we'll be using the SaaS model when it comes to the deployment of Informatica MDM.

The Provisioning tool is something that is really handy for everyone. It is my pick as the best feature.

It is a very mature tool. It has been in the market for more than a decade.

If I compare it with other MDM solutions in the market, one thing that can definitely be improved is automation to help with the configuration. Currently, when we are creating any staging of base object tables, all the columns have to be configured manually in the Informatica Hub Console. A lot of tables and different kinds of business columns have to be configured manually. There should be an automated process for this, especially in the Dev environment. When people are creating tables and columns from scratch, if there is a backend automated process for that, it would be really helpful. In Stibo, a similar feature is there wherein you can tag attributes to certain objects. It would be helpful if Informatica also provides a similar option. It would reduce the manual effort. It could be that such a feature is already there, but I am not aware of it.

Their support can also be improved. They sometimes take long when an incident is not a priority incident.

I have been using Informatica MDM for the past five or six years.

It has been in the market for more than a decade. Over the last decade, Informatica has proved to be the best MDM solution that is available in the market. Informatica is one of the leaders as per Gartner and Forrester. There are no second thoughts about the stability of the tool. It's definitely the best one in the market right now.

I would rate them a four out of five. There is definitely room for improvement when it comes to technical support. Sometimes, when an incident is not a priority incident, they take their own sweet time to meet the SLA. For a priority one incident, they jump in and resolve the issue really fast. 

For someone trying it for the first time, it would definitely be a little bit complex, but once you get used to it, over a period of time, the complexity reduces. With experience, it becomes easier.

The deployment duration depends on the complexity of the configuration and the complexity of the import configuration on Informatica MDM. There is a feature called import where you get the chance to import it from the lower environment to a higher environment. The import process is pretty straightforward, but sometimes, when very complex configurations are done in the lower environment, it can get a little bit complicated to import the delta changes. It can take a while. 

Its maintenance isn't a big headache. For on-prem deployments, the maintenance is pretty easy and straightforward. It is not a very big overhead. With the SaaS solution, there is no overhead at all.

It was done in-house. There was no third party.

There is no doubt that it is very expensive, but the brand value comes at a cost. Other MDM solutions in the market that haven't proven themselves like Informatica are also pretty expensive. We need to understand that MDM itself is very expensive to implement. So, Informatica is also pretty expensive. I would rate it a two out of five for being pretty expensive.

One piece of advice that I would like to give to anyone implementing Informatica MDM or any other MDM solution is to be in regular touch with business users during the implementation. Because it's an MDM solution, it's business-driven rather than IT-driven. So, always stay in constant touch with business users or data stewards to best understand the data. Never try to make decisions related to the data on your own. It is always good to be in regular touch with business users and let them make the decisions. Based on their decisions, you do the implementation. Do not make any decisions yourself because the businesses understand their own data best, and they are the best decision-makers when it comes to their own data. 

I would rate Informatica MDM a nine out of ten.