Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

The company I work for has a huge supplier database with a billion records, so Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is a data integration tool used for migrating the legacy data to Informatica MDM (master data management), then moving to the cloud. It's GCP and PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry).

I've also used Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for moving data to SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is used for multiple technology in legacy mainframes, Oracle, some PeopleSoft, some Java-based applications, some in-house, QAD to MDM, or to SAP S/4HANA, or SAP Ariba, so it has various use cases, from legacy to cloud, legacy to MDM, and MDM to S/4HANA, etc.

The feature I found most valuable in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is the mapping. You just drag, and it maps the data. Mapping is very easy, and it's no code.

When you migrate data or when the data interaction happens at the source and destination, the challenge is that you'll get different formats. The validation has to be done in the middleware, and the transformation should happen. In Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, it's very easy to do data validation and transformation compared to any other tool.

Synchronicity is an area for improvement in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services. For example, when you want real-time or immediate response from the solution when multiple technologies are involved, the integration with Informatica Intelligent Cloud isn't seamless, whether it's the MQ, JMS, or BES service, so the connectivity should be improved a bit.

The data governance is good, but what's lacking is a demo. For example, if there's a new feature in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, the documentation for that new feature is limited, so if Informatica could give a more complete documentation and more demos, that would be better for the users.

Right now, there isn't any issue with any of the features of the solution. It's the new feature awareness or user training, and improved connectivity that I'd like to see in the next version of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.

I've been using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for four years.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services has good stability.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is easy to scale.

We contacted the Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services technical support team for some configurations which we needed that weren't available in the product, so we had to create a ticket. We talked to the product team biweekly and asked if they can get it done.

When the incident is high-priority because of the impact, the support has an SLA of twenty-four hours, especially if it's about configurations that aren't available in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services. Otherwise, if the issue is about a feature already in production that we are already using and we need technical support, there's a four-hour SLA. That's the agreement we have with Informatica.

I would rate the Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services technical support team as four out of five.

We've used the CIG (Cloud Integration Gateway), and we switched to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services because CIG only works in an SAP environment. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, on the other hand, integrates with various environments, even non-SAP environments.

Compared to other solutions, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is also good with data governance, scalability, and it's no code.

The initial setup for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services was straightforward. The first time the solution was set up, the deployment took three weeks. My company had a center for excellence team that worked with the Informatica product team. The team from Informatica served as a guide throughout the deployment process.

The next deployments only took one to two hours of work. Once you get the approval for the SOWs and the contract, you'll have access to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services then you can use it. It's usually a one-hour job.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating my experience with setting up Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services as four.

The first time we implemented Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, we did it with the guidance of the Informatica product team, but during the next deployments, for example, when adding a new service, we did it ourselves.

In terms of the licensing for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, we had the option of paying based on the number of users and paying based on the volume of data, and we went with the data volume licensing option.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services isn't as expensive as CIG. The pricing for it is okay, so I'm rating it a four out of five in terms of pricing.

We did use the email verification and address validation services which weren't part of the contract, so we had to pay additional fees for those services.

I'm using data integration and app integration tools from Informatica, in particular, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services and Informatica Data Quality.

I'm working with the latest update of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.

The solution doesn't require any maintenance after it's deployed.

In my company, across all departments, between five hundred to six hundred people use Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.

On a scale of one to five, in terms of performance, I'd give Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services a four when it's used in a complex environment. If it's just at the source and destination without multiple technologies, then it's fine. If you have to build an entire architecture, or when you compare from end-to-end, and multiple systems will be involved, then the performance of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services needs improvement because connectivity issues in a complex system affect the performance.

The advice I would give to anyone looking into implementing Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is to get a POC done for the complex use cases for your organization. If the data hasn't been used for years and you have to move that to another source, be it the cloud or any other new technologies, take the data and do a POC for profiling, cleansing, and transformation for the different sets of data. For example, chunk the data, get the categories, then see how it is. Once that's done, look further and check if it's real-time, or it's a batch. If it's real-time, check how much time it's taking, and if it's aligned with your use case.

If you're using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for so many applications, do an end-to-end as a POC and check the time to see if it gives the time performance index, how the performance is, and how is it landing at the destination.

My rating for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is eight out of ten.

My company is a customer of Informatica.

We use MDM to get more data quality. We are partners with Informatica and I'm a senior technical lead and practice architect.

The fuzzy matching capability is a great feature as is the network hierarchy which is the new concept code. 

I think the UI could be improved. We're also currently facing issues with real-time integration and if Informatica had their own it would be helpful. They need to look into the user mechanism and the security access mechanism in the data governance process. One of the major features is access control and access data management and they need to work on that because I have observed some data glitches.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The solution is stable.  

The solution is scalable. There is room for improvement in terms of scalability with the MDM SaaS. With limited data it's fine, but with a large volume the scalability is questionable, the threshold of data transaction is different. We are a service-based company, so there are limited users within the company. From the customer side, there are multiple users. 

We sometimes have technical issues and the customer support responds in a timely manner and is quite good.

The initial setup is easy. Deployment takes around 15 minutes and we have 22 internal users in our company. 

We pay an annual license. Mobile players are unable to afford the product. Different MDMs have different pricing approaches but there needs to be room for mobile players.

We went with Informatica because we have functional and non-functional requirements with respect to the market data management of our customers and Informatica is a suitable product for their needs.

This is a good solution although it's expensive and even though we are integrated with Oracle DB2, we're unable to integrate with multiple things. The market is changing and there are many more options so we have to think about the integrations of multiple databases. 

There are some additions or improvements that could be made so I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are currently working on a project with the Oracle Fusion system, so we have multiple use cases and often need to pool data in different source systems. In the project, we have multiple sources and target systems. Based on the requirements, clients, and what they propose, we need to make decisions or check the technical feasibility of whether it is possible to complete the integration.

Product-wise, compared to other on-premise tools, Informatica Cloud Data Integration can be deployed on-premises and cloud. So when we were working on-premises, there were a lot of challenges with the hardware. For example, there were memory space issues, but once we switched to cloud, there were no more issues. 

There are challenges when we use Cloud Application Integration (CAI). We want add-ons when we complete data integration and merge images. The current features are a bit complicated, and we need to write big scripts and test.

We have been using this solution for more than six years. We are using a cloud version and the most recent version, 10.4. We have also used versions 8.6, 9 and 10, and we have observed that there isn't that much of a difference between versions, just additional features added. We do not have private or public cloud for Informatica Cloud Data Integration, just cloud.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. We have more than 20 people using this solution.

We hardly raise an SR for this solution. But, whenever we require technical support, we do not get a satisfactory response. This is because their knowledge base may not be developed.

We used this same tool but on-premises in the past. We have also worked with AWS Snowflake, an ELT tool similar to Informatica Cloud Data Integration but with a different architectural approach. If we had to rank them, Informatica Cloud Data Integration would be the best, followed by Snowflake, then AWS.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration has some advantages over the others. It has a more UI-based tool, and the scripting is good. AWS also has an ETL tool called Glue, but it does not have everything we need to write in a script. We still need to write a script if we want to perform a small task. AWS is also challenging to teach. Informatica Cloud Data Integration and Snowflake are easier to use.

The initial setup is easier for cloud compared to on-premises. Deployment does not take much time and takes about 20 to 30 minutes.

The pricing of Informatica Cloud Data Integration and other solutions are almost the same but with slight differences. It differs from project to project, their use case, source and target. Unfortunately, I do not have information on precise licensing costs.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, it is a great solution, but users should understand their source and target system. For example, we also deal with Oracle Fusion, and it's a bit challenging to push data because Oracle has multiple models, financial supply chain and HR. Hence, it is difficult for a developer. Therefore, it is difficult to push data.

They should decide whether they are comfortable using Informatica Cloud Data Integration as their middleware tool or whether they want to use Oracle or OCI. OCI is a different middleware tool owned by Oracle.

Regarding additional features in the next release, Informatica Cloud Data Integration doesn't have image merging transformation or capability. We can do it without the solution, but it is a lengthy process. So, it would be helpful if they added the transformation to play with images and deal with invoices and financial data. We sometimes need to add 200 out of 800 invoices, and it's a bit challenging without the additional features.

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 essentially use Informatica Axon to set up a data governance framework for a corporation, usually a medium-sized or large organization.

The dictionary, the search, and the ratings are without a doubt the most beneficial components of this solution. 

Socializing data governance is one of the examples, but I'm not sure what the others were. For instance, if you locate a specific data attribute, you can grade its accuracy by assigning it a star rating between 0 and 5. 

When someone else conducts a search, they might discover whether employees at the company believe the data to be of high quality.

In terms of additional features, I believe it is quite rich. As I previously stated, it is a fairly mature product.

The main issue probably has nothing to do with end users, but installation can definitely be simplified. Also, I believe that this is something that they are already working on it, but it needs to be provided as a service. 

The Microsoft version, Purview, is now available as a cloud service, it must be provided as a service rather than just installation. You do not need to go through the installation, you literally create an account in five minutes. That is something they need to do. I believe that it is already something they are on working on, but I don't believe it has yet been released.

Over the past year, I have definitely used Informatica Axon.

I have worked with Informatica Axon for two years.

We are always working with the latest version.

Informatica Axon is a stable product.

It's a fairly mature product. For many years, it has been the market leader.

Informatica Axon is a scalable solution.

The smallest organization would have 500 users.

Any of the multinational corporations could be the largest. It's quite pricey. 

It is commonly used by large multinational corporations.

It has two or three user interfaces, one for everyone in the organization, one for specific data analysts, and one for IT technical staff.

Like many organizations, technical support responds quickly at times. It can take some time. It's about average, in my opinion. I wouldn't say it's particularly good or bad. It's average.

I would rate the technical support a three and a half out of five.

Neutral

I am just really familiar with Azure DevOps as a deployment technology.

Some of the Azure services, such as Database and Purview, and Informatica tools, such as Axon, and Data Governance, are among the things I am familiar with.

Informatica Professional Services should absolutely perform the installation due to its complexity. Additionally, training is required for end-client configuration. It is not something you can pick up and configure immediately.

Although there is no cloud version of it yet, it can be deployed in the cloud as a virtual machine, or VM.

Axon itself, you normally allow anywhere between five and ten days to conduct the installation configuration together, and that's not elapsed time. It normally takes a week to two weeks to install and configure an initial setup. This is elapsed time, not necessarily man hours. You will always need additional configuration to be done. Although the actual installation and configuration might be completed in a few weeks, getting it ready for use by the organization might take six months.

We do not have a technical team. I was the person who deployed this solution.

It was a challenge, but I did it for the POC.

Informatica Professional Services was consulted when it came time for the client's actual installation.

Axon can typically be present; the technical installation only requires one person, and a second data specialist is typically required for configuration. Normally two. Additional technical setup and data configuration are required.

It is definitely high if used properly, but many organizations spend all of the money and then fail to use it to its full potential. It is unquestionably a good investment if used properly.

It depends on how the client uses it.

Pricing is determined by the number of licensed users as well as the number of Core CPUs. 

You can imagine how expensive it would be for a company with 10,000 users, but it all depends on how many analyst user licenses they require. 

I believe there is a flat fee for the end user. 

It is not expensive, but individual licenses are required for technical users, data analysts, data stewards, and the data governance team, which can add up if you have a large number of them.

Different clients may have different licensing costs, but it is based on a yearly paid license. It is renewed every year. There is an initial licensing fee as well as an annual renewal fee.

They are very expensive, and they charge a lot because they know they are number one. I would rate them a five out of five. Five being the most expensive.

I would definitely recommend it. If they can afford it. I strongly advise them to use it. But, before diving into Axon or any of the other governance tools, make sure they understand their data landscape thoroughly because the tool will not help them with that. They will fail if they do not have good data practices in place.

I'm a freelancer, but the consultancy I went through is also independent, but they do have a partner relationship with Informatica, as they do with many vendors.

I would rate Informatica Axon a nine out of ten.

Informatica MDM is used for customer affiliations and sites and hierarchy management.

Informatica MDM has helped our organization because we now work from a harmonized single record for customers and patients. We're able to have an aggregation or hierarchy view, which drives a whole variety of things, such as data quality and data reliability.

The most valuable feature of Informatica MDM is hierarchy management. It's not something that's typically available and effective within ERPs.

Informatica MDM can improve the data catalog and data marketplace.

Informatica MDM is expanding in AI by making it much more efficient and automated stewardship-related work. I'd like to see that accelerated and made available for on-premise.

I have been using Informatica MDM for approximately four years.

The stability of Informatica MDM is good.

Informatica MDM is scalable.

We have approximately 100 people using this solution in my company and their roles vary. For example, we have stewards, data analysts, platform administrators, architects, developers, and support teams. The active users are primarily stewards and data analysts.

We rate Informatica MDM support on an annual basis and we have quarterly executive business reviews where we discuss support issues.

Positive

We previously used SAP for MDM. We switched because there were new use cases that SAP couldn't meet. 

The initial setup of Informatica MDM is more complex than it should be.

We used a third party for the implementation of Informatica MDM.

We have approximately 20 people that do the maintenance and support of the solution. This includes support admin teams and architect engineers. We have a BA for each of the domains, shared architecture, shared engineers, ETL, and MDM. Additionally, we rely heavily on third-party assistance.

We have seen an ROI in duplicate data management, visibility to market share, and reduction in risk.

I rate the licensing cost of Informatica MDM a five out of ten.

We did go through a solution selection and RFP process before we chose Informatica MDM.

My advice to others is for them to look at SaaS and cloud options first.

I rate Informatica MDM a seven out of ten.

Informatica MDM has a lot coming ahead from a solution standpoint, which is a benefit for them. However, there's a lot of configuration involved to keep the solution going and this is why I would encourage a SaaS solution for anyone coming in.

I use the solution for enterprise-wide data discovery and traceability, providing business context to data and collaboration between different stakeholders of data.

My organization, being a service provider, uses the product to develop domain PoCs, customer PoCs, develop data management and governance use cases, etc. The major issue with enterprises are the ability to quickly develop an MVP and showcase it to business and other data users for greater buy-in. This is important as these are new technologies - and hence, users might not easily adopt.

Our organization is a service provider as compared to an end-user. We have helped multiple organizations onboard onto data management using these technologies. 

It has improved different areas for different enterprises, including the improvement in overall business outcome and business experience, imbibing a data-driven culture, having easy availability of the right and relevant data, allowing for better compliance to regulations, and providing greater data quality and privacy management.

It has also improved overall time to service data requests such as DSAR requests.

The metadata management of Informatica is great. When an organization uses developer for data integration, IDQ for Data Quality, EDC for Data Catalog, Axon for Business Glossary, DPM for data privacy management etc., Informatica tools integrate metadata from all these tools seamlessly. The advantage is getting a complete view of your enterprise data through business and data lineage - as it not only provides you with pure data lineage but also associates related data quality measures, data protection levels, etc.

Additional metadata harvesters from different major tools can be an added advantage. Informatica provides some smart connectors for harvesting metadata from some of the industry tools. That said, this can be improved a lot more.

Overall, the toolsets are really good.

Installation and configuration can be another area where Informatica can improvise a bit. It is not easy to set up and configure the tool. A proper step by step guide to ensure this process goes smooth can be a huge advantage for end customers.

I've used the solution for more than six years.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent.

Technical support is good.

Positive

Most of our customers were using excel and email-based communication for data access. These new-age solutions improve efficiency ten times or more.

The initial setup was not very straightforward. This is an area of improvement.

We, being a service provider, have implemented and configured the setup on our own.

ROI depends on the buy-in from businesses and overall adoption rates. There is a huge amount of change management and change strategy that needs to be in place to ensure users are adopting the new tools/technology.

Informatica has good pricing options and a good professional services team who can help with setup/configuration.

There are other competing good products such as Collibra, Azure Purview, Erwin, IBM CP4D, and more. All have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you are an Informatica shop, there is no need to think twice to opt for an Informatica-based Data Management product suit.

We use the solution to validate emails, telephone numbers, and postal codes. It can also create some data quality rules using the Cloud app's data quality function.

It offers enhanced usability with the ability to create rules quickly using its AI engine. This feature simplifies rule creation by allowing users to specify their needs, and the system generates the necessary scripts, acting as a significant accelerator. 

Another advantage is its seamless integration with other Informatica capabilities, making data quality a deeply embedded part of the solution. Informatica has a strong history in data quality with its on-premise product. All those powerful capabilities are now available in the cloud, making this product even more robust.

Accessing data as a service is essential, especially for validations requiring external data services. This goes beyond basic syntactic checks, like ensuring an email address contains the @ symbol or .com domain. Instead, it's about advanced validation, such as verifying if an email address exists or if a phone number is valid. 

These services are in high demand, especially for regions like China, Argentina, and other parts of Latin America. While such capabilities were initially more common in the United States, they are now increasingly required globally.

Five to six people are using this solution.

Informatica Support is one of the best services available in the market now.

Positive

Many clients acquired this product because of the ROI.

Informatica is one of the most expensive solutions available in the market.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.