Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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 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. 

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.

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. 

Our primary use case of this product is for data management relating to customers and contact information. It's a global resource, we ensure the quality of our customer information and primary attributes. I'm a principal data architect and we are customers of Informatica. 

The solution has improved our organization by providing data quality.

The evaluation service is a valuable feature of this product. 

Because we are moving everything to cloud and our platform is in Azure, it has an infrastructure as a service. I'd like to see a platform as a service, to avoid having to take care of the payments as an upgrade for the platform. I'd like to have email as a service, it would allow us more flexibility. But we already know that Informatica have a cloud integration service but it's not mature enough to do what's required. The service model can also be improved. 

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is not as stable as we'd like. We need to do a lot of work on the operational side because it crashes frequently, at least once a week.

Scalability is not a problem. You can't count the number of users because it's a platform that has an operational model in which we move the data. We have the data and we clean the data, but users don't have direct contact.

The technical support is very good. 

Initial setup is not complex, it takes about a week to install. We have very good consultants that carried out the deployment for us so although licensing is tricky, the development and the installation is okay.

I believe licensing is around $700,000 annually and we pay around $300,000 for support. The licensing is tricky because sometimes we need to pay for additional connectors and those are hidden costs for us.

We evaluated SAP Master Data Governance. We noticed that more people use Informatica and because it's the most widely used platform we went with it because we knew we'd be able to get access to consultants.

I would rate this solution a seven 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.