Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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. 

We use the solution for party data management. The tool ensures that the information is the same in every business system so that all the systems have the same view of what parties are involved in an agreement.

It is easy to create REST-based interfaces of the master data objects. It can be used for reading, creating, and modifying the master data objects of the parties, their addresses, and contact information. The creation and modification features always consider the data quality rules, and it is a very powerful way to provide a data interface to master data objects. It is missing in many other tools.

The solution meets the performance needs of my organization. There isn't much that Informatica doesn't do. The maintenance of the data quality rules has been improved. It’s a lot better than it was when we started. Replacing the old SOAP APIs with the new REST APIs is a great improvement. It’s still a work in progress. Some interfaces still use the old SOAP APIs.

The management of different properties is sometimes divided between different user interfaces. The tool should provide a unified user interface to manage the data objects.

I have been working with the tool for ten years.

The tool can scale according to our needs.

The initial setup was not difficult. We had very good support from Informatica’s professional services.

The team was a mix of in-house, vendor and other consultants.

The product has a high price point. However, it does not lack features. TIBCO EBX and Profisee are much cheaper. However, they lack features that Informatica MDM provides out of the box. Though the list price of Informatica MDM is high, it is negotiable.

I do not have experience with the new workflow engine. It is much more extensible because it is a full business process engine. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

My company works with our different customers to implement and install the solution.

The workflow in Informatica Axon is intelligent and good. Informatica Axon provides good data collection and good search criteria. In Informatica Axon, workflow and business glossary are good.

There are some limitations with Informatica Axon when one tries to connect or integrate it with Jira. For example, I can't delete any workflows after the integration process. There are issues with the integration capabilities of the tool with third-party solutions, specifically Jira.

I have experience with Informatica Axon for two to three years.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I recommend the solution to big companies because its functions are suitable for high-end companies.

The P1 support offered by the solution's technical support is very fast. If it is not P1 support, the support a user might get will be slow as it takes time. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

For data governance, I work with Informatica Axon only. I prefer Informatica Axon for enterprise metadata management at an enterprise level, data quality, and integration. I only recommend Informatica Axon, mainly for data governance.

The product's initial setup phase is very easy.

For each of our company's customers, with an installation scope in place, it doesn't take much time. The product's implementation scope differs from the installation scope. I usually help our company's customers implement the tool.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Informatica Axon is a very good product with an easy implementation phase and a lot of information about the tool available online on the internet.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We are customers of Informatica PIM and I'm a senior architect. 

Informatica comes with a predefined data model which is the way in which you enrich your products. It acts not only as master data but also as a product enrichment tool. The product provides flexibility; you can go for an undefined number of attributes that define a product. You can plug it in with any e-commerce website. That's its value to us and why we need it. 

Database access is highly restricted with PIM. If you're using the cloud version, you probably won't have database access or a view of it. If you're wanting a customized application, you can develop the out-of-the-box PIM solution with a little bit of customization here and there without even needing a database. That's a very big drawback. As a developer or as an architect, you need to have a data model. I know some people use it without database access and the issue is that they don't know what that data model is built on other than just seeing it through UI tabs. The one thing I'd really like to see is for the solution to be made scalable. 

The solution is stable, in terms of bugs they're very good. They keep evolving their toolset. I have encountered many bugs in Multidomain MDM, but to date not in P360.

Scalability depends on your use case. If you're using it as an integrator, then it is definitely scalable. That said, it would require an altogether separate MDM solution. If you don't have MDM, then there are likely to be some limitations. We're in the process of installing now but in my previous company, we created the core set of attributes through MDM. From there it went worldwide through an e-commerce website. We have 50 to 60 people internally using it as a tool. If you're exposing your data through an e-commerce website, then it's accessible to all, although just for reading and not for updates.

If you're working with Informatica, you need to interact with them on the out-of-the-box features. They are very efficient and quick in their response times. 

I've trained in Stibo which is a little bit better than PIM and I've used Oracle PDH and CDH. Those were basically a package MDM solution. If you're using SAP, I would suggest Oracle products. But there's been a very big evolution over the past decade when it comes to enterprise MDM tools. Most people working in companies are disbursed in different locations and using multiple toolsets, they can't be restricted to one technology. That's the reason that Informatica, Stibo, Riversand, and other technologies are very useful and very powerful. When comparing PDH to PIM or CDS to Multidomain, managing the Informatica toolset is easier in terms of effort required in comparison to managing Oracle MDM or Oracle CDH or PDH because they have their own set of limitations. The good thing is that they can be very easily coupled with an ERP solution. Here, you have to build real-time or multiple interfaces. 

The setup is relatively easy I would say. But if you need additional attributes, it gives you a repository manager feature where you can use XML, add your own attributes and then configure it. To my mind, the setup is simple to moderately complex.

Licensing costs are a little pricey. For my previous client, as a support contract partner, we were making less money than Informatica was charging them. 

Informatica 360 PIM was bought from Heiler and is a very good tool if you already have MDM in place and you simply want to use it as an enrichment tool. With Informatica, you perhaps need to go somewhere into the roots of Multidomain. P360, Multidomain, and C360 are all different things. Managing a thousand plus attributes into that data model is going to be very complex. If they could come up with a standard data model that Oracle offered customers like PCH or PDH, similar to what P360 has, that would be my preference. Also, my recommendation is to always utilize your team as an integrator rather than being a master data manager.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

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.

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.

Our primary use case for the solution has been in some of our smaller pilot projects.

One of the main valuable features is the user interface which is very easy to use if we have any problems to solve. We don't need to install any client machines to do this, we can access from any machine. 

For the past six and a half years I also worked with PowerCenter, so I used to see the big icons and it's very easy for me to do. But with moving to Cloud there have been some challenges but it's getting better. We are able to connect to a lot of structured data, there are a lot of provisions. 

The user interface could be more user friendly with a simplified mapping task. In general, improvements could be made in mapping. When we create mapping from uploaded data, I'd like to see integrational mapping. I possibly need some extra time to grasp it all but a general improvement in icons and the virtual interface would be good for us. We are working as developers and we're working with the solution on a daily basis so any improvement would be good in this area. 

As far as my knowledge base goes, I feel pretty good with the stability of the product. 

I think technical support is awesome. Initially it feels challenging connecting with IACS, but I am able to get assistance and then apply it immediately. I feel like we're always getting good support from Informatica, even when there are technical challenges, it's one of the best things about the solution. 

I would rate this product a six out of 10. 

Our primary use case for this product is two-fold: 

• Reporting- If the users want to visualize into a meaningful report then they would pass on that as a requirement to the Informatica team. This goes to the Informatica team, which will then apply the business rules and validation, cleansing or whatever else is needed on top of the data set.

• ETL-There is a lot of information that is required by multiple downsizing applications. So, if the file of information is huge, it does not fit into application integration use case so then Informatica can take a huge set of data and pass it onto several downsizing applications.

It has become an easy way to exchange information through any cloud application. As the overall solution guidelines that we get from our solution checking, a connection to an outside cloud application cannot be a direct integration.

My most valuable features of this solution are that the DI team uses the Informatica Powercenter, which is an automized tool that Informatica provides. For quite some time, they have been using this. So, the cloud products are coming from the same school of thought, which makes it more believable that it can do whatever it is required to do. And, I think that was the primary reason for going with Informatica on Cloud The majority in terms of dating their product promptly is something that is quite apparent.

The biggest challenge I see is the IDE's for the cloud and automization are different. They could have made an IDE in such a way that you can write an integration for the cloud. If I had the flexibilty of making that decision later, that would be a great benefit to have.

In addition, another improvement could be if you develop and design your integration without being connected to the server. If you could deploy it anywhere, that would be helpful.

I think that it is the best in the category.

It is scalable.

We have our own team that helps us with support issues. I do not have any experience with the Informatica tech support team.

We also have prior experience with IBM Cast Iron.

I was not involved on the initial setup.

A product must have: quality, performance,good pricing and scalability.

We also considered MuleSoft. We reviewed MuleSoft and found it to be a competitor that has some of the features missing from Informatica. But, it is not completely a perfect competition because it is more into application integration and API management. But, I think that Informatica can aspire to do the same.

We also considered Dell Boomi Atmosphere, but we did not do much research into that particular solution.

The amount of usage that we see in Informatica on Cloud is going to increase. And, correspondingly, the usage of the automized version of Informatica that we use is going to decrease because exchanges are going to be more towards the cloud.

I suggest that someone considering this solution should take a minimilaistic free license, and do a proper analysis of the solution.