Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

The use cases attached to Informatica MDM may vary for different industries. Suppose I talk about industries related to healthcare and life sciences. In the aforementioned scenario related to healthcare and life sciences, there have been situations where a lot of sales representatives have issues while trying to set up calls with different physicians. Informatica or any MDM solution usually helps people in the healthcare industry optimize their business processes, especially when setting up calls with different physicians. Typically, Informatica MDM helps to reduce the number of duplicate details related to a physician or the data related to a particular organization data so that the sales representatives don't end up sending duplicate call invites to the same physician, especially those physicians who have probably different versions of their own name.

I think the integration feature is probably one of the key features in Informatica MDM. When compared to other Indian products, Informatica MDM has an edge due to its integration capabilities.

I don't see any area of improvement required when it comes to Informatica MDM since it is one of the leading products in the market. Some unification in Informatica MDM's UI side would probably make it better. I find Reltio more intuitive when compared to Informatica MDM's UI. Informatica MDM's UI is not intuitive enough. Informatica MDM's UI can be made a bit more intuitive.

I think all the latest up-to-date features are made available in Informatica solution. When it comes to Informatica MDM, all the features are mostly included, because of which there is nothing that needs to be added.

The long response time taken by the technical team of Informatica can be considered for improvement.

I have experience with Informatica MDM. I currently work for a company that has an alliance partnership with Informatica. I use Informatica to develop MDM solutions for my company's clients. I work as a solution provider since my company wants its employees to work as middlemen for Informatica products. In my company, we use Informatica to build solutions for clients. I use the latest version of Informatica MDM.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It is a highly scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

If it is for a single region deployment, the number of users who use the solution can vary somewhere between ten to fifteen, but if it is for a global deployment, then there could be hundreds of users who would use the solution.

The solution is used on a daily basis in my organization.

If there is a super high-priority issue, then the technical team of Informatica is super responsive. However, if it is a low-priority issue, they usually take a little longer than their usual response time. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

When it comes to Informatica MDM, it is mostly a cloud or SaaS-based product, because of which the configuration or setup phases may not pose a challenge. Most of the MDM solutions are now SaaS-based products that the product vendor maintains, and so such products are mostly accessed through web URLs over the cloud. Right now, any configuration or setup is not challenging, which used to be the case several years ago when these solutions were deployed on an on-premises model, because of which installation and other such procedures were required. Currently, most products are SaaS-based solutions, so there are no such challenges with respect to setup.

I rate the initial setup phase of Informatica MDM as a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

Predominantly, Informatica MDM gets deployed on a public cloud. There is a provision to go ahead with if any of our company's clients want the product to be deployed on a private cloud, but it comes at a very high cost.

The time taken for the end-to-end deployment process depends on the complexity of the project that you are working on, but if I have to give you a standard answer, it would be approximately six months to start from scratch until production goes live.

Considering the members from the production and UAT departments, the UAT department dealt with the product for three weeks, and the overall deployment process took place over a month to a month and a half. Around eight staff members were required for the deployment process, including an Informatica developer responsible for configurations, a lead developer, two people for integration, a project manager, and one solution architect.

One of the in-house teams in my company carried out the deployment process.

I would say that the return on investment from the use of the solution is fairly good.

I rate the product's ROI a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is zero percent return on investment, and ten is one hundred percent return on investment.

I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price. The product does come at a certain cost since it is one of the best products in the market. The payments for the solution are made on a subscription-based model, meaning it is a pay-as-you-go model. In general, the costs attached to the solution depend on its usage.

The costs, in addition to the standard licensing fees for the solution, depend on users' requirements.

The people required for the maintenance of Informatica MDM depend upon the requirements of the clients who use the product.

I would say that a team of five people that includes a solution architect who operates in a partial capacity would be good enough to take care of Informatica MDM's maintenance phase.

I recommend the solution to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

We use Informatica MDM to enable the master data for getting the customer's product 360.

Informatica MDM has data quality, mastering the data's capability.

Inserting the GenAI into the master data management will reduce the overall effort of operational activities.

I have been using Informatica MDM for five to six years.

Informatica MDM is quite a stable solution. I rate Informatica MDM a nine out of ten for stability.

Informatica MDM is quite a scalable solution. Most of our clients for Informatica MDM are enterprise businesses.

Usually, it takes six to eight months to deploy Informatica MDM.

Master Data Management is always only 20% implementation; the remaining 80% defines all other components. So, if users have the right process, the tool will do its job. The tool will do whatever we give input for.

Informatica MDM is quite a good product in terms of mastering all the data and ensuring that we will be able to get a 360 degree of the master data.

Overall, I rate Informatica MDM a nine out of ten.

We use the product to store data. We have established a structured system where we store all relevant information, including donor details, images, and series, ensuring easy accessibility for users.

The product's most valuable feature is the ability to select the data flow and lineage.

Informatica Axon's response times and certain aspects of the admin panel could be enhanced for better usability.

We have been using Informatica Axon for more than one year.

I rate the platform's stability as seven out of ten.

We have around 400 Informatica Axon users in our organization. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

The technical support services at the moment are impeccable. The support team has answers for everything. They have maintained this level of quality as we progress. There aren't many issues currently, although we're awaiting the migration to the cloud.

Positive

The implementation process could be simplified.

The platform has a premium cost. I rate the pricing as seven out of ten.

The product needs to be adequately supported in the current setup. I advise others to conduct a proof of concept (POC) and assess how it progresses. The learning curve can be steep, but with sufficient time investment, they can also impart knowledge to the users, which is crucial for effective change management.

I recommend it to others and rate it an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for data governance, data quality, data lineages, and data cataloging.

It is used by an internal team for data discovery. However, we are not able to provide business area-level access to other users because of data security.

It's a good product, and the features for data quality, data cataloging, and UI are excellent. It has a lot of advantages.

The major points of improvement are stability, integration, and permission to sub-folders or categories of data. If you want to provide access to a particular type of data discovery to a team, it exposes a lot of data points which in turn makes Axon not that useful for them.

Permissions, scalability, and connection with other informatic tools are the main areas that need development. Integration with other tools, such as IDQ, is challenging. The management of data discovery is highly challenging because many data points have identical definitions.

Mostly, this will come under the data security permission level or admin access.

I have been using Axon for a year, but I have been using other solutions from Informatica for five years now. 

I currently use the latest version of Axon.

I would rate the stability a three or four out of ten. It's not loading at all and it keeps on getting down.

I would rate the scalability a six out of ten. There is room for improvement. 

We developed something on IDQ on the data quality side. If there is a huge data or a big workload, it takes a lot of time to run and we don't get the result in Axon. 

There are around 10 to 15 end users using Axon in our organization. 

There is a different team for platform maintenance, management, and deployment. There are around ten people on the team. It's a mix of engineers and developers.

The platform team had some difficulties with admin-level things and keeping Axon up all the time because it's on-premises. 

The solution is expensive.

Not on the governance, but I have used Databricks, Azure Synapse, Oracle, and other services by Azure.

Databricks is my personal favorite because of the scalability and the runtime it takes to load a large amount of data from a data engineering and data science perspective. 

I'll probably look for another solution because it has stability issues. When it's needed, it's usually unavailable.

However, it is a good product the way it's designed. It's a very good product, and it has a lot of features that are required for data governance. It moved all the Excel work to our web page, which can be accessible to everyone. It's a good product, but it needs some improvement.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Informatica MDM is a multi-domain product for any master data management. We could use it for customer master data management or supplier data. Given the nature of the business, we can apply Informatica MDM to master the core data entities within an organization.

Informatica MDM has a defined data model we can customize with user and developer options. The solution's user interface allows users to work with the master data model. Another feature I like is that the solution can integrate with various data cleansing engines, such as address cleansing or data quality-related packages or functionalities.

From a data or master data management perspective, the solution is pretty evolved. But from a business process automation workflow standpoint, it could be a bit more intuitive, rather than technically complex, such as in workflow alteration using ActiveVOS. The solution also needs adaptive rules elaborating AI/ML technologies.

I have been working with Informatica MDM for ten years now.

The solution is robust and stable enough.

With master data, we don't usually talk about tons of data. There could be a lot of records, but then it's not that huge. Now that Informatica is shifting towards the cloud as part of their software, they would have considered the scalability perspective, which is not too huge. Like transactional databases, we would expect less data there. The solution is mature enough to cater to a wide range of users.

We have a huge dependency on support all the time. If something is required or unclear or doesn't work, we have to raise a ticket and follow a process to resolve it. The turnaround time is long sometimes.

Even for simpler questions, we still have to be put on hold and wait for someone to pick up and respond. Even if the problem is critical, support does not treat it with the same urgency we would anticipate or expect.

Neutral

One would need professional services from Informatica to get MDM installed, and there has to be a contract with professionals all the time after that to manage the data model and any changes to the data. Moreover, there is a huge dependency on their professional services to work with the product in the long-term perspective.

The setup is not complex for professionals, but people without a technical background would not be able to set up the solution by themselves.

Once the installations are complete, there are two aspects to the solution. One is the back-end, which is the model, then setting up integration to load the data and configuring the MDM system to perform its master data capability. The other part is the front end, which is deploying the user interfaces and ensuring the user roles are defined and set up.

When deploying the solution, the whole project team needs to be around because the developers, the users, and everybody on the project team must come together because once it is deployed, it needs to be tested. Maintenance teams would be separate. They need to focus on any minor enhancements to the solution and provide support with any bugs, issues, or questions users might have with the data.

I have heard from customers that the product comes with a huge license cost. Under contractual terms, Informatica does not let us have full control of our own datasets, but that comes down to how the billing and licensing work. The licensing is a bit complex and expensive.

I have experience working with Informatica MDM. However, I have been comparing it against MS MDS to see how each stands. More from a costing perspective, a licensing standpoint, or any roadmap from a product's perspective, for which MS MDS has no plans to expand or evolve to a newer product with more capabilities. That's something I am checking in the background. Given the current landscape in my organization, both tools coexist, but we are trying to see if we need to replace one with the other.

At the moment, Informatica is the market leader within the MDM space, expanding into the latest data integration and management advancements. I don't see MS MDS in these areas. But then again, MS MDS has been treated as a legacy system within the organization, and we're trying to find a roadmap to replace it with Informatica by understanding what it offers comparatively.

The solution is pretty evolved from an MDM perspective, and it seamlessly integrates with its product suite.

We work with the on-prem version. We have seen the cloud version, but we're not there yet because it takes a long time to onboard all the businesses onto the cloud. The cloud version is still at a proof of concept stage.

Before purchasing the solution, the user must understand the licensing and cost structure, as well as their professional support. All these aspects are important on an ongoing basis. Depending on the wide suite of products they offer, it's best to understand which products would suffice the business needs rather than having to roll out a full-blown MDM solution, which is not the case with all the clients.

I rate the product a seven out of ten.

I manage the environment and admin-related tasks.

I have integrated Axon into EDC, PowerCenter, and data quality tools, and I face no difficulty integrating with those tools.

I also handle installation, configuration, and troubleshooting issues, in addition to when users face access issues or need help seeing their DQ technical roles.

With Axon, you can easily call and verify DQ rules. You can also upload your business gallery, and the business team can easily verify your data because it is secure.

Some of Axon's valuable features include creating your business glossaries, importing DQ rules, and creating change management.

They could improve technical support because it is not good enough at the moment.

I am a consultant and have been working with Informatica Axon for three years.

I rate the stability an eight out of ten because I have not yet seen the environment go down.

I rate the scalability of the solution a five out of ten. We have faced some performance issues. We have about five or six Axon business users who are data owners and stewards. They are not very active with the solution.

Personally, for the last month, I have not touched Axon or the servers. There are no plans to expand Informatica Axon's usage at the moment.

I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten. The clients gave us their Linux servers, and I set up the solution on-premises.

I could set up the environment, the installation, and the configuration in one day.

My organization's initial steps required us to get licenses for the installation, and we needed specific kinds of ports opened from our environment. We first needed to install the Axon agent and Axon server on different directories. Once we did that, we needed to update a couple of files to communicate with data quality and other functions.

The solution requires some maintenance. I might have to perform a sync-up or make sure the environment is not down, but that is very rare.

The solution was implemented in-house, with me deploying the solution single-handedly.

I rate the pricing a six or a seven out of ten because the price is neither too high nor too low.

Informatica is a big name in the market and the tools are trustworthy, which is why our client chose Informatica Axon-EDC. I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company and have worked with two tools from Informatica, both on on-premises and cloud models. I have experience with Informatica Axon, and I have used the cloud services under Informatica CDGC.

The use case of the tool is basically in the banking sector. It is used to optimize certain areas of a project. In Europe, we have a GDPR implementation. In the Middle East, there is the Central Bank of the UAE and UAE data protection law. Implementing data protection laws and ensuring that all the policies are enforced for financial security is my use case. I have to make sure the bank or financial institution meets the requirements of the Central Bank of the UAE. Data quality is another use case where my company handles corporate and retail customer data, and protecting their information is known as PII. The tool ensures that the system holds the PII data properly.

For data lineage, we look for things at a transformation level and how the data is transforming and managing the ETL mapping. Every tool gives this information about how the data goes, but our company is interested in knowing how the data is transforming and the transformation logic between the two data sources.

There are some tool limitations. Some connectors do not scan the metadata properly. If I want to scan the metadata from the data lineage or the Python code, such areas can get tedious in the tool. To manage such areas, one needs to have a lot of coding knowledge, and you need to know how to apply the code, and only then can you get it fixed. There is no user-friendly enterprise.

There are certain shortcomings even if we opt for subscription-based technical support.

I have been using Informatica Axon for four years. I work as a consultant.

It is a stable solution. Once it is implemented, we will handle everything for the business. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a highly scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The tool is meant for enterprise-sized businesses.

I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

I have experience with Informatica Data Governance.

If one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the product's initial setup phase an eight out of ten.

The solution is deployed on the cloud, specifically if you have cloud-based virtual machines. If there are compliance issues, and you need to hold the metadata only on-premises models, you can do that, too.

The solution can be deployed in a few days.

It is an expensive solution. I would say it is the most expensive solution in the market.

For the features of the software, the price is justifiable.

Speaking about how the tool enhances data governance tasks, I would say that we have three types of users, consisting of the consumer, who are normally a business user, then we have a developer and finally the admin. Our company onboards the user, and then the user can collaborate, comment, ask questions, give ratings to their assets, publish the data to the marketplace and go for downloads.

One needs to resolve the problem that stems from the fact that different people can have different understandings of the concepts associated with the tool. A database administrator may see an area as a table, but for a business, it may be a person. The tool gives you a common understanding of the business concept. The tool also provides lineage data and how the business data is performing. It provides an interface between organizational policies, the different processes governed by a certain policy, and the different systems governed by which policy. The tool gives you a 360-degree holistic view of the data.

The cloud version of Informatica Axon utilized the AI for the classification purposes, data domain and automatic data tagging. In my company, we use the tool's AI capabilities.

I will recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

The solution helps with cataloging and obtaining the data lineage. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog also helps in identifying vital datasets, including the critical data elements and cataloging them. In our company, we have to manage the life cycle of the critical data elements and maintain the business glossary.

The definitions of the critical data elements, their linkage, lineage, as well as the relationships are managed using the solution. Informatica has been in the industry for decades, so they are one of the top SMB partners. 

At our company, along with the solution, we also use Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services REST API for app and system integrations in the packaging industry. Of our total portfolio, we integrated applications for about 20%, but we did not have any cloud presence; only a setup application was in the cloud. But for all the on-prem projects, the key components of the customer's product were integrated and governed by using Informatica. 

Data lineage is a valuable feature when, at our company, we design the physical elements and the logical components and need to identify the relation between them. 

The duplicate identification feature for two tickets, synonymous fields, or attributes is another vital aspect of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The categorization of whether data is critical or not in the business glossary is another vital feature of the tool.  

The product is difficult for an untrained professional to operate. Specialized skills need to be acquired by learning the tool and executing it for data operations. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog needs to be more user friendly, the UI is extremely complex.

For instance, if I have to view the tool, the first deterrent is that it gets highly technical. Thus, a limited number of professionals can understand the tool processes. Unless you are a data professional, it's very difficult to use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The tool operates with Power BI sometimes.  

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for eight years. 

At our company, we haven't faced any downtime or business issues with the solution. The solution allows a limited number of users, so it's easier for the vendor to manage stability. 

I believe the solution is scalable and integrates satisfactorily. Our company was successful with scalability because, for the majority of our applications, where the key data was being hosted, we could integrate the apps quite easily with the cloud.

If Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is being used, scaling the data up or down shouldn't be a problem. The solution's cloud integrations make scalability easier, unlike the on-prem version, which requires implementing complex security protocols. 

I would rate the customer support a nine out of ten. The product's support team has been highly responsive while solving the issues faced by our organization. 

Positive

At our company, during the product deployment, we had to asses our applications and APIs that would be connected, whether they were available out of the box or not. But the capabilities of customer connections are available with similar tools.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog offers custom connectivity. Therefore, the deployment process has been troublesome for our organization except for the mainframe. But as we kept using the tool we realized the integrations could be smoothly completed. At our company, we implement the product if customers are convinced to integrate the tool and make it their central, single source of data management for integrators and technicians. 

The deployment of the solution took more than a year in our organization, which included upgrades, contract renewals, and demonstrations similar to IDMC, provided by the same vendor. For deploying the on-prem version of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, a team of five engineers was needed in our company to manage the whole deployment and support process.

A couple of business analysts are needed to gather the users' requirements. Our organization has about ten members who provide on-call support on Informatica for its customers, comprising developers, business analysts, and testers. 

In our organization, we were able to derive about 70% of the critical data lineage. 

It's a costly solution. I would rate the pricing of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog as six out of ten. 

The automated data lineage feature utilization depends upon the integration, which is why, in our organization, we had all our key applications integrated that derived automated lineages. But there were unknown applications as well, which, due to the lack of integrations, needed to be manually plugged in.

The mainframe integration with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is highly complex. At our organization, due to the aforementioned complexity, we had to import all the data of the mainframe into Informatica. If you are able to integrate the tool with your core applications and systems, then the data lineage duration is pretty simple and this structure is the same for competitor tools as well. 

In our company, we might explore in the near future how Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog can assist with AI capabilities. I would overall rate the solution as eight out of ten. To anyone looking to use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, I would say if they are willing to understand the company data, then the professional should gather sufficient technical knowledge about the product or take assistance from an Informatica expert because it's not a straightforward tool.