Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We use the solution for ETL.

It's a powerful tool to create data warehouse solutions for our clients. We take unstructured data and use Informatica Cloud to structure it in various ways, making it usable on a reporting front end. This enables clients to make informed business decisions based on the data.

It's the accessibility and the range of features that stand out. Before using Informatica Cloud, we were working with Informatica PowerCenter. The transition from PowerCenter to Cloud wasn't entirely effortless, but it was seamless enough for our developers to adapt and continue their work smoothly.

Our main issue is transitioning from on-premise to cloud data storage. As many clients move their data to cloud platforms like Azure, Snowflake, and AWS, we're encountering problems with Informatica. Errors that were straightforward and clear with on-premise databases now appear ambiguous in cloud environments. Our developers spend significant time reducing these generic errors, often simple issues like a column not accepting null values. This lack of clarity is causing unnecessary delays as they have to sift through logs or contact support to diagnose problems that would have been more easily identified in an on-premise setup.

I have been using Informatica Cloud Data Integration as a financial partner for over five years.

We have about seven developers. It is a scalable solution.

When errors arise, contacting support can be frustrating. Sometimes, the technician can't solve the issue and transfers us to someone else. This makes us less confident that the person helping us is truly equipped to resolve the problem.

Neutral

The initial setup is simple and depends on the task. However, it usually takes a couple of hours if development is complete and we're moving from the development environment to production.

ROI is strong because we have a structured portal that ensures development is done correctly. It is shareable, scalable, and equipped with enough monitoring tools to quickly address any issues. Ultimately, the client doesn't care what tools we use. They just want problems resolved quickly. Informatica provides the necessary tools and features to help us do that effectively.

It has premium pricing. Depending on what we're working on and which features we're using within Informatica, there can be additional costs. It's mostly data integration, but you might need to upgrade your license to include other aspects of Informatica. Certain connectors require a license upgrade to access.

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

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.

We primarily use it as an enterprise-level firewall. 

I have to incorporate my particular data, schema into Axon. I can do it in two to three ways. Either I have to do a bulk upload feature in Axon, and I have to create an Excel sheet and I have to incorporate all the columns, all the attributes, all the asset columns, and their definitions, and everything into the Excel sheet and then I have to upload it. That is a manual process, and an SME has to be required to accomplish that feature.

The feature of auto-onboarding of the assets, enterprise assets via EDC is good. EDC will scan the data within the technical metadata, and then you can associate that technical metadata, and then Axon can consume that technical metadata and associate the business metadata to that technical metadata. Following some Axon systems, we have to create some systems to associate that technical metadata, as there has to be some logical hierarchy that has to be followed. It allows for some flexibility. You can have related features like policies, business glossaries, or maybe some regulatory compliance feature policies, et cetera, as well as governance.

If you have a DQ rule, data quality rule, on any particular subject area or any particular column, then one cannot create directly a rule in Axon. It has to ingest the technical tool we create in IDQ then into the Axon.

Informatica Axon itself is not a very complete tool. It's highly dependent on Enterprise Data Catalog and IDQ. Blending data catalog and IDQ makes it complete. When I say blending, I mean in the sense they have internal plugins, internal listeners. Axon has internal listeners for reading EDC, as well as IDQ components. EDC is Enterprise Data Catalog, which's a metadata catalog from Informatica.

I would like to have broader connectivity. Axon currently is limited. It cannot connect to any other application. It does not have any connectors for other applications. I want more applications to have connectivity to Axon. Axon should create more plugins for connecting to other applications, which are currently dominating the market.

The solution still is a bit manual in its functionality. We want t to be more automation-driven.

The solution needs to be more resilient.

I've been working with the solution for the last three years.

Currently, what happens in a week or two, the server goes for a toss because Axon still uses PostgreSQL as its database. They have all the services and they, basically, fetch all the backend tables. All the tables are in the PostgreSQL database. That is also a kind of constraint for Axon as PostgreSQL nowadays is a solution that no one uses. That's why the server always goes for a toss and we have to restart the server. They have to make it more resilient. The resilience is missing. 

For example, in EDC they have multiple nodes. When one node goes down, you can still use the backup node. You have to just configure it. In Axon, this does not work like that. They have to make it more vigilant instead of having to restart the cycle and again restart all the services, pre-configured services to get it up and running. That thing is a bit scary sometimes as, over in product staging and dev, it works, however, for production, if it goes down and we need our scanning and some processes running, then it's pretty tough.

Technical support, nowadays, is a bit of a let-down. They will reply once you raise a ticket. They normally categorize their ticket as a P1, P2, or P3. A P1 ticket is for production for the first failure and the P2 and P3 are for normal failures. They reply promptly, however, the response is not very good. Earlier, GCS, Global customer support used to make sense and be helpful. However, nowadays, their quality of service is really going down. The person that comes to attend the ticket is often not very equipped, or not technically not very capable.

Therefore, you need to have a regular follow-up. Normally what they do is not solve the problem. They will ask you, source this, the source that, and then send some kind of justification instead of trying to solve the issue. Sometimes the client is not technically equipped to answer their ticket. They want to see some logs which get embedded. They ask businesses for those logs. Then, the business has to log into Unix, find a particular folder, and access that backlog. These become a challenge for our business as there are not that many Unix-friendly people. In any case, it lengthens the process and draws out the resolution.. 

When I started, I was using version 6.3 and now it's 7.2.

The solution is on-prem in the sense that it's a web browser. It's browser-based so that you can use it on your desktop for unblocking your firewall. It's an enterprise firewall, you can deploy it. Since it's browser-based, it does not matter where the server is. The server can be on-prem and it can be deployed on an iPaaS service or other infrastructure at your service.

Informatica has created the Axon brand in such a way that it's kind of an interesting strategy for them. Once you have Axon you cannot buy it as a standalone product. You will always have to buy IDQ and EDC. That's a sales strategy. However, they really need to improve on their customer support. I really would advise Informatica to work on support. They really need to catch up on this, and they really need to add more qualified engineers to their customer support team to meet the client's expectations.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

The improved interface (IDD), eliminating the need to run a full tokenization process during match & merge process allowing 24x7 access to on-line users, and its better interface in console.

In the previous version, over 5,000 users of our on-line customer maintenance application were unable to use the application for approximately 12 hours every weekend while the match & merge function was run. Since upgrading, the overall time to execute M&M has decreased and the on-line users are able to add, update & search for customer records 24x7.

We experienced several basic issues with the product that required daily meetings with Informatica product specialists. Several Emergency Bug Fixes (EBFs) were required to fix the issues. It was felt that the vendors internal testing should have caught many of these issues and not been found by a customer.

I've used it for six years.

Deployment was very smooth due to extensive planning between the development and application support teams. A two week outage was planned and communicated. However the overall outage lasted only eight days. Running the Readiness scripts in production for several weeks before deployment, eliminated this step from the deployment process, and corrected data issues. Also, deployment activities ran faster in production environment than they did when performing upgrade steps in other environments (Dev, Val & POC).

Several issues were encountered in production that required immediate remediation that were not found during the 10 week QA cycle. After four weeks that system is stable and the operations team is able to complete daily & weekly cycles without issue.

There were very few changes to the database, and the same number of customers were being processed. A HealthCheck by Informatica was performed before starting the process to assure that the existing infrastructure was adequate for the new version.

Overall it's very good. Once a point person was assigned by Informatica, all the issues were consolidated into a single tracking spreadsheet that was reviewed daily. Tracking tickets were still submitted, but we did receive expert attention to resolve issues quickly.

Very good. Although, most technical support is off-shore, and there were issues with working time that prevented internal staff from interacting with off-shore experts.

No – just a long over due upgrade from 9.0.1 to 9.7.1.

The upgrade process is straightforward, and well documented. This process was executed multiple times as different environments were being built. By the time the production environment needed to be upgraded, it was almost standard. A separate Proof-of-Concept (POC) environment was developed to allow the developers to “play” with the new version and test functionality.

A combination of in-house and a vendor team. It was difficult to find anyone who had expertise with 9.7.1, so both teams learned during the project. The vendor team (Wipro) did have Informatica MDM experience in various version that allowed them to contribute to the design of the upgraded system.

We have a global license which was outside of the cost of the upgrade project.

No other options were evaluated.

The upgrade is straightforward if you currently have Informatica implemented. Don’t wait too long to upgrade, we waited five years between upgrades, and will not do so again. If this is you first MDM implementation, spend as much time forming data governance program as you do on the technical piece. The major vendors in the MDM space (Informatica, IBM, SAP & Oracle) have similar functionality. Informatica has been slowly integrating their legacy ETL product into the former Siperian product to make a very robust product.

Overall product management, flexibility, intuitiveness and governance.

Workflow & UI

2 Years

4/5

I used IBM PIM before, I switched because of customer centricity, enriched out of box product data management features in Informatica PIM.

Straightforward

Vendor team

Yes, STEP, Oracle PIM

I mainly use it for data management.

It's for tool management, maintaining the golden record of customer status.

Data integration should be improved. Another area of improvement is customer applications, along with business 365 application case integration between applications.

I have been using this solution for three years now. I work with the latest update.

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

I would rate the scalability of the solution an eight out of ten. There are currently nine end users in my team. There might be more people in the company. 

Recently, Informatica MDM upgraded, it transitioned from its traditional on-premise MDM offerings to a cloud-based platform called Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS). So, we are not planning to expand its further usage.

The customer support and service are helpful. 

Neutral

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy. 

It is very easy to set up. However, the deployment time depends on the configuration. It can take 10 to 15 minutes.

The pricing is reasonable.

The users should have more training on Informatica MDM, especially practical training. The vendor should provide some practical training.

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

The product is used for data governance. It's a tool for data governance, a technical metadata dictionary, and a data lineage repository.

So far, we have been pleased with its capabilities. 

It has a wide coverage of technologies. 

The solution scales well.

It is stable and reliable. 

The technical support has been helpful.

The initial setup is very, very difficult. 

The solution is quite expensive. 

I would like them to extend the coverage to other technologies like web services and programming languages.

I've been using the solution for six months. 

It is stable, and it is reliable. The performance is good. We haven't dealt with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We can scale the product.

We have about 50 users on the solution right now. It's not used too extensively just yet. It will be in the future, however. We do also have plans to increase usage. 

We've used technical support previously and found them to be quite good. We are satisfied with the level of support we can get. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup is not straightforward. We found it to be quite difficult. It took us about two weeks to deploy it.

We have ten people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks, including a team leader and project manager. 

The implementation can be done in-house with a lot of effort.

I'm not sure of the exact cost, however, the range is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's very expensive. 

I'm not an experienced user of it. I used it in workshops, and I use other Informatica products, so I have some relevant knowledge.

I deal with the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the product nine out of ten and can recommend it to others to use. 

We use Informatica Supplier 360 to provide a New Zealand-based national product catalogue for the health sector.

It's got a reputation in the industry as one of the best solutions for master data management. So, it's what we see in the Gartner top right quadrant as the best product in that space.

We'd like to see the microservices, which don't run yet because the solution is not yet fully cloud-based.

I have been using this solution for about 12 months.

It is stable.

One of the main reasons we purchased this product was its scalability, which is better than other offerings in the market.

We have a premium service with access to tech support. They're very good. On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate them as eight.

Positive

We did not use any solution previous to Informatica Supplier 360.

It's a long-term journey, and we're still working on it. We're due to finish at the end of this year, making it a two-year deployment, but it will have a long run.

A mixture of in-house and integration partner.

We're still in the deployment process, so we haven't seen any ROI yet. We also have a benefits realization program that won't be realized until we've fully rolled it out.

The licensing model allows you to consume a reasonable amount of products and is not constrained to specific parts items. So we can bring on other components of the solution without needing new licenses. You order a tranche of stuff and consume it. 

We are quite happy with the licensing model.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.