Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

It comes with lot of features and is a one-stop-shop solution for integration, data modeling, and data governance. Everything can be built under one particular umbrella. If any issues come up, then there won't be any blame game saying that it could be an integration issue or an MDM hub issue because it's wholly owned by Informatica. That's the biggest advantage of Informatica MDM over that of any other tools that are available on the market.

It has given us a lot of flexibility in terms of solutions.

This is a costly solution. We have several customers who evaluate it but then look for other solutions because of the cost.

At present, Informatica MDM comes as an on-premises or cloud-based solution. I would like to see them offer a SaaS-based MDM model. I think they are working on it.

I've worked with Informatica MDM for close to a year.

We have not had any performance issues.

It is a scalable solution.

The technical support is good depending on the SLA. Sometimes, they do have a busy schedule. When I contacted them for issues, someone joined the call if he/she was ready. Otherwise, we have had to wait for a day or two.

Informatica MDM is a costly solution because it comes as a bundle. They are also globally positioning themselves and are definitely working on very upgraded technologies. If someone wanted to do it on the cloud, they have a lot of flexibility because they upgrade themselves according to the current needs. It definitely comes with a lot of features and that's the reason why it's costly.

The licensing cost should be approximately one million dollars. It's about four to five times that of other vendors.

Take a look at your budget first and then proceed with this solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I give Informatica MDM a nine.

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.

We use this solution for data quality management.

We have matured as an organization with regards to better quality management, and we have evolved over time. This solution has had a positive impact on our efficiency, especially with regard to finance officers. They rely on the quality of data for customers and vendors so that they can invoice properly.

From a sales point of view, there are also improvements.

The most valuable feature of this solution is data profiling. We are able to set rules, establish a data quality management platform, and monitor the quality. These features are excellent.

I would like to see better visuals for business users, such as a dashboard where they can precisely track where problems are. You should be able to better visualize data quality.

This solution is stable.

The technical support for this solution is good. They have a good mechanism for support and I haven't experienced any problem with it.

Prior to using this solution, we did not use a dedicated product for data quality. Rather, we used a combination of other products. One of these was CranSoft, by BackOffice Associates.

We switched because this product was quite immature, not covering the governance part of it. It was more for data quality, only. 

The initial setup of this solution is pretty much straightforward.

The deployment should not be complex, although there are other factors that influence the time it takes to complete.

The suitability of this solution depends on your environment. If you need large scale data quality and rely heavily on different connections to ge the data, then you really need a good powerhouse and this is the best. But, for example, if you already have SAP in your organization then you may not need IDQ on top of it. There are different factors to consider.

This is a good solution, but I can't say that you can solve all of the problems using it. Informatica is focusing only on master data quality. In this regard, there is room for improvement, but it depends upon the use case.

I would rate this solution an eight 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. 

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.

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.

I would like to have the solution in one product and technical support needs to be better. 

The product is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Informatica Axon is easy to deploy and takes six months to install. We would need five people for the solution's deployment. 

Informatica Axon is expensive. 

I wouldn't recommend the tool to small companies due to price and integration. I would rate the tool a seven 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.