Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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 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'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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Informatica MDM a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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.