Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

Our clients need to perform data masking to comply with GDPR rules or the company's internal data security policies. Data masking restricts who can look at the private customer data. Informatica provides a comprehensive solution for on-the-fly or real-time data masking. 

One use case is masking the data for a test environment, so developers and testers can't see production data. This is something you have to do regularly with large amounts of data.

The second use case is in a production environment. Sometimes you need to mask the data on the fly when the data consumers are retrieving reports from the data platform. You are masking the data for certain groups who don't have permission to see that data. 

Informatica should simplify the rules for setting classifications and user access management permissions. It's too complex to define, configure, and make work.

One feature I would like to see is the ability to do data sampling when anonymizing a test environment. It would save you the trouble of having to replicate or perform complex configurations when moving to another environment for testing or development. You should be able to easily configure the data sampling when you are preparing an environment with anonymized data.

We are a system integrator, and we've been one of Informatica's biggest partners for around two years. My team integrates Persistent Data Masking for our clients, but I don't use it personally. I understand the product and its capabilities, and the clients give me feedback on it.

Persistent Data Masking is stable and ready to scale. It has to be. You are working with large amounts of data.

I rate Informatica support eight out of 10. Informatica provides standard support during deployment. A vendor that doesn't offer support isn't a good company. Informatica is willing to make a straightforward deployment because they care about feedback from the client. 

They don't mind investing some money at the beginning to make it run. They care about retaining clients for a long time. Client satisfaction is essential.

Positive

I rate Persistent Data Masking eight out of 10 for ease of setup. It's straightforward. You can deploy a proof of concept in three weeks. It takes two or three people to deploy, but one guy is fine for maintenance. Then again, it depends on the scope and how many anonymizations you have to do, but it doesn't require a big team.

It's usually a yearly subscription, but customers can go with a different pricing model. Typically, it's a yearly subscription for the cloud solution. If you're buying an on-premise solution, it's a one-time payment and annual license for support.

I rate Informatica Persistent Data Masking seven out of 10. 

I use MDM to collect customer information and ensure that there is no duplicate information on our system.

The most valuable features are that MDM has a very strong master merchant, and it's possible to model all kinds of domains in one solution.

An area for improvement would be that the pricing model is not very visible, which makes it hard to understand how much things will cost. In addition, the on-prem solution is harder to learn than the cloud-based versions. I also understand that Informatica is not porting their on-prem system to cloud, so I would like the new cloud solution to include all the features from the on-prem solution and make it the proper multi-domain MDM.

I've been using Informatica for around twenty-five years.

MDM is very stable - it can handle millions of hits daily and still run 24/7.

MDM is scalable with no problems.

As a customer, you can raise tickets, but you also have a Customer Success Manager in Informatica who is responsible for customers and helps them get the best value out of their investment. So you can raise your ticket with them, and they will help you with it.

The initial setup is straightforward on cloud, but the on-prem version is not so easy.

Don't underestimate how much work you will have with integration (though this is an issue with every MDM solution, not just Informatica). I would give this solution a score of eight out of ten. 

I use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for searching for PII data, tagging different kinds of data, and for data lineage.

These are the features I found useful in Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog: one is its data profiling is good. The data lineage is also okay, though it had a few issues to be solved. The data domain discovery for the solution is good, though it was hard to implement.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is hard to set up, so this is an area for improvement, e.g. it would be good if they make it easier to set up, because the project was made 80% of the time of the setup. Another area for improvement is its ease of use, because the interface is not as user-friendly.

I've been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for the last three years, and the last time I used it was three days ago.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is not as stable.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is an easily scalable solution.

The technical support for Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is not so good, because it took a lot of time for them to solve simple problems.

The set up for this solution was not easy.

My advice to other people who want to implement Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is that they need to be sure that it can deliver the expectations they have about the data catalog, because after our implementation, we weren't able to use it a lot.

I'm rating Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog seven out of ten.

The organizations I work with often have trouble getting buy-in from business users and understanding how data governance relates to them or where the data lineage is. We use Axon in two key areas. 

The first is automating data governance processes, policies, and roles in terms of data stewards, data owners, etc. Those process flow charts are typically stored in a PowerPoint, Excel, or board document. Everyone involved in data governance would have to send emails manually and such. Axon allows them to automate all that. So if there's a data owner that needs to update a definition, a request that needs to be flagged, or a data quality error, all that is embedded into the Axon system. That's one reason our clients go with it. 

The use case is embedding the data or the business glossary into the day-to-day workflow. For example, we could integrate it with Tableau. When people are looking at a Tableau report, they understand exactly what the data lineage is and where this data is coming from. They'll also know exactly what those business glossary terms mean, so they can more accurately interpret and analyze the report.

Axon does one interesting thing that I don't think other tools do as well. It lets you rate data and incorporates Informatica's data quality feature into it. There are little indications and graphics that show you how good the data quality is, and you can drill into it to see where potential issues lie. 

Users can comment on the data, tag people, and ask questions or rate the data one to five based on their experience, which helps eliminate data silos. You have all your information right there, and it's easier for future users to know which data to draw from.

The cloud version of Axon is far behind the on-prem, and many of my clients want to go fully to the cloud. However, Axon has to be an on-prem installation. I would like to see their cloud products catch up with their on-prem capabilities. 

I would like to see Informatica add more automation and AI. Some of that is already there, but it would be helpful to have some automation to speed up the process of manually tagging and moving components of your IT setup into your business glossary and the front end.

We started our first Axon implementation at one of our clients in the fall of 2021. Two of my other clients are about to purchase the technology and start using it.

Axon is stable. 

Axon is scalable.

Informatica support has been good. These data governance and metadata products are some of the newer products on the market technology-wise, so I've been impressed with their responsiveness and the tool's maturity.

Installing Axon is straightforward. If the cloud version were more robust it would be easier, but it's just fine for the on-prem solution. Two people should be enough to deploy and support it. 

I rate Informatica Axon nine out of 10. If you're planning to implement Axon, I recommend having an identified data governance lead. I think the most difficult part of implementing this is getting your people and processes aligned, so you know what you're putting into the system. Having a clear data governance manager is the most helpful data governance practice for an organization.

We use Informatica to extract data from production. It's mainly the configuration of the systems. We extract data from one site in the same system and mass customer data to the test system. It's a list of customers that is a subset of the data. 

In our CRM, we have data on our customers, and the data in that system is a copy of the production environment. We have all the configurations manually modified to work as a test, but we can extract only new clients, which is a problem. We need to have a CRM with only the configuration but not the customers. 

My plan is to make Informatica work with the CRM. If it works, I am sure that I can get the budget to make it work with other systems, but the first system that I need to work with is CRM. The other ones are less important and don't have the same impact of making it work with the CRM. We're at about 80 percent completion with this project. 

Informatica is user-friendly, stable, and scalable. These three aspects are the most valuable for us. If we can make it work well with the CRM, we can continue or try again this year to complete that part of the project. I am confident that this kind of solution is what we need because we have a third-party resource that works in the development. 

We need to have a lot of hardware infrastructure to make our test system work. We use a complete copy of the production environment for testing, which is a real problem for us. The problem is not with Informatica as a provider per se. It's more of an issue with our system providers, but we need support to complete the projects. That's our real situation. With the pandemic, we have undergone many changes that have slowed down these projects in the last few years.

We have the license to deploy Informatica on any system we want. Right now, we aren't using it as much as we thought we would. We understand the solution, but it isn't easy in some areas. One problem is we have systems in which we don't know all the relationships among the data, and we need support from our providers to get that information. That is one of our most complicated problems implementing it.

Informatica's support understands the solution, but they lack the experience we need for our use case. That was one thing that we prioritized when we started searching for this kind of solution. 

Informatica is working well, but we need access to the production databases to extract the data. The real problem is understanding the data in the system that we don't own or provide. Those are the most problematic to implement with this solution. We make it work with what our team has developed. Deployment took four to six months. Right now, we have one developer and two or three system administrators using Informatica, so it takes about three or four people to deploy and manage the solution. 

We worked with the team we used for all the installations. They made it work. I can say that wasn't as good as I expected when we purchased the solution. When we started the implementation, we understood that they didn't have the research that works in this project because we did a lot of work to understand the data from the implementation team. That wasn't what we wanted because we knew that Informatica would be the most complicated of all the systems we would implement in the extraction. After all, they are our clients, and almost all other systems depend on that system. 

We have a perpetual license for Informatica, and we only need to pay for support. However, because we're not actively using it at the moment, we don't have the budget to continue with the support.

We evaluated several solutions, including IBM InfoSphere Optim and Delphix. We purchased 15 licenses at the same time that totaled around $230,000.

I rate Informatica Persistent Data Masking eight out of 10. It's important to have a robust understanding of the knowledge you need in the system. That is one of the main problems that we have. You need firm control over the systems to do data masking. All of the data is a subset because we want to make the subset and the data masking, but you have to have good control over the systems. I think that is the key.

We have it deployed on the cloud, but I don't think Informatica has been involved much with cloud-based solutions. They have multiple issues, especially related to LDAP and other configurations. Plus, their certified and supported versions are also not what every client has, so they're still evolving in terms of AWS. I don't think they have any support on Azure. They say that for the time being in the Azure setup, you can install MDM the way you would install it on-premise, but we don't have a built-in solution as they have for the on-prem database. That is my understanding for now.

With a Java user configuration, I will probably see 70 to 75 percent of the use cases met. I'm not talking about workflow integration. Instead of going to an active worksite, I'm managing everything from Informatica PowerCenter. I used to do those things, but now I'm just keeping my viewpoint specifically within MDM. I think with the configuration, you can achieve 75 percent of use cases. New tools are coming out that will enable you to achieve 90 percent of use cases with the out-of-the-box configuration, but I would like to keep Informatica tight here. Otherwise, you need a Java user edit course and other things to do multiple things that you cannot configure out of the box. They have to go through those use cases to do something if those can also be configured rather than coded.

We promote our code changes from a lower to a higher environment, which is highly complex when working with a multi-domain MDM like Informatica. This is the biggest obstacle for Informatica MDM, and I think they should change it because that's very time-consuming. You have to be very, very focused. Also, Informatica should develop a process where all the application servers are synced for people using multiple application servers. That's another significant drawback I've seen with Informatica MDM.

Informatica MDM's pricetag should come down. They have to cut some costs.

I rate Informatica MDM nine out of 10. It's one of the best tools in its class. It gets a high rating because of the improvements in the latest version. I was working on a very outdated edition that was seven to 10 years old. There were multiple issues, but they have made a lot of progress, especially in the newer version. For example, they moved away from DB to a different DB-sorted feature. 

It is generally used for the data integration between multiple ERPs. We have ERPs, and then we have third-party exchanges that sell products. The third parties are partnered up with some of the customers, so they create deeds, and we pull in orders and quote requests.

We're trying to get to the latest version. We're two revisions behind right now. It is a local install. 

It is on-prem, and we're trying to get to all-cloud. We do use the cloud for configuration, but we deploy it to the agents locally. We're using the cloud instance of Informatica to deploy to, and we're currently on Azure.

In the latest version, I like the outlay of the business roles creation. I like seeing that visualization as you're building it, as opposed to going through metatables or XML mappings. We liked that piece, and it makes it more intuitive for the business. 

Its GUI interface definitely helps visualize what we're trying to accomplish. There is always a disconnect between IT and the business, and it helps in creating the feeds that follow the business process flows with some of the types involved with the business.

It is so broad in what it can do. Their services have expanded beyond what they originally built it out to be. The best thing I like about it is that each time they add a new service to the platform, it easily integrates with the core, which is really nice.

The biggest pain point for us is the documentation. Typically, you have to go through knowledge forums and knowledge groups to find out about the syntax issues for interfacing with new products. Typically, you've got to deal with someone who has been through the pain before. Their documents are not really up to date with current innovations happening in the industry. As big as they are, you can't really expect it, but that's our pain point.

We've been using this solution for about four years.

We love it. It is very stable. It is probably the best thing we've seen in a while.

It can out scale our ERP. So, scalability is not an issue for us. However, it can overload our system, but that is not related to the scalability of MDM. It is related to the scalability of the system it feeds.

We have five business roles that are using it, and there are two admins who are supporting it. Basically, it is supporting an environment of about 5 billion in revenue. That's a lot for that amount of revenue. It is a lot of people.

We're trying to extend or expand more modules. We have MDM, and we're going into Supplier 360 and Product 360. We found that it is the most robust platform to integrate with our e-commerce platform. Basically, we have four different e-commerce realms, and we're going to consolidate them. So, Informatica helps with the supplier stuff coming in, harmonizing the data, propagating it out to the sites. In the future, the four sites are going to be combined and consolidated into one site, and then we'll be dealing with four different ERPs, and Informatica will be very key in that as well.

Their technical support is excellent. Whenever we had issues, they were pretty quick to respond. There was never an issue in finding them. The longest we had to wait for getting a resolution was a couple of hours.

I walked into this, so I don't know what they had before.

I wasn't involved with its setup.

It is expensive. That's probably the biggest drawback. The business has heartache paying the license, but that's mainly because they don't realize what value it brings. The key thing about the MDM solution is that it is in the backend, and no one sees what it is actually doing. You don't know it is a problem until it is not there.

I would advise making sure that you have a very well-defined design before you decide you need an MDM. In our case, after MDM was in place and we turned it on, we realized that there are other processes that we needed to refactor for the purpose of MDM, which extended the rollout. This was not an MDM issue. It was a process issue in the business. That's why you need to make sure that the design is well defined. It helps to have their partners involved as well. We're dealing with Informatica consulting today to help design a Supplier 360 portal. 

It is hard to find people who are well versed in Informatica. It is hard to pluck one out of the place. You've got to go and poach for them. They're not out there open and looking for jobs.

I would rate Informatica MDM an eight out of 10.

We are simply service providers; I don't think our relationship with Informatica is that strong. We have a financial client that has a very good relationship with Informatica. They were recently using PowerCenter and IDQ, but a couple of years ago, they purchased DIH. Recently they have been doing some POC using Informatica, Enterprise Data Catalog. They have a great relationship with Informatica. 

We don't use Informatica Data Integration Hub extensively. I enjoy using it to create multiple publishing models.

The solution is good but recently, we have stopped using this product because we were not using it extensively. If you are using Data Integration Hub, it should be as a centralized repository, where it can communicate with many systems. For our current client, we are only using it for two source systems, which are not driving big revenue. For this reason, we stopped using Data Integration Hub and started publishing the news directly.

At present, I am not sure how many sources it can communicate with (how many multiple connectors are available). Nowadays, they're coming up with many connectors. It can communicate with all of the Cloud connectors and Cloud databases. If they could leverage social media connectors, I think that would be great a great asset. If they added this feature, it would be much more scalable.

I have been using this solution for almost two years. 

We encountered a few bugs in the coding page, but we faced bigger issues with Informatica PowerCenter. The data was not loading correctly for certain multi-regional datasets; when we analyzed the data, we tracked it to the same code page from the starting point to the end. Other than that, we never faced any difficult situations.  

We never had to use their technical support. We resolved any issues ourselves and thankfully, we never experienced any problems that we could not handle. 

The initial setup was not very straightforward. Not complex, but not very simple either.

Deployment took roughly one week — 40 hours max from start to finish.

We have a team of 30 to 40 people who handle all maintenance-related issues. 

Informatica products are always increasing in price. Nowadays, many of their customers are leaving and seeking other data integration tools. That's the only drawback with Informatica. Performance and flexibility-wise, they're very user-friendly, but comparatively, their prices are a little bit too high.

Presently, everything is moving to the cloud, and moreover, many people are moving to Snowflake Data Warehouse, as it provides more scalability. I feel the usage of DIH is very limited compared to Snowflake because Snowflake holds and stores highly compressed data and allows you to use different cloud-based tools, including AWS services, DCP, and other services. Snowflake also comes with Matillion, which is a very good ETL tool.

The use of DIH is very limited. Anything that we do with DIH, can be done with Snowflake, regardless of the subscription you may have. There are plenty of use cases — you can use it to build tables and consume it from the downstream. For these reasons, I believe that DIH is currently not doing as well as Snowflake in the market.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. Performance-wise, it could be better. The performance-related Issues could be due to low infrastructure, but for whatever reason, sometimes the performance is slow.