Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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.

The solution is used for real-time validation of the addresses entered by end-users in the MDM solution and validation of the addresses which are received via the inbound interfaces. 

Apart from validation, this service is used to enrich the address data, for example, entered addresses include country, city, and street name. The service returns additional characteristics, for example, postal code (if it can be derived from the other attributes), which are then written back in the requesting system. It's used for Master Data Management in our case.

The overall quality of the addresses associated with other master data entities (Customer, Supplier, physical locations, etc.) has improved significantly. Addresses have now standardized format per country of origin - this means that addresses located in one country have a bit different template than in others. This is a consequence of the fact that Informatica uses various country postal authorities to provide the content used by the Address Verification service. As explained earlier, we use the results of AV service to enrich the address information in some cases. 

Due to improved quality of addresses, the user satisfaction of our MDM solution has increased. Also, the connected systems receive more complete data from MDM. Address Verification service helps in ensuring proper data governance of the master data which is used in many critical processes across the whole enterprise.

The product is easy to set up thanks to pretty good documentation. 

It supports several ways of using it (real-time, batch mode) and has testing capabilities. 

The pricing model is clear. 

The service returns good results which vary depending on the country of the address origin. In case there are multiple matching addresses, this service returns all of them which allows our end of the process or the end-user to select the best matching record. The speed of returning the validated addresses is really great.

The product is really good in its current form; it's hard to imagine what can be improved. It's easy to integrate via the exposed APIs, hence, also in this aspect, I don't see much that can be changed.

The only thing that I can imagine that might be improved is how the available transactions verify addresses used. These transactions have a valid end date and must be used within the agreed timeframe. Sometimes it's difficult to predict how many transactions will be required. In the worst case, some of them might be lost if not used on time.

I've used the solution for more than one year.

There is no single issue with the stability since we started using it (more than 1 year ago).

The scalability is very high.

We previously used Google APIs, however, that was for another client. Hence, there was no real switch as such.

The product is very easy to set up and offers good documentation.

We handled the implementation in-house.

I'd advise users to try to predict the expected usage of the service. The unused transactions may be lost if not used on time.

We looked at both Google and Experian.

We are customers of Informatica PIM and I'm a senior architect. 

Informatica comes with a predefined data model which is the way in which you enrich your products. It acts not only as master data but also as a product enrichment tool. The product provides flexibility; you can go for an undefined number of attributes that define a product. You can plug it in with any e-commerce website. That's its value to us and why we need it. 

Database access is highly restricted with PIM. If you're using the cloud version, you probably won't have database access or a view of it. If you're wanting a customized application, you can develop the out-of-the-box PIM solution with a little bit of customization here and there without even needing a database. That's a very big drawback. As a developer or as an architect, you need to have a data model. I know some people use it without database access and the issue is that they don't know what that data model is built on other than just seeing it through UI tabs. The one thing I'd really like to see is for the solution to be made scalable. 

The solution is stable, in terms of bugs they're very good. They keep evolving their toolset. I have encountered many bugs in Multidomain MDM, but to date not in P360.

Scalability depends on your use case. If you're using it as an integrator, then it is definitely scalable. That said, it would require an altogether separate MDM solution. If you don't have MDM, then there are likely to be some limitations. We're in the process of installing now but in my previous company, we created the core set of attributes through MDM. From there it went worldwide through an e-commerce website. We have 50 to 60 people internally using it as a tool. If you're exposing your data through an e-commerce website, then it's accessible to all, although just for reading and not for updates.

If you're working with Informatica, you need to interact with them on the out-of-the-box features. They are very efficient and quick in their response times. 

I've trained in Stibo which is a little bit better than PIM and I've used Oracle PDH and CDH. Those were basically a package MDM solution. If you're using SAP, I would suggest Oracle products. But there's been a very big evolution over the past decade when it comes to enterprise MDM tools. Most people working in companies are disbursed in different locations and using multiple toolsets, they can't be restricted to one technology. That's the reason that Informatica, Stibo, Riversand, and other technologies are very useful and very powerful. When comparing PDH to PIM or CDS to Multidomain, managing the Informatica toolset is easier in terms of effort required in comparison to managing Oracle MDM or Oracle CDH or PDH because they have their own set of limitations. The good thing is that they can be very easily coupled with an ERP solution. Here, you have to build real-time or multiple interfaces. 

The setup is relatively easy I would say. But if you need additional attributes, it gives you a repository manager feature where you can use XML, add your own attributes and then configure it. To my mind, the setup is simple to moderately complex.

Licensing costs are a little pricey. For my previous client, as a support contract partner, we were making less money than Informatica was charging them. 

Informatica 360 PIM was bought from Heiler and is a very good tool if you already have MDM in place and you simply want to use it as an enrichment tool. With Informatica, you perhaps need to go somewhere into the roots of Multidomain. P360, Multidomain, and C360 are all different things. Managing a thousand plus attributes into that data model is going to be very complex. If they could come up with a standard data model that Oracle offered customers like PCH or PDH, similar to what P360 has, that would be my preference. Also, my recommendation is to always utilize your team as an integrator rather than being a master data manager.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We have a lot of data from multiple vendors spanning multiple years. We want to have one unified final data standard, rather than searching around to do the quality check. We have a data governance process to make sure we have the proper data. In order to do that, we use some tools, such as Informatica Cloud Data Quality to bring the data together and to do the quality checks.

One of the most valuable features of Informatica Cloud Data Quality is Master Data Management. You can write code to build your logic rules to check the quality. 

I used to use Informatica Cloud Data Quality more but recently we have been using another tool that we feel is better because it handles spatial data. Informatica Cloud Data Quality could improve by adding the ability to handle spatial data.

When I build the workflow and rule configurations, they could improve by making the process easier. You want to automate it and not have to manually do it.

I have been using this solution for several years.

The solution is stable, it has been around for a long time.

The solution has been scalable for the amount of data we have been processing.

We are a large company and a long-term customer, the support we have received has been good.

I have evaluated other tools.

This is a good and very valuable tool, but it has some drawbacks and there are other alternatives.

I rate Informatica Cloud Data Quality a nine out of ten.

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.

I have worked with two clients implementing Informatica MDM. One use case was for the regulatory master data in big pharma (using multidomain edition), on premise installation. The other installation was related to several data domains implemented using Informatica multi-domain MDM edition, but hosted by vendor.

Helped identifying and reducing data duplication. Helped in improving data quality.

Its data cleansing capabilities are very valuable. The match and merge and the audit trail functionalities are very useful. Review and approval workflows are widely used by the user community.

Informatica support should be improved, as resolution of some cases takes definitely too long. Scalability of the solution should also be improved.

I would also like to have a bit more modern and friendly UI for the end-users. There should definitely be a simplified way to configure the system and set it up for the end users.

I have been working with Informatica MDM for three years - on premise and hosted version. I started with MDM 10.2, and then with version 10.3 upgrade to 10.4, which is the latest one.

Its stability is pretty good. We don't have any major concerns.

It is scalable, but its scalability should be improved especially with the hosted version.

It is a strategic MDM solution in the company, so it is extensively used.

We have had some trouble with their support from time to time. Resolution time could be improved.

We have been replacing several very old solutions which reached end of extended support life and several old bespoke systems.

It is a pretty complex product, so the initial setup is also complex. You require skilled resources to deploy this product. Its deployment can take several months.

We use an experienced system integrator and seasoned external consultants.

It is a pretty good and advanced tool, but at the same pretty complex to set up. To implement Informatica MDM, you should look for very skilled resources with past experience in deploying Informatica MDM, not competitive solutions. 

Informatica MDM is one of the best in the market in the master data management area. Make sure that you realize the potential of this solution and like with all other MDM projects - plan your roadmap carefully. Start small, enable most important capabilities and then work on enabling additional features.

Don't overengineer. Informatica MDM is very flexible in defining the underlying models, setting up workflows, enabling cleansing, etc. Hence a risk of misusing the product or make it too complex and downgrade its performance of usability. If you don't have really skilled resources who have worked with Informatica MDM, there is a good chance that the project will simply fail, or it will take you much longer than expected to deploy and benefit from this product.

I would rate Informatica MDM a nine out of ten.

Primary use case is generally for product items and demonstration. 

I like that Informatica MDM doesn't require a separate IDQ. In the IBM InfoSphere, we need exclusive data quality to identify the issues in the source system. But if you use Informatica MDM, that's not the case. The MDM itself identifies the issues and we can use the data quality tools and the score card. It's good compared to other tools. Troubleshooting is very easy and I believe performance is better than any other tool. It solves any complex queries you can connect, any complex route, any complex mappings, you can do it all with Informatica MDM.

I'd like the ability to directly connect from MDM to any of the analytical tools. It's a feature that would be very helpful for analytical reporting. When you connect to the cloud, there are multi-cloud technologies that will have some problem and when you connect from on-prem to cloud, there are more data latency issues than with other tools. The product is more expensive than other similar solutions. 

I have six years of experience with Informatica. 

It is a stable product compared to other MDM products. Other solutions like Oracle CLM and CDH are similar tools but they're not great when compared to Informatica MDM. Of course, it is very stable compared to any other MDM products.

The solution is scalable but when you do the design, you have to know what the data load will be and the number of concurrent users. Based on that you have to design the infrastructure and measure capacity. 

I've implemented this solution in three or four different projects.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10.