Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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. 

Some of my clients use it as a front end tool for the data quality governing process.

The solution allows the complete governance process, starting from the data quality, those definitions, and it can get the data quality in the EDC.

I would like to see more API integration to have the capability to build a report using other third party reporting tools allowing things to be streamlined.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is a stable solution, we do not see any kind of issues. When we do find issues we have to go to Informatica to get help, I would say it is not completely matured.

The technical support is very good, they have resolved any issue we have had.

The installation is simple.

You can purchase licenses for this solution at different intervals. For example, annually or every three years. They recently changed their terms for licensing and now it is more flexible.

When choosing this solution you need to identify a path by asking yourself a few questions. Where are we going to start? What are the sources? What are the business pain points in terms of the data governance process?  Are you looking for metrics in terms of streamlining the whole process? Are we looking mainly in the bigger lineage? Are we looking to build reference data? We need to identify those areas and prioritize what is more important. Start small and then eventually add more sources, do not commit too much at the beginning you will not be able to be successful. Start thinking in terms of what are the business pain points currently. What would be the first result that you feel would make the business happier and then adjust accordingly, you can build on it further later.

I rate Informatica Axon a nine out of ten.

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.

We would like to centralize all our product information systems. Currently, the product information is stored in various disparate systems, and we would like to bring it to a single place.

The staging and hierarchical features are the most valuable.

Its look and feel needs improvement. It has a lousy look and feel.

Informatica PIM is designed specifically for the retail industry. They need to make sure that it is also applicable to all the other industries and verticals.

I have been using Informatica PIM for almost two years.

It has 75% stability.

It has good scalability. Because of the cloud, we are able to expand it. Sometimes, we do run into issues, but it is mostly good.

We have around 250 to 300 users with IT, business, data governance, and DQ roles.

We haven't yet contacted them. 

We used an Oracle solution. We switched to Informatica PIM because of the licensing cost.

The initial setup was done by Informatica. We didn't face any issues.

We switched to Informatica PIM because it was cheaper than the Oracle solution. It is cheaper initially, but they will bundle it later. This is what happens in the industry.

I would suggest to watch out. Informatica PIM is designed specifically for the retail industry. To use it for manufacturing, you need to think twice and make sure that it satisfies your business requirements. When you are asking for a free demo from Informatica, make sure that you tell your use case and ask them to configure it in a way that suits your business use case. Otherwise, it is not going to solve your problem. 

I would rate Informatica PIM a six out of ten.

I am not quite sure that the product will be part of our use cases anymore. We started off with it because of the data lineage. In other words, we used it because we also used the older Informatica program and it had been serving a purpose for us as a data management tool. But now we are in the process of developing our own solution for at least part of that functionality.  

We currently plan to keep Informatica MDM, but not for the complete handling of the data analytics. We use MDM for data gathering in big data environments. We start with Informatica and do further analysis outside the product.  

I think the most valuable part of Informatica is the flexibility in extending the data model. I think that is the biggest benefit. The data quality component is also an important part of it.  

I have begun to lose track of what needs to be improved because we only use the product now for what it is best at and in those areas it does not need improvement.  

There are two main things and that make up the complete Informatica suite solution. One is the insight into the data lineage which was a huge promise made by the product, but one that it never delivered in practice. That was the big problem that we are trying to solve in another way. The second part of the solution, especially for MDM is its ability to use the data by integrating with other process engines.  

So the insight into the data or the data analysis part needs to be improved.  

I have been using Informatica MDM (Master Data Management) for about two years now.  

Informatica has been stable. It does not have downtime during processing.  

I would say that Informatica is scalable. Right now we have about 20 people using the product directly. The scalability would be in the volume and types of data it can scan and collect and it is good at performing these services.  

With technical support, there is a big gap between sales, presales, and support for the end-users. Like with the data analysis the process starts good but in the end, there is no delivery. There are too many promises and too little delivery. So the support could be also improved after the sales, or I would say that the post-sale support should be improved to be in alignment with the pre-sale support.  

Informatica is definitely not easy to install. In order to do the installation and to set up the whole program, I would say it is complex.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), if I were to rate Informatica MDM and I had a review site, I would mark it as a seven-and-a-half out of ten possible points. It has not delivered on all it has promised.  

We primarily use the solution for tasks such as masking. It's used to mask the customer data.

We are using end-to-end features of Informatica. Everything comes under the product. We really like that the solution is part of a bigger use case that can all be under one umbrella system.

There are new features that are being built to help more closely link all of the solutions we use, and we like that they are always thinking about how each product interplays with the other.

We've used the solution for quite some time, so in our organization, the product is pretty mature.

There are lots of use cases surrounding the use of the product.

The integration could be a bit better. The process is something new. 

They need to include more documentation and support around the build.

It's my understanding that they are currently fixing quite a bit and building in updated capabilities in the upcoming version. We'll have to see what that looks like.

The general design of the resolution could simply be tweaked a bit.

I've been working with the solution for five or six years at this point. It's been quite a while.

We've worked on both the Windows and Linux platforms and have not had any issues with stability. It's been very good in both cases, and we have not faced any errors. There are no bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash.

We have 100 user licenses and we are using them in real-time. We work with an Indian bank that often requires more users. We can implement MDM to accommodate their needs at any given time.

I've worked with support from Oracle and a few other vendors, so I can compare it to those experiences. When I compare with other vendors, Informatica support is better, feedback-wise. Their documentation is great. They are very responsive to their customer base and very quick to respond to inquiries. We're very satisfied with their level of service.

I don't really have experience with other solutions. I only really know MDM.

The initial set up's complexity or simplicity depends on the requirements of the organization. Some have simpler implementation cases. Others are more complex. I would say for the simple to medium cases, the installation and deployment is very straightforward. 

When it comes to bigger builds, we need to be a bit careful in order to configure a few more settings to make it work properly. In general, the solution has simple to medium level complexity during the set up process.

The time for development usually takes a few days. It does depend on who is setting everything up. If you are well informed on the solution, the deployment process itself may only be a few hours. For a downtime point of view, you don't have too much time between products. Depending on when you do it, you can have 0% downtime as well, however, it would need to be strategically planned.

The solution has a couple of pricing models. You can go via can go a number of records, number of CPU, and various other items. I don't know what current model we follow. 

My experience on pricing is maybe four to five years old. I don't know what the current model is based on in our organization.

Although we're on version 10.3, we're working to move over to 10.4 soon. We're about to upgrade.

If you look at the Gartner quadrant, MDM is the top product. There are a few platforms available, however, I don't have good experience with other products in order to compare and to recommend. From my personal point of view, definitely I would recommend MDM.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We're still testing a few capabilities that the solution provides, however, we aren't using them yet. We do plan to implement them in the future. Since we aren't extensively using the core features, I'm not giving them a higher score. We need to see how things progress.