Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

• Integration - it provides a single code-base with all data management technologies, and handles all entity data types in all modes (for operational and analytical use)
• Model-Driven - it models an organization’s business definitions according to its own requirements and style. All metadata and business services are generated on the organization’s definitions. Informatica MDM Hub can be configured with history and lineage.
• Flexible - it implements all types of MDM styles registry. Reconciled trusted source of truth and styles can be combined within a single hub. Informatica MDM Hub also coexists with legacy hubs.
• Reporting – it has an integrated Data Stewardship User Interface Application which has been recently integrated with Jasper reports. One of the most powerful open source reporting engines which can provide on demand MIS (Management Information System) reporting

I've never been a client, but can suggest the usage across industry verticals.

• Regulatory compliance, such as financial reporting and data privacy requirements
• Avoid corporate embarrassments. For example, you can improve recall effectiveness and avoid mailing to deceased individuals.
• Cost savings by streamlining business processes, consolidating software licenses, and reducing the costs associated with data administration, application development, data cleansing, third-party data providers, and capital costs.
• Productivity improvements across the organization by reducing duplicate, inaccurate, and poor-quality data, helping to refocus resources on more strategic or higher-value activities.
• Increased revenue by improving visibility and access to accurate customer data, resulting in increased yields for marketing campaigns and better opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling to customers and prospects.
• Strategic goals, such as customer loyalty and retention, supply chain excellence, strategic sourcing and contracting, geographic expansion, and marketing effectiveness.

UI application performance was quite disappointing until v9.0.x, but with 9.5 and later versions, they have facelifted the UI. Still there are some performance improvement scopes.

I would like to see a custom service based integration of MDM Hub with the Informatica Data Director (presently JMS and SIF) and a seamless usage of Informatica 9.5+ versions with other databases such as SQL server which still has quite a few bugs.

I would like to see more ETL capabilities inside the MDM tool to be a self-sufficient in handling data extractions

I've used it for about five years, including 9.0.x (7/10), and 9.1.x (7.5/10).

No issues encountered.

Sometimes, but it depends largely on the design decisions.

Absolutely brilliant. Their on-demand support is really good speaking from a development team perspective.

Very straightforward. You just need to finalize the version based on business requirements, and I always suggest you get the latest version. And there is a Product Availability Matrix available which will guide you through the rest of the process.

It allows you to build your own rules to identify the golden records as part of master data management.

It helped my client, a technology company, to identify a unique customer and remove the redundant customer information. For example, a customer might be linked with a product to the organization directly, indirectly or as a retailer. Informatica MDM helped us realize our goal of maintaining a distinct (golden) record in our database for better decision making and reporting purposes.

I've been using it for 15 months.

In general, it is good. We used to face some Java application problems, approximately two issues a month.

As the data keeps growing, we have to clear temporary storage space. Otherwise, we encountered issues in starting the batch jobs.

Customer Service:

3.5/5.

Technical Support:

3.5/5.

I worked as a vendor for one of my clients. As I heard recently, the contract is still on, so I think we are doing pretty well.

I used this product almost 18 months ago. Informatica is one of the renowned names in Enterprise Information Management and there has been some changes for their MDM product. I would suggest you check their recent upgrades and take an informed decision.

The improved interface (IDD), eliminating the need to run a full tokenization process during match & merge process allowing 24x7 access to on-line users, and its better interface in console.

In the previous version, over 5,000 users of our on-line customer maintenance application were unable to use the application for approximately 12 hours every weekend while the match & merge function was run. Since upgrading, the overall time to execute M&M has decreased and the on-line users are able to add, update & search for customer records 24x7.

We experienced several basic issues with the product that required daily meetings with Informatica product specialists. Several Emergency Bug Fixes (EBFs) were required to fix the issues. It was felt that the vendors internal testing should have caught many of these issues and not been found by a customer.

I've used it for six years.

Deployment was very smooth due to extensive planning between the development and application support teams. A two week outage was planned and communicated. However the overall outage lasted only eight days. Running the Readiness scripts in production for several weeks before deployment, eliminated this step from the deployment process, and corrected data issues. Also, deployment activities ran faster in production environment than they did when performing upgrade steps in other environments (Dev, Val & POC).

Several issues were encountered in production that required immediate remediation that were not found during the 10 week QA cycle. After four weeks that system is stable and the operations team is able to complete daily & weekly cycles without issue.

There were very few changes to the database, and the same number of customers were being processed. A HealthCheck by Informatica was performed before starting the process to assure that the existing infrastructure was adequate for the new version.

Customer Service:

Overall it's very good. Once a point person was assigned by Informatica, all the issues were consolidated into a single tracking spreadsheet that was reviewed daily. Tracking tickets were still submitted, but we did receive expert attention to resolve issues quickly.

Technical Support:

Very good. Although, most technical support is off-shore, and there were issues with working time that prevented internal staff from interacting with off-shore experts.

No – just a long over due upgrade from 9.0.1 to 9.7.1.

The upgrade process is straightforward, and well documented. This process was executed multiple times as different environments were being built. By the time the production environment needed to be upgraded, it was almost standard. A separate Proof-of-Concept (POC) environment was developed to allow the developers to “play” with the new version and test functionality.

A combination of in-house and a vendor team. It was difficult to find anyone who had expertise with 9.7.1, so both teams learned during the project. The vendor team (Wipro) did have Informatica MDM experience in various version that allowed them to contribute to the design of the upgraded system.

We have a global license which was outside of the cost of the upgrade project.

No other options were evaluated.

The upgrade is straightforward if you currently have Informatica implemented. Don’t wait too long to upgrade, we waited five years between upgrades, and will not do so again. If this is you first MDM implementation, spend as much time forming data governance program as you do on the technical piece. The major vendors in the MDM space (Informatica, IBM, SAP & Oracle) have similar functionality. Informatica has been slowly integrating their legacy ETL product into the former Siperian product to make a very robust product.

Overall product management, flexibility, intuitiveness and governance.

Workflow & UI

2 Years

4/5

I used IBM PIM before, I switched because of customer centricity, enriched out of box product data management features in Informatica PIM.

Straightforward

Vendor team

Yes, STEP, Oracle PIM

I use AddressDoctor to validate address on a e-commerce site (based on WebSphere Commerce) for a company lead on food production. It is simple to use and results are always correct. Options used to configure validation request and details provided in result, such as which field is changed and why.

I'm not involved in this aspect, but reports underline delivery failure decreased.

Nothing, according to me only data source need to be increased to support new market, like eastern Europe.

Since 2012, when new site version was released. 2011 if you consider also build time.

No problem during deployment; only some issue during development to fit AddressDoctor model whit OOB one.

No.

No.

Good, response is fast and detailed.

Yes, switch was decided by client because previous system is not reliable like AddressDoctor and it doesn't support market where client is.

Complex to adapt data model provided using web service and e-commerce one. Furthermore, I developed two different result management (for customer service and for end user) to fit business requirement.

I implemented it.

Yes, previous versions of address validation (QAS).

Pay attention to configuration. Correct configuration can help implementation and reduce integration time.

Address correction batch mode and suggestion list

Billing/customer contact departments used to verify all addresses manually, it used to take weeks. Now that we run all the addresses through AddressDoctor, we know what is a deliverable address and what is not, and we see the suggestion list for the addresses which are not deliverable. Great in reducing human effort and errors.

Suggestion list and batch mode

5 months

None

None

None

Customer Service: 8/10Technical Support: 8/10

A little complex, in configuring the suggestion list in the admin console and content management.

Vendor, very goo knowledge and experience.

I know it reduced a lot human effort which in turn means savings but I don't know the exact figure.

• Matching, merging and survivorship
• Maintaining cross reference and merge history information

A lot of my pharmaceutical clients had to implement an Aggregate Spend application to track how much money they are spending on their prescribing physicians. This was need to comply with the Sunshine Act and their was a need to uniquely and unambiguously identify these physicians. The Informatica MDM tool provided a very robust and cost effective solution to implement a single view of physicians.

The major area of improvement is its GUI front end. The out of the box solution call Informatica Data Director is not at all user friendly, it is a data stewardship tool. A user friendly and feature rich front end will be a great improvement.

I've been using it for over eight years.

Only minor issues which can usually be resolved by the Informatica Support team.

Never when the implementation and sizing guidelines were followed.

Never when the implementation and sizing guidelines were followed.

Customer Service: Customer service is very timely and consists of very capable and competent staff.Technical Support: Technical Support is very timely and consists of very capable and competent staff.

I was implementing the Siebel UCM product before while working for Oracle. I had to switch because my client opted for the Informatica/Siperian MDM solution. I have been implementing this product ever since.

The initial set up and configuration is fairly straight forward, which is one of the strengths of this product.

I have implemented this solution with vendor teams as well as in-house ones. A rigorous Vendor Selection process including reference checks are a must if using a vendor to ensure successful implementation. I prefer to work with in-house teams so that it becomes a great learning process for everyone who will have to enhance, maintain and support the MDM application.

In most of the implementations we used relative implementation costs rather than ROI and the Informatica MDM solution is very cost effective.

It varies by the size of the projects based upon number of sources, data volumes and quality, complexities, etc.

Most of my clients go through a Product Evaluation and Recommendation phase during their MDM implementation and the other options usually evaluated are solution offerings from IBM, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Trillium, etc.

Always start by forming a robust Data Governance organization to ensure implementation of good data quality standards, policies and processes.

Data cleansing and address validation are the most valuable features. Also the web services which can be called on the fly. Data Duplication plays a very important role.

It has improved the customer data management where we had the incorrect addresses and data cleansing. Also in finding the duplicates so as to ensure the customer data is not duplicated.

Asia pacific region address validation needs to be improved.

3 years

None

None

None

Customer Service: 4 out of 5Technical Support: 4 out of 5

We previously used Firstlogic as a data quality tool. We found that Informatica is more feasible and user friendly than Firstlogic.

In-house.

Yes. Trillium.