Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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.

We use Informatica MDM for various clients for integration, removing duplicates, and centralizing data in one place.

It has improved our organization because it has made our data more reliable. Data is the most important asset these days, and in order to trust your data, you need these tools to make sure that your data is clean and reliable.

The match and merge function is good.

New machine learning could be added to Informatica MDM because the solution is outdated and is not moving with the current trends. The solution is good, but it definitely needs a lot of improvement and needs to speed up as per the market.

Artificial intelligence is something which they should add to the solution.

They need to do MDM on real-time data as well.

The price is a big factor. We try to convince our clients to go for Informatica, but the cost is too high, and they choose another product.

I've been using this solution for 15 years.

It's a reliable and perfectly stable solution.

It is scalable but to a certain limit.

I'm satisfied with the technical support.

Previously, I used IBM MDM, Orchestra Networks MDM, SAP MDM, and Oracle MDM. I have used a lot of MDM tools, and I've found that Informatica is the best solution out of all of them in terms of the architecture and user-friendliness. Also, the graphical user interface is very simple to use.

The initial setup is not very straightforward but not very complex either. It's somewhere in the middle.

Deployment can take six to seven months to a year or two years. It depends on the number of domains and the number of data sets you need to implement.

A team of eight to nine people can usually handle the deployment.

We mostly deploy on-premises and sometimes on the cloud. Informatica is very weak on cloud-based computing though.

We implement the solution for our clients.

Based on my clients' feedback, they have seen a return on investment in the long-term. After five or six years, they can definitely see that the value of their data is growing.

Informatica MDM is very expensive. Apart from licensing fees, they have broken down their products into multiple products, and they charge for each and every product. If the data is huge, they charge for the data. At times, we have to use third party services for data cleaning, and they charge for that as well.

If you are choosing Informatica, then you need to employ the right kind of service provider. If you don't have good implementers, you'll not be able to leverage the product. So, choose your consultant and service provider wisely; then, you will not have any issues when implementing Informatica.

I would rate Informatic MDM at eight on a scale from one to ten.

The cloud version of the Informatica, it's a very substandard product. They might say it's enterprise-ready but it's not at all ready. They need to add more features, such as improved data replication features. If you look at other tools, such as Matillion they are now cloud-native and flexible. Additionally, Informatica Cloud Data Integration should have a good migration strategy from Informatica PowerCenter to Informatica Cloud Data Integration.

I have been using Informatica Cloud Data Integration for approximately 17 years.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is stable.

The scalability of Informatica Cloud Data Integration can be good if you plan well with your enterprise.

The technical support from Informatica Cloud Data Integration is good.

I rate the support from Informatica Cloud Data Integration a four out of five.

We have received a return on investment using Informatica Cloud Data Integration.

We use Informatica to extract data from production. It's mainly the configuration of the systems. We extract data from one site in the same system and mass customer data to the test system. It's a list of customers that is a subset of the data. 

In our CRM, we have data on our customers, and the data in that system is a copy of the production environment. We have all the configurations manually modified to work as a test, but we can extract only new clients, which is a problem. We need to have a CRM with only the configuration but not the customers. 

My plan is to make Informatica work with the CRM. If it works, I am sure that I can get the budget to make it work with other systems, but the first system that I need to work with is CRM. The other ones are less important and don't have the same impact of making it work with the CRM. We're at about 80 percent completion with this project. 

Informatica is user-friendly, stable, and scalable. These three aspects are the most valuable for us. If we can make it work well with the CRM, we can continue or try again this year to complete that part of the project. I am confident that this kind of solution is what we need because we have a third-party resource that works in the development. 

We need to have a lot of hardware infrastructure to make our test system work. We use a complete copy of the production environment for testing, which is a real problem for us. The problem is not with Informatica as a provider per se. It's more of an issue with our system providers, but we need support to complete the projects. That's our real situation. With the pandemic, we have undergone many changes that have slowed down these projects in the last few years.

We have the license to deploy Informatica on any system we want. Right now, we aren't using it as much as we thought we would. We understand the solution, but it isn't easy in some areas. One problem is we have systems in which we don't know all the relationships among the data, and we need support from our providers to get that information. That is one of our most complicated problems implementing it.

Informatica's support understands the solution, but they lack the experience we need for our use case. That was one thing that we prioritized when we started searching for this kind of solution. 

Informatica is working well, but we need access to the production databases to extract the data. The real problem is understanding the data in the system that we don't own or provide. Those are the most problematic to implement with this solution. We make it work with what our team has developed. Deployment took four to six months. Right now, we have one developer and two or three system administrators using Informatica, so it takes about three or four people to deploy and manage the solution. 

We worked with the team we used for all the installations. They made it work. I can say that wasn't as good as I expected when we purchased the solution. When we started the implementation, we understood that they didn't have the research that works in this project because we did a lot of work to understand the data from the implementation team. That wasn't what we wanted because we knew that Informatica would be the most complicated of all the systems we would implement in the extraction. After all, they are our clients, and almost all other systems depend on that system. 

We have a perpetual license for Informatica, and we only need to pay for support. However, because we're not actively using it at the moment, we don't have the budget to continue with the support.

We evaluated several solutions, including IBM InfoSphere Optim and Delphix. We purchased 15 licenses at the same time that totaled around $230,000.

I rate Informatica Persistent Data Masking eight out of 10. It's important to have a robust understanding of the knowledge you need in the system. That is one of the main problems that we have. You need firm control over the systems to do data masking. All of the data is a subset because we want to make the subset and the data masking, but you have to have good control over the systems. I think that is the key.

We have it deployed on the cloud, but I don't think Informatica has been involved much with cloud-based solutions. They have multiple issues, especially related to LDAP and other configurations. Plus, their certified and supported versions are also not what every client has, so they're still evolving in terms of AWS. I don't think they have any support on Azure. They say that for the time being in the Azure setup, you can install MDM the way you would install it on-premise, but we don't have a built-in solution as they have for the on-prem database. That is my understanding for now.

With a Java user configuration, I will probably see 70 to 75 percent of the use cases met. I'm not talking about workflow integration. Instead of going to an active worksite, I'm managing everything from Informatica PowerCenter. I used to do those things, but now I'm just keeping my viewpoint specifically within MDM. I think with the configuration, you can achieve 75 percent of use cases. New tools are coming out that will enable you to achieve 90 percent of use cases with the out-of-the-box configuration, but I would like to keep Informatica tight here. Otherwise, you need a Java user edit course and other things to do multiple things that you cannot configure out of the box. They have to go through those use cases to do something if those can also be configured rather than coded.

We promote our code changes from a lower to a higher environment, which is highly complex when working with a multi-domain MDM like Informatica. This is the biggest obstacle for Informatica MDM, and I think they should change it because that's very time-consuming. You have to be very, very focused. Also, Informatica should develop a process where all the application servers are synced for people using multiple application servers. That's another significant drawback I've seen with Informatica MDM.

Informatica MDM's pricetag should come down. They have to cut some costs.

I rate Informatica MDM nine out of 10. It's one of the best tools in its class. It gets a high rating because of the improvements in the latest version. I was working on a very outdated edition that was seven to 10 years old. There were multiple issues, but they have made a lot of progress, especially in the newer version. For example, they moved away from DB to a different DB-sorted feature. 

Each use case is basically based on two pillars, one is MDM tools (for better consolidated integrated master data) and the second pillar is the e-governance (the quality dimension).

You can build something, you can expose it as a service, which can be consumed by anyone. But there is a good benefit that helps us on boarding new applications, having a seamless connectivity between these. Our center which plays a very good role in ATL, also works well. It has an ADT Meta Data Management business glossary, for filing those kind of components, and it helped us in really maturing from a governance point of view and from an infrastructure set-up point of view.

It gives you accountability to centralize your data and have it available to different applications. Its not limited up to specific platform, SAP for example is quite rigid in connecting outside SAP, and within SAP it is fantastic. 

I think they should work really hard on UI.

The stability is considered "number one." The agility is much better as compared to others.

The scalability of the solution is excellent.

Tech support is good. 

The initial setup was straightforward. If you want to use immediate features, it has out-of-the-box features. But, if you want to play around with it, then it can get more complex.

It's expensive, but if you're looking for a stable solution, Informatica is a good one to choose.

We looked at Informatica MDM vs SAP (solutions) and Informatica MDM vs Microsoft MDS.

At our company, we use Informatica MDM for data architecture and numerous other aspects of data warehouse, such as data designing or modeling. We recommend Informatica products to our customers based on their use cases, data volume, budget, and environment suitability.  

The product isn't mature enough to provide suitable connectors to various data engines. The performance of the solution in transporting data between data lakes and Big data infrastructure is not up to the mark. At our company, we use a similar solution called Spark, which is much better than Informatica MDM in terms of performance and speed. The data support capabilities of Informatica MDM can be improved. 

It's a stable product without any bugs or glitches. But overall Kafka is a better product than Informatica MDM. 

The product exhibits satisfying scalability. 

The tech support is satisfying from the vendor. The support team was able to respond and solve the issues in a very short time. I would rate the tech support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

Informatica MDM easily integrates with the Informatica environment as well as with third-party tools. But for some integrations, for instance, when Informatica MDM is integrated with SAP, the functionality slows down drastically; the task that would take five minutes with Spark takes five hours with Informatica MDM.

The same scenario occurs when Kafka is integrated with Informatica MDM. For popular database integrations such as Oracle and SQL, Informatica MDM functions well enough. 

The initial setup of the solution is straightforward. Our company professionals suggest that Informatica MDM should be on a Linux server instead of Windows. 

The product is very expensive compared to other competitor tools. Informatica MDM is not meant for small businesses but rather used by large enterprises like banks or government organizations. Informatica MDM can be purchased as a stand-alone product and doesn't come in an Informatica bundle. The support for Informatica MDM is not included in the standard licensing fees and must be purchased separately.  

I recommend that others test Informatica MDM with different integration tools before making a purchase decision. I also advise others to evaluate the use cases before choosing a product. Other popular competitor tools in the market include Collibra and SAP MDG. 

Informatica MDM fits our organization's use cases perfectly. When a customer of our company has a plethora of business products, VOCs need to be implemented, even if it's a different MDM solution than Informatica MDM.

Some customers depend on a single technology ERP, while others work with Oracle ERP or SAP, and sometimes they are using ERP and Informatica MDM in combination or migrating from one ERP to another. These use cases will impact the setup that already exists on the customer's site, and thus, the solution needs to be configured accordingly. I would rate Informatica MDM as eight out of ten. 

 A stand-alone application used for any integration with third party tools, like Oracle, it may be SAP, or it can be their local in-house build, or HRMS. It can be any application from A to Z. But this acts like in the web services. 

The data mapping capability is a valuable feature. 

Certain applications aren't accepted. For example, for IBM applications, it takes a lot of time. And certain applications are not being synced with the ION.

I have been using Informatica Cloud Data Integration for two and a half years. 

Its a very stable solution. 

There are twenty five customers at present. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes two hours time. 

It's an expensive solution. 

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