Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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 use this solution for MDM in the commercial sector. I'm a lead software engineer for EPAM Systems.

The product provides all the typical MDM capabilities like deduplication, machine survivorship, and other things. 

The downside of this solution is that the UI is terrible and not user-friendly. The solution was developed a long time ago and it no longer provides a lot of value. Our organization is considering decommissioning the solution or reducing usage. The problems seem to be more about the design and not the tool. The UI and general user experience need to be improved. Making changes on Informatica takes a lot of time compared to making changes on other MDM tools.

I've been using this solution for seven months. 

I haven't heard any complaints about stability. 

Before my time, the company used a legacy MDM solution for dealing with customers. It was created for reporting purposes, to create some compliance reporting, but its functionality didn't allow the addition of more MDM features, so they decided to build a new solution based on Informatica MDM, and from there they basically merged two solutions, the legacy one and this one into Informatica MDM.

The initial setup was carried out prior to my joining the company. 

A lot of the solutions on the market are expensive and Informatica is at the top end in terms of licensing costs. They use a bundle model so you choose what you want to include in your bundle and that's what you pay for.

Informatica MDM is a typical MDM tool. I've worked with others and they are all more or less the same. It requires more work than some other tools in terms of development and adding additional features. It has lots of features and is rated highly by Gartner. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

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.

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.

Informatica MDM's most valuable feature is the interconnection between multiple Master Data domains.

Informatica MDM could be improved by adding drag and drop options, business data insights, and visualization reporting.

I've been using Informatica MDM for six months.

Informatica MDM is scalable.

Informatica's technical support is good, except for response delays because of time zone differences.

Neutral

The initial setup is simple.

Informatica MDM's price could be lower.

We evaluated TIBCO, IBM, and Microsoft.

I would rate Informatica MDM eight out of 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.

We use this solution primarily for core master data management and deduplication.

Recently, they have come up with cloud versions, which I have not experienced. It's mostly deployed on-premise.

We have a limited number of users who are using this solution and working with the master data.

Initially, there wasn't a great product competing with Informatica for market management. It has been leading the market with hierarchy management and all the different match concepts and algorithms. They're very robust.

Informatica's issue is the licensing. Right now, there are a lot of new gen MDMs that are offering a lot in a single licensing model. VOS or Entity 360 are offering licensing differently.

I have been working with this solution for more than 10 years.

It's stable and reliable.

It's scalable.

I have had mixed experience with technical support. Sometimes it's very quick. Sometimes there isn't a quick turnaround and we don't have a person to reach out to directly to get an answer from them.

Installation was challenging. Informatica has a very robust engine, which takes a little bit of time, but they're stable.

We have a technical team of 50 people. Deployment depends on
the size and complexity of the requirements. Starting from scratch, any new implementation should take around five to six months. For new gen MDMs, the implementation can be done in three and a half months.

The ROI depends on the business requirement. If they're using their core master data and that data is helping them to address a lot of issues, then the return on investment is definitely very high. If an organization isn't using that to full scale, then it might not be that great.

It's offers value for money. They're more competitive with respect to pricing and offerings.