Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

I am not quite sure that the product will be part of our use cases anymore. We started off with it because of the data lineage. In other words, we used it because we also used the older Informatica program and it had been serving a purpose for us as a data management tool. But now we are in the process of developing our own solution for at least part of that functionality.  

We currently plan to keep Informatica MDM, but not for the complete handling of the data analytics. We use MDM for data gathering in big data environments. We start with Informatica and do further analysis outside the product.  

I think the most valuable part of Informatica is the flexibility in extending the data model. I think that is the biggest benefit. The data quality component is also an important part of it.  

I have begun to lose track of what needs to be improved because we only use the product now for what it is best at and in those areas it does not need improvement.  

There are two main things and that make up the complete Informatica suite solution. One is the insight into the data lineage which was a huge promise made by the product, but one that it never delivered in practice. That was the big problem that we are trying to solve in another way. The second part of the solution, especially for MDM is its ability to use the data by integrating with other process engines.  

So the insight into the data or the data analysis part needs to be improved.  

I have been using Informatica MDM (Master Data Management) for about two years now.  

Informatica has been stable. It does not have downtime during processing.  

I would say that Informatica is scalable. Right now we have about 20 people using the product directly. The scalability would be in the volume and types of data it can scan and collect and it is good at performing these services.  

With technical support, there is a big gap between sales, presales, and support for the end-users. Like with the data analysis the process starts good but in the end, there is no delivery. There are too many promises and too little delivery. So the support could be also improved after the sales, or I would say that the post-sale support should be improved to be in alignment with the pre-sale support.  

Informatica is definitely not easy to install. In order to do the installation and to set up the whole program, I would say it is complex.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), if I were to rate Informatica MDM and I had a review site, I would mark it as a seven-and-a-half out of ten possible points. It has not delivered on all it has promised.  

Our primary use case is to build composite applications for our clients and to automate the business processes. We build new automation applications out of it

Our requirement is to orchestrate. We talk to different integration points in our client's systems and get the data from different APIs. Data gathered is enriched/cleansed and filtered with application of business rules . Output of application can be a communication sent out to clients customer via different channels or an update to their core data elements via API

There isn't any human touch involved. It's just an automated business process to build different applications and talking to various APIs using the client's ecosystems. Human workflow feature of this tool has not been explored.

We don't use all of the features like Human workflow. Moreover for build human workflow application would prefer products like Appian and Service. Would like to this tool to enable features like BAM and inbuilt BRE. Currently we are using custom integration to external rule engine built using JBOSS Guvnor.

We have been using Informatica for the past five to six years.

For the kind of application we have built and running on this tool, its been very stable and has given consistent performance. The nice feature of enabling logging and persistence level at individual process level gives the flexibility to optimise the performance of process by keeping those attributes at lowest level.

We have not used it with high availability setup. But there is plan to enable it behind LB and deploy it on Amazon cloud.

We very rarely contact their customer support. We generally only contact them for version upgrades and any major upgrades on the server version. Then we use them in our test environment. We'll use it and then we go to production. But we have only done that twice 

We haven't had many technical issues. We don't use all of the components of the tool that are more complex like Huma. Workflow which can be more error prone . We have a straightforward orchestration flow in which we haven't faced any issue.

Earlier we were using product named Intalio. We switched due to its increased license cost and frequent issues.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. They provide steps that were quite clearly defined. You only need to follow the steps in order to configure the server.

I already had experience working with different tools. It was quite easy to do this setup on my own, without consulting anybody.

Inhouse as I have good amount of experience in other BPM tools with more complex setup requirements.

Many other tools were evaluated before finalizing om Activevos. As we did not have requirement for human workflow, so tools.like Appian, Lombardi ans Oracle BPM were not considered and there pricing was also not in he budget. Tools like WSo2, Activiti were considered for evaluation.

Informatica actually does not sell this product. They acquired this product to support their own MDM productt and they want it to be used in conjunction with their MDM product. They have no intention to sell it as a standalone tool to any other company. But because we already have experience in BPM they were more convinced that we'll be able to use this without asking too many questions. So they were okay to give it as a standalone product to us. But they do not sell this product as a standalone product to anybody else.

I would rate it a seven out of ten due to lack of inbuilt BAM and BRE features.

We primarily used the solution because we wanted to be aware of metadata management solutions for our Data Lake, in order to manage the assets in the Data Lake and also to manage the ETL or the data ingestion into the Data Lake.

The solution has an excellent data profiler.

The way that the solution scans is very useful. 

The discovery worked well for the AS400, which is a very old database.

It is not the best solution on the market. 

They don't have a good solution for SSIS scanning, and we don't have the good solution for Microsoft OLAP and Microsoft Tabular. 

Another thing that can be improved is their ability to add custom screens or custom views and manage the custom server and customs views. Currently, it is pretty closed. You cannot add columns to the views, which makes the views very narrow. In order to see data, you have to do a lot of clicks just to get to a particular field.

They have to improve their relationship discovery tool. They say that they have AI inside, but this AI did not automatically find relationships or suggested relationships between entities.

The solution needs better support for data discovery or scans.

I've been using the solution for almost two years.

The solution isn't too stable. If it crashes, it takes time to boot it back up. It's not as stable as you would expect it to be for this type of solution, which is concerning.

We have five people using the solution as of right now.

Potentially, it is scalable, but is not automatically scalable. If you needed to scale it out, then you would have to add some more nodes in order to be able to support the scalability. As long as you are in the boundaries of your initial setup, then it won't scale. However, if you are exceeding that, then you have to increase memory and data store and maybe even some machines to your cluster in order to support the scalability.

Technical support could be improved. From an implementation standpoint, their "customer success" team proved to be unhelpful and did not make what turned out to be a complex set up any easier.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was very, very complex. It took us a few months to complete the entire set up. There were a lot of bugs during installation. Also, when we wanted to upgrade from, I believe it was a 10.2.1 to 10.2.2, our production environment was down for a few weeks just because of the update. It was not a straightforward experience.

We had a very complicated environment, so when we worked on this, we also implemented the SDK or the API mechanism that came with the suite. Therefore, there were four people working on the setup for this environment. We also had support from the local integrator and we had a lot of support from some specialists from India.

We had an integrator and some specialists from India assist us in the implementation.

Most of the work we did by ourselves, but we wanted some help from a local integrator. They had a process that they called "customer success". We had a weekly call with them, with the customer success team. The customer success representative brought in the product team for discussions, but it didn't really help us, to be honest.

It requires between one and two people to handle maintenance on the solution currently.

We ran a proof of concept or a full selection process and we compared it with some other tools. We selected this tool because it had better support for AS400, which was our main source.

We decided to stop the project because it was too much effort and we couldn't benefit from the solution. We saw that it required a lot of effort just to make it work, so we decided to stop the implementation. We stopped using the solution about two months ago.

If other companies attempt to implement this solution, I would suggest that they try to stick to the features which are there and don't try to extend it because it is not that extendable.

In our case, we needed to get a better contract with the local integrator and make sure that they got paid only upon successful completion of the project. Instead, we paid upfront. I'd advise other companies not to make that same mistake. 

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

New ProductBusiness user-friendly web user interface, dashboards and graphs, flexible task-based workflow, ability to use library of out-of-box data quality rules or define custom DQ business rules, channel specific exports, fully customizable BPM workflow engine for task management and notifications, enterprise scalable performance, flexible data model and hierarchy management.

Our Implementation Delivery team is able to design and implement robust business solutions for PIM and Product MDM for our many large, global Retail, Manufacturing and Distribution clients.

Additional pre-built, "plug and play" out of the box functionality should continue to be built.  Additional pre-built capabilities and connectors to better integrate with social product data for ratings/reviews, additional Ecomm and external DAM solutions.

Approximately 4 years.

Some technical issues have been encountered and resolved during migrations and cutovers. 

We have seen stability issues with older versions, particularly 6.x and below. Newer versions have proven stable.

Scalability is on par or better than any other solution on the market. One of our customers has over 21 million SKUs in PIM, and others have 100's of international users.

We use Axon for controlled and governed data sharing as well as for the policies and principles from a data governance perspective. Our use case was for an airport company and we used Axon in tandem with Datacat Log EDC. We customize data search and data sharing. We have a partnership with Informatica. 

The management of the policy is very useful. The ability to customize data search and data sharing is useful. The solution has all the necessary features. 

The GUI needs to be a little more user-friendly and appealing. Salesforce, for example, although in a different category, is very user-friendly and I think if they were to include some of the Salesforce principles, it would be helpful. Informatica needs to do a better job in terms of educating users. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is stable and dependable as long as we keep an eye on the servers. 

The solution is scalable. 

The support process needs to be more agile. 

The initial setup took a few days. It wasn't very complex but there were some initial challenges because we were trying to setup the Informatica Data catalog, EDC, at the same time. The deployment was reasonable but not very smooth. We have around 300 users.

Licensing costs are generally on the higher side.

Collibra was a solution we evaluated but Informatica was the final choice.

I rate this solution seven out of 10.

We would like to centralize all our product information systems. Currently, the product information is stored in various disparate systems, and we would like to bring it to a single place.

The staging and hierarchical features are the most valuable.

Its look and feel needs improvement. It has a lousy look and feel.

Informatica PIM is designed specifically for the retail industry. They need to make sure that it is also applicable to all the other industries and verticals.

I have been using Informatica PIM for almost two years.

It has 75% stability.

It has good scalability. Because of the cloud, we are able to expand it. Sometimes, we do run into issues, but it is mostly good.

We have around 250 to 300 users with IT, business, data governance, and DQ roles.

We haven't yet contacted them. 

We used an Oracle solution. We switched to Informatica PIM because of the licensing cost.

The initial setup was done by Informatica. We didn't face any issues.

We switched to Informatica PIM because it was cheaper than the Oracle solution. It is cheaper initially, but they will bundle it later. This is what happens in the industry.

I would suggest to watch out. Informatica PIM is designed specifically for the retail industry. To use it for manufacturing, you need to think twice and make sure that it satisfies your business requirements. When you are asking for a free demo from Informatica, make sure that you tell your use case and ask them to configure it in a way that suits your business use case. Otherwise, it is not going to solve your problem. 

I would rate Informatica PIM a six out of ten.

The solution was part of building our data warehouses, where we needed a tool for bulk data migration that didn't require mappings when migrating from a source to a target.

The product's most valuable feature is the replication tasks. It allows the creation of identical tasks that can be applied across multiple tables, ranging from 100 to even 1,000 tables. 

The product interface could be improved to be more intuitive. It requires navigating through several steps to access mappings and pre-created metrics. Enhancing it to provide a more streamlined structure or dashboard would allow quicker access to maps and other essential features.

We used Informatica Cloud Data Integration for six months. 

The product was stable. I rate the stability a ten. 

We had 30 Informatica Cloud Data Integration users in our organization. I rate the scalability an eight. 

The solution didn't require much setup, and since it was browser-based, it was fairly easy to use. I rate the process a ten out of ten.

The product was pretty easy to use. The connections to other platforms worked fine. 

I recommend it to others and rate it a seven. 

It is quite easy to use and flexible.

With recent versions of cloud-based products in use for all applications, it provides flexibility in integrating the different applications. With AWS S3 and Informatica, integration is flexible and loosely coupled.

The vendor should have more training resources: online classes, free tutorial videos, etc.

I have used this product for six months.

We have not yet had any issues with stability, as we are just beginning our journey.

Yet to be determined.

So far, so good.

We recently started migrating and using SaaS-based application solutions. On-premises, there are multiple integration platforms being used, such as BizTalk and SAP PI.

Since it is SaaS based, no setup was required, except for the installation on a secure agent.

I was not involved in pricing and licensing.

I was not involved in the selection process.

It is quite useful and flexible compared to other vendors in terms of cost of implementation and use case.