Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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. 

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.

We are using Informatica Cloud Data Integration to take sources from databases to flat files or from web service to flat files. We do data integration with the tool.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration could improve the price by making it less expensive.

I have been using Informatica Cloud Data Integration for approximately four years.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is stable.

The scalability of Informatica Cloud Data Integration is good.

We have many people in my company using this solution, approximately 100. We do not plan to increase usage.

I have not contacted the support from Informatica Cloud Data Integration.

The initial setup of Informatica Cloud Data Integration is easy. The deployment of the solution only takes a few clicks of the mouse, it takes a few minutes.

We did the implementation of Informatica Cloud Data Integration in-house.

The price of Informatica Cloud Data Integration could be reduced.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is good overall. I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Informatica Cloud Data Integration an eight 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.

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.