Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

The most valuable features of Informatica MDM are it is cloud-enabled and has all the elements that are supposed to have in terms of MDM as a solution. All the features that are there. It is very well-integrated with any of the SAP and non-SAP applications. It is quite user-friendly. The user experience that you receive in Informatica MDM is quite good.

From multiple masters that are there in Informatica MDM, we can improve the financials.

I have been using Informatica MDM for approximately four years.

The stability of Informatica MDM is good.

Informatica MDM has very good scalability. When we say scalability it refers to the ability to add custom fields as per the requirement and then upgrade the overall data model the way you want for the client. 

The scalability is one of the most important features because the clients do not want to use a common data model. They want to have scalability so that they can upgrade the data model the way they want.

We have approximately 25 people using this solution in my organization. The users of the solution include data stewards, business data owners, data sponsors, technical architects, and testers. All kinds of people are using the solution.

There are certain challenges with the support from Informatica MDM, however, I did not directly contact them. It was somebody in my team who did.

I rate the support from Informatica MDM a three out of five.

I did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup of Informatica MDM is complex but is okay if you have experience. The full deployment took approximately five to six months.

Where one is the easiest and five is the most complex, I rate the complexity of the initial setup of Informatica MDM a two out of five.

The deployment of Informatica MDM was done by a whole team, approximately eight to ten people involved, and they had multiple roles. Each person looked after a different section, such as data, validation, and testing.

My advice to others is they need to first ensure that the functions of the solution are stable and the people who are supposed to implement it should have a good functional understanding. It is important that the team that is working on, in terms of standardization and data quality check, that it is a robust team, a strong team to take care of the solution. If we upload data in the system and then the data is not correct, then it becomes a very difficult job to clean afterward.

I rate Informatica MDM an eight out of ten.

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.

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 use Informatica MDM for master data maintenance across our organization. We have multiple departments, like material real estate, trading, and supply. We use it for consolidation, harmonization, and central master data maintenance. We are also integrating it with the nonrecipient systems.

I like that Informatica MDM has robust matching technology. Informatica MDM is also porting the external Java applications for validations. I can consider that a must-have. It is also exposed to Rest API calls, and we can engage in real-time integrations with any third-party systems.

The configurations could be better. It is a bit confusing because we must develop two tools when building a data model in Informatica MDM. Even though Informatica MDM is a single tool, we have our hub console plus the provisioning tool within that. Whatever data model we are building in the hub console, we have to develop it in the provisioning tool again. It is double the work to create a data model. 

We are also using external calls or the Java custom plans functions. This can be both positive and negative. Since MDM as a client does not support any complex validation, we have to depend on the external call or a Java call. Every time we deployed, the entire solution was impacted if something went wrong. 

I have been using Informatica MDM for four years.

Informatica MDM can be more stable. There are some issues and some crashes, and sometimes, with the data load, we usually feel like we are doing an initial data load for any project. Sometimes, it could also be down to the production environment.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a six.

Informatica MDM is a scalable solution. We probably have 1000 direct and indirect users with multiple use cases. But people solely working with Informatica MDM might be around 200 or 300. Most users are from business IT data support.

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

Technical support is very responsive.

Positive

I was using SAP MDM, which is currently end of its life, so we migrated from SAP MDM to Informatica MDM.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have to make a jar file which we have to download from the link and download it as a client in our local mission. However, there are some challenges if we deploy Informatica MDM with IDQ on-premises. The deployment time depends on the use case. One or two people can maintain this solution.

We have seen a return on investment. From a business perspective, there have been many improvements since we migrated from SAP MDM.

I would recommend Informatica MDM to potential users. Even though Informatica MDM does not come with data quality, Informatica as a whole has some of the right tools. We have embedded the MDM with the IDQ informatic data quality in ways we can interact. It is the best fit for non-SAP systems.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Informatica MDM an eight.

Informatica MDM's most valuable feature is the interconnection between multiple Master Data domains.

Informatica MDM could be improved by adding drag and drop options, business data insights, and visualization reporting.

I've been using Informatica MDM for six months.

Informatica MDM is scalable.

Informatica's technical support is good, except for response delays because of time zone differences.

Neutral

The initial setup is simple.

Informatica MDM's price could be lower.

We evaluated TIBCO, IBM, and Microsoft.

I would rate Informatica MDM eight out of ten.

Some of my clients use it as a front end tool for the data quality governing process.

The solution allows the complete governance process, starting from the data quality, those definitions, and it can get the data quality in the EDC.

I would like to see more API integration to have the capability to build a report using other third party reporting tools allowing things to be streamlined.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is a stable solution, we do not see any kind of issues. When we do find issues we have to go to Informatica to get help, I would say it is not completely matured.

The technical support is very good, they have resolved any issue we have had.

The installation is simple.

You can purchase licenses for this solution at different intervals. For example, annually or every three years. They recently changed their terms for licensing and now it is more flexible.

When choosing this solution you need to identify a path by asking yourself a few questions. Where are we going to start? What are the sources? What are the business pain points in terms of the data governance process?  Are you looking for metrics in terms of streamlining the whole process? Are we looking mainly in the bigger lineage? Are we looking to build reference data? We need to identify those areas and prioritize what is more important. Start small and then eventually add more sources, do not commit too much at the beginning you will not be able to be successful. Start thinking in terms of what are the business pain points currently. What would be the first result that you feel would make the business happier and then adjust accordingly, you can build on it further later.

I rate Informatica Axon a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is purely for data quality analysis.

It took us a while to teach our users how Informatica works and to help them understand. We are still learning together with them because it also took us a while to master the tool. The contractors that come with Informatica are good on the ETL side but not that good on data quality.

The features I find most valuable are the mappings and rules. I am also impressed by the solution's interface. I really like this solution, as it works very well.

The visualization is very limited. It's not modern age, it's not self-service BI. It only has three levels of granularity on which you can present data and that's not enough. What's more, we had a few problems with the configuration. At times we found it difficult to integrate with other systems, but it turned out that the problem wasn't with the solution but with our firewalls. We had a couple of bugs but they are all fixed now. 

Another feature I would also like to see is tagging. At this stage, we can't tag data in the database of the data source with particular data flows. This is a nice feature that other solutions have and that Informatica lacks. We have to analyze and store data in a database and then we have to analyze it again and go through the servers. This takes up double storage. So if the data could be tagged at the database instead, anybody who has access to this data will know if there is a problem with the accuracy or anything else.

I don't think the solution is very stable because we have to refresh and restart the server at least once a month, or even more often. We couldn't understand what was causing this, perhaps we have a few bugs. But at times one team will be working and everything will be running, and then the other team will have some access issues. All we could do to fix this was to restart the server and then everything was up and running again. 

The scalability is very good. We have about 30 users and this may increase because our organization constantly needs more people, so people see the benefit because it's stable and it gives consistency. We will probably move to big data analytics and purchase their big data applications.

To be honest, we didn't really have any major issues yet but the technical support is good and they have a dedicated tech person assigned to us by Informatica to supports us. It works well because if we have a problem that our own IT team can't fix, they use Informatica to help them. 

I used IBM InfoSphere before but Informatica is much, much better; gold standard. There is no comparison. The interface and everything else is better.

The initial setup was very complex. It is mainly our own fault because we didn't go for the solution that was recommended by Informatica. We used shortcuts that backfired on us and we've been struggling for a year. In the end, we did exactly what Informatica recommended at the beginning and now everything works fine.

We have an integration team that is responsible for maintenance and deployment.

Informatica is very expensive. But luckily we got enough free licenses, so we are still within limit. 

Informatica has been the best solution for the past 10 years, but now there are new tools emerging. So maybe we will switch in the future. 

I would advise others to go for it because I love it. Maybe there are better tools, but I don't know about them. I would use it in conjunction with Tableau and Google Analytics for visualization. I would also suggest others to follow instructions during the initial setup and not to cut corners. Do the configuration exactly as Informatica suggests.
I love Informatica but I am not sure if it is value for money. Organizations that plan to increase their users may find it worth the money, but smaller organizations may want to use something simpler.

I will rate this solution an eight out of ten. My rating would have been nine if the solution offered tagging and if it was cheaper. 

We use Informatica Axon for MDM purposes.

The most valuable feature of Informatica Axon is that it is flexible and user-friendly.

Informatica Axon needs more integration connectors so that it can connect to systems and different kinds of datasets.

I have been using Informatica Axon for two years.

I rate Informatica Axon an eight out of ten for stability.

Ten engineers are using Informatica Axon in our organization. I rate Informatica Axon an eight out of ten for scalability.

Informatica Axon's installation, configuration, and user access take two to three days.

Informatica Axon eliminates all MDM-related problems quickly.

Informatica Axon is a costly solution. I rate Informatica Axon a four out of ten for its pricing.

I am using the latest version of Informatica Axon. I recommend Informatica Axon to users as it is a good and flexible tool that gets the work done.

Overall, I rate Informatica Axon a seven out of ten.