Collibra Governance Reviews

We're a very large pharmaceutical organization so it's difficult to quantify exactly how many users are using Collibra.

Within our organization, there is a data governance team that we had set up. I am the person in charge of that team. While working on the data governance processes, we thought of leveraging Collibra for things like data dictionaries, developing data lineage, ensuring that business artifacts like KPI catalogs and board catalogs can be built within Collibra itself. 

This solution has done a lot for our organization and the trust amongst the data that we've been using has definitely improved. Earlier, these things were happening in silos, there were people who were doing manual documentation. Now, things are centrally available on Collibra, so it is more of a centralized platform. People are now able to track what is happening in the background of the data that they are using. Essentially, it has provided us with more trust and transparency — this is the real benefit that we've got out of Collibra.

Also, connecting the dots — things that used to be done in silos, now we have a centralized platform. Every team is aligned with what others are doing. It is not as if I am reporting a KPI, which has an "A" definition and somebody else is reporting a KPI with a "B" definition. When things are consolidated from a country level or a regional level and you're trying to present it to the leadership team, then there is a different picture to it. You're not using consistent calculations and definitions. This ability has been really effective for our organization.

It's a one-stop solution for all of our queries related to data that we are leveraging for our reporting. Pharma is totally dependent on what people are turning out as a report and what analysis or analytics they can derive out of it. From there, leadership accordingly makes a decision. It gives us more confidence in having a go-to platform that acts as a one-stop-shop solution for all of our queries.

Due to technological advancement and data becoming more critical for all reporting and analytics purposes, we are no longer restricted to primitive tools like Excel, etc. Earlier, we were leveraging these tools because we used to source data directly from data sources, but now, things have moved to the Azure platform and we have much more freedom in the cloud.

It's now really important for technical people to have some kind of lineage for these data sources because currently, we are not just leveraging data from the source and reporting it somewhere. We have thousands of reports with some transformation that occurs in between. Data is moving from one layer to another — all types, including raw, curated, and rich.

When our technical team works on it and our business demands new modifications, it becomes difficult for them to track that lineage and what impact it's going to have on the upstream and downstream system. This is one functionality of Collibra that we have leveraged extensively. 

We are in the process of migrating all our data sources towards the data lake — some has already been done and more is on the way. We want to connect all of our reports, which are either based on ClickView, Tableau, or PBA, directly to Collibra, as our data platform. If a business user wants to track down a KPI in a report to the rawest data from which we are sourcing it, there are a number of layers and transformations happening in between.

It is important for business users to track what is happening in the background. Are we leveraging the right thing? Are we applying the right kind of transformation or the right business-logic to arrive at a certain KPI? At the same time, the IT team needs to be able to know what kind of lineages there are. For example, If I make a change to one of these things, what impact will it have on the backend? This is one of the powerful functions of Collibra which we as an organization think is really useful — as an organization, we have been reaping the benefits thanks to this solution.

I am a business person — I am a team leader. My duty is to ensure that the data governance processes are set up; that's how I started to use Collibra. There are certain limitations I have observed in Collibra. With regards to our data lake, Collibra doesn't give us direct connectivity to the Azure Data Lake. We have to establish data lineages. We have to browse those files manually and then connect them via Collibra — that's how data dictionaries get published. Overall, it's quite a manual type of process which needs a lot of human intervention.

I've been hearing that tools like Talent are going to be available soon, which we hope to leverage in the near future. Talent is similar to other ETL or Informatica-type tools. It directly connects to the source system, captures all the transformation tools, and provides you with a spreadsheet that talks about data lineage, which can be fed into Collibra. If this functionality could be improved, it would be a great time-saving solution. It would require less effort and it would be a more automated kind of system, less dependent on human operation, which means that it would be less prone to errors as well.

We create and issue the management of workflows with Collibra. In regards to workflows, I find that they can be made very simple. For example, a request goes directly to the person who is in charge of that particular asset and some simpler workflows can be assigned to it. Recently, I find that the default process of issue management in Collibra is really complex — It wasn't really helpful to us.

I have been using Collibra Governance for one and a half years.

If deployed correctly and leveraged properly by the people, if the commercialization of the product within your organization, post-deployment, is good and you're able to transfer that value to people, then this solution definitely has huge power. In terms of data governance, as I mentioned, it can be a one-stop solution for all of your data governance needs. 

If commercialization, onboarding, and value from Collibra are conveyed properly to the teams, then definitely it's a powerful data governance tool.

No. Things were happening in silos. Everybody had their own way of doing data governance. There wasn't any connection or central platform to do that. Everybody was using their own method, platform, files, etc.

We have one person from our leadership team who has experience in data governance — 20 years of experience. Similarly, we had certain technical team members as well. The initial setup was a collaborative effort. Overall, I found the process to be a little complex. 

You actually need to get into a lot of theory to be able to understand the backend of Collibra and then be in a position to be able to implement it. Initially, it's a little complex but now that I've spent one and a half years working on it, I find it a little easier, but at the time of initiation, we found it to be a little complex.

Deployment took us roughly nine to ten months. 

Our data governance lead oversaw the initial deployment. In my team, there were around five team members who were supporting us through deployment. There were two technical members from the same organization that I worked for who were actually involved in the technical assessment. Then there were onshore business people, too. This was all new to our company — we just made decisions and then we started to go ahead with them. 

There was one expert from Collibra that our organization has partnered with because it was a new thing for us. That person actually acted as a guide and mentor, leading workshops and assessments — showing us what should go into Collibra. In a nutshell, these were all the people who were involved.

From a technical perspective, maintenance is required after deployment. We have a dedicated team who looks after this, we don't have to do anything. From an operation perspective, for the maintenance of the asset, you have to ensure that your information is real-time and updated on a regular basis. You cannot just feed this information once and then never look at it — in the data world, things keep on changing. You need to ensure that those dynamics are being catered to. From an operational perspective, yes, there are monthly processes in place that are there to ensure that whatever we have posted on Collibra is up to date and relevant.

From a technical perspective, I cannot contribute much because there is a dedicated team that makes all of the decisions. If we are upgrading Collibra, they are the ones who get the notification, they work with the team and then they agree on the next steps and then we just get notified that new features are going to be available. 

I was not involved in the licensing of this solution. 

We evaluated the pros and cons of another tool (I forget the name of it). From a forward-looking approach and long-term perspective, I think Collibra is far more powerful than the other tool.

Before you deploy or implement Collibra, just ensure that you have certain use cases that really qualify for leveraging Collibra. Assessment and evaluation are really important, first. Benefit analysis is the most important key.

What are the transformational changes that Collibra is going to bring? If it's going to improve your ROI by deploying it, then migrate over to it; just don't do it because everyone else is doing it — that's not a good enough reason. 

There are certain tools out there that can analyze data and generate reports with a few simple clicks. Collibra doesn't work like that until you have the ground knowledge of the metamodel — how the backend works and how your assets should be categorized. You cannot expect to directly deploy Collibra. You need certain experts in that area who do extensive research and understand the backend of Collibra, only then can you proceed with it. Once you are pro with it, it becomes much easier, but initially, it does require some research and hard work.

From what I have leveraged out of Collibra thus far, on a scale from one to ten, I would give it a rating of seven.

Collibra Governance reduces the time-consuming aspects of the process. You'll need only one-fifth of the team as it'll depend on two to three people, and that's really important to businesses.

I find the metadata feature valuable because it replaces the coding. The metadata creation happens via Collibra, and it reduces the code. 

We have an issue with metadata history. If someone changes the metadata, we can't see who changed it. But they are trying to upgrade the system with this feedback and are still working on it. We are still waiting for a proper log to maintain the solution.

I have been using Collibra Governance for the last four years.

I haven't found any limitations or obstacles with scalability. It completely depends on who is managing the solution. We have placed Java resources, and we didn't face any limitations with that. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give their technical support a seven. 

This is because they still haven't completely provided the solutions we asked for. They're a new product and are lacking in some areas. They can provide 80 to 90%, they have fixed some things in the public sector, but there are some gaps. 

If you're going to start a completely new project, the deployment takes at least six months. But if you're looking to establish particular effective information governance or something like that, it could take maybe 10 to 20 days.

We have had a return on our investment because we don't use the same manpower that we used to for the code.

Before using Collibra Governance for metadata development, you need a business analyst with extensive domain expertise. Collibra Governance is just a metadata creator. You need business knowledge to understand how you're going to create the metadata and how it will link with your business applications.

Collibra Governance isn't the only part where you're going to develop everything. Collibra plays a major role, but you still have to add other components. For example, you need Java resources, Oracle and you need to integrate all this stuff into the Collibra before making the project list.

It demands a high level of visibility. The technology component idea, database knowledge, and more should be made available to a select group of people. If that's not there and everyone is new, and you're using Collibra Governance for the first time, you're going to have many problems.

The teams should have proper knowledge of background modeling, and they should have proper knowledge of the existing business. If they're creating a completely new team and the new team doesn't have any business knowledge, expect project failure.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Collibra Governance an eight.

Our use case is to manage master data inside of Governance.

The solution is deployed on cloud. We have around 10 data analysts using the solution.

The most valuable feature is the discovery process for the data catalog because we get it in a visual format as a way to understand and classify it. It's good to generate insights and get the context of the data.

When we are doing discovery for unstructured data sources, I would suggest a quality report of the data that would indicate what was unable to process.

The main issue is the data quality and that we can't control dealing with the real-world data. It's good to measure this and compare it between different data sources.

The Collibra products are very consolidated in the market. I think it's harder to analyze different domains of the data. Through Data Lineage, I think Collibra could add a relationship graphic analysis. They could add a feature that is a new way to explore the data.

I have used this solution for six months.

It's pretty stable. It hasn't suffered any outages so far.

I'm not sure if you can improve or optimize the performance to streamline it, but in terms of stability, I haven't had any issues.

We haven't scaled up, so I don't know if we will have any issues with this.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

The entirety of Data Intelligence is good, but I can't talk about all the products inside. I can't give it a 10, at least for the pieces of Collibra that I know.

There are many pieces of the platform, and I think everyone should at least test the Data Catalog and Data Privacy or deploy it and combine it. If we mix with other vendors that can deliver these things, it will be complex to get things done.

It's very tight with the Data Catalog and Data Lineage. It's more than just an integration and an API for your services.

Our primary use case of this product is for metadata information for our technology assets. We also use it for all the governance dictionaries, and for minutes as well.

The solution is very useful for IT people but it's also helpful for those not literate or knowledgeable in IT. The sales department, for example, can track where the information is coming from, where the transformation is happening and where they can find a report for any specific asset. It's very important for them to have it handy, and I believe that for the people who need to know that information, it's very good.

The diagram showing the limits is absolutely magnificent. It shows an end-to-end business term or any asset going from end-to-end. From a visual perspective on the diagram, it's simply beautiful.

The workflows and the language they use needs to be improved. Programming the needs for every user on the workflows is a key improvement that is required. In addition, they haven't updated their training solution in a while. We need to implement a lot of things ourselves and they want us to move to the cloud but there are a lot of glitches in the system. There are three environments - stage, development and production. Often things work well in the first two stages and then when you get to production, they don't work. It happens a lot and their response is slow. 

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

I would say that stability is around 85%-90%. It's very stable compared to other solutions on the market. 

Scalability is very good, excellent. 

Collibra provides one-on-one technical support, which gives access to a very knowledgeable person and their customer service is amazing. The only problem is that sometimes they don't know the answer so they have to check it out and get back to us. Sometimes you reach a dead end and that's the main problem of their system. We also now get in-house support.

We didn't switch from another solution, but we were using other solutions to control metadata. We used Infomatica for our transformation things. It wasn't like a governance tool. We also used Spark IS, an information solution, to harvest the data we needed.

The initial setup took a week because our systems are tricky due to security considerations. Deployment throughout the company took about six months, but that's an internal issue because of training implementation and that adds to the time. It's our main governance system so we had to move carefully. We already have 2,100 people using it. Operations uses it a lot and sales uses it for everything. 

For now, only 60% of our company is using it, so there's no ROI yet. 

Collibra started at a very reasonable price and then they increased the cost significantly by about 150% and almost lost us as a customer. It was something that the people from procurement and from finance ask whether the solution is really necessary.

At the time we also evaluated Unify, which became Boomi after it was purchased by Dell. That's an amazing tool as is Informatica. The issue there was that the price was too high. We went with Collibra because of the price and what it gives the end user.

Sometimes the technical support is messy but the system is great. It's a very good tool and I would suggest speaking directly with the technicians who develop the tool, rather than customer service. It's a great tool for a medium size company. if you're in a larger company, I would recommend implementing team by team. It's a tool that the end user needs to understand so if you implement it all at the one time, people will have difficulties and you won't have the support. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Collibra Governance helps us set the business rules and define critical data elements.

It is user-friendly, and other companies use Collibra Governance as well.

I have been using this solution for about a year and a half.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. When we initially migrated, it was a little tough, but we are getting used to it.

We had issues during setup, so we had to bring in a third party for the initial setup and migration from IGC to Collibra Governance. We didn't have technical knowledge then, so we needed help.

I do not have details on the licensing costs.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. However, we like the solution, and I recommend it to others. It is better than the IGC solution we used in the past.

I don't use it as an individual. It's basically for my clients. I serve as a consultant for the tool. The typical use cases for the clients that we get is around metadata management and around building lineage. You can create a lineage by modifying out-of-the-box Collibra asset models.

While, for privacy reasons, I cannot share exact use cases, I can say that the solution helps smooth and streamline the processes of clients. 

The most valuable features of Collibra are the workflows and the data lineage capabilities. They help improve the client's existing processes. You can map those into workflows and those processes can directly be done on Collibra. Basically, what happens is, you directly script the metadata for the process that is happening.

I'm fairly new to the product, however, what I generally hear from my clients is that the requirement around having ways to ingest more metadata. Currently, with Collibra, they provide you a catalog platform, which helps you integrate or get metadata from a few commonly known platforms, like Tableau and IBM Db2, and Informatica. If they could bring them through, or if they could bring in more connectors to help us ingest metadata from other systems as well, that would be really helpful. That would reduce a lot of time and effort from our end.

If people had backward compatibility as well, that would be much better. I've also worked on other technologies, primarily Java, which is very, very much backward compatible. Any new implementation which they bring in does not impact your existing work to a heavy extent. It would be helpful if Collibra was similar.

I've been using this solution for the past two and a half to almost three years.

The stability as of now is quite good. We do get regular updates from the Collibra platform and that is good. In terms of performance, at the end of the day, it boils down to how your infrastructure is. However, we haven't really faced any issues with our clients.

If you have an on-premise setup, then the scalability is entirely in your hands it depends on the sizing. However, if you have a cloud-related Collibra setup then the scalability is pretty good. 

In terms of internal scalabilities, such as the different platforms we can bring on or onboard onto Collibra, it is good as of right now. However, if we have more connections or if you have leads to ingest data from these different sources, it could be better. That is an area where we can still see some improvement.

I'm more of a developer here, therefore, I've not really interacted with the Collibra support team. If a client needs help, we ask them to route it via their fortified product partners. We get a resolution that way. I haven't directly interacted with Collibra.

I was not involved in the initial setup as that is taken care of by the Collibra team.

We implement the solution for our clients according to their requirements. Collibra also does a lot of the implementation process as well.

I do not have visibility into the pricing of the product. It's not an aspect of the product I handle.

My overall IT experience is only for three years. I basically started working with Collibra. Therefore I have not really evaluated other solutions. I've never run a comparison with other market tools like Informatica or other ETL-based tools, for example.

If you know Collibra's history, the tool is fairly new to the market. It is maybe eight to 10 years old. Within the past three years, we've seen the Collibra platform, or the Collibra product, changing a lot and developing a lot. They've been incorporating a lot of user suggestions. I would say the DBA, the system we've learned, the product is still quite immature. However, it's developing. Earlier, they were using a few core APIs, which will now be deprecated in the newer version. Even though those are mapped to a newer functionality, it's an ever-changing thing. That does impact all your backend code and workflows. New users just need to be aware that it's still evolving.

Collibra generally, is trying to incorporate as many new solutions into its product. That sometimes comes at the cost of an existing solution being removed due to coaligned abilities which you have already kind of implemented with the clients. It's kind of a reimplementation on the newer versions for a newer component. It's something to be aware of.

From a client perspective, I rate it as a six out of ten. From a market perspective, I can rate it as a seven or eight. As much as I have heard that tool is comparatively unique and that lineage and the other capabilities like workflows that this brings to the table, compared to other products in the market, is kind of better. From a product perspective, I have to rate it as a six or a seven. And from a developer perspective, I'll rate it as a six. Overall, if I had to rate it on every aspect, I'd give it a seven out of ten.