Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We are customers of Informatica PIM and I'm a senior architect. 

Informatica comes with a predefined data model which is the way in which you enrich your products. It acts not only as master data but also as a product enrichment tool. The product provides flexibility; you can go for an undefined number of attributes that define a product. You can plug it in with any e-commerce website. That's its value to us and why we need it. 

Database access is highly restricted with PIM. If you're using the cloud version, you probably won't have database access or a view of it. If you're wanting a customized application, you can develop the out-of-the-box PIM solution with a little bit of customization here and there without even needing a database. That's a very big drawback. As a developer or as an architect, you need to have a data model. I know some people use it without database access and the issue is that they don't know what that data model is built on other than just seeing it through UI tabs. The one thing I'd really like to see is for the solution to be made scalable. 

The solution is stable, in terms of bugs they're very good. They keep evolving their toolset. I have encountered many bugs in Multidomain MDM, but to date not in P360.

Scalability depends on your use case. If you're using it as an integrator, then it is definitely scalable. That said, it would require an altogether separate MDM solution. If you don't have MDM, then there are likely to be some limitations. We're in the process of installing now but in my previous company, we created the core set of attributes through MDM. From there it went worldwide through an e-commerce website. We have 50 to 60 people internally using it as a tool. If you're exposing your data through an e-commerce website, then it's accessible to all, although just for reading and not for updates.

If you're working with Informatica, you need to interact with them on the out-of-the-box features. They are very efficient and quick in their response times. 

I've trained in Stibo which is a little bit better than PIM and I've used Oracle PDH and CDH. Those were basically a package MDM solution. If you're using SAP, I would suggest Oracle products. But there's been a very big evolution over the past decade when it comes to enterprise MDM tools. Most people working in companies are disbursed in different locations and using multiple toolsets, they can't be restricted to one technology. That's the reason that Informatica, Stibo, Riversand, and other technologies are very useful and very powerful. When comparing PDH to PIM or CDS to Multidomain, managing the Informatica toolset is easier in terms of effort required in comparison to managing Oracle MDM or Oracle CDH or PDH because they have their own set of limitations. The good thing is that they can be very easily coupled with an ERP solution. Here, you have to build real-time or multiple interfaces. 

The setup is relatively easy I would say. But if you need additional attributes, it gives you a repository manager feature where you can use XML, add your own attributes and then configure it. To my mind, the setup is simple to moderately complex.

Licensing costs are a little pricey. For my previous client, as a support contract partner, we were making less money than Informatica was charging them. 

Informatica 360 PIM was bought from Heiler and is a very good tool if you already have MDM in place and you simply want to use it as an enrichment tool. With Informatica, you perhaps need to go somewhere into the roots of Multidomain. P360, Multidomain, and C360 are all different things. Managing a thousand plus attributes into that data model is going to be very complex. If they could come up with a standard data model that Oracle offered customers like PCH or PDH, similar to what P360 has, that would be my preference. Also, my recommendation is to always utilize your team as an integrator rather than being a master data manager.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We have a lot of data from multiple vendors spanning multiple years. We want to have one unified final data standard, rather than searching around to do the quality check. We have a data governance process to make sure we have the proper data. In order to do that, we use some tools, such as Informatica Cloud Data Quality to bring the data together and to do the quality checks.

One of the most valuable features of Informatica Cloud Data Quality is Master Data Management. You can write code to build your logic rules to check the quality. 

I used to use Informatica Cloud Data Quality more but recently we have been using another tool that we feel is better because it handles spatial data. Informatica Cloud Data Quality could improve by adding the ability to handle spatial data.

When I build the workflow and rule configurations, they could improve by making the process easier. You want to automate it and not have to manually do it.

I have been using this solution for several years.

The solution is stable, it has been around for a long time.

The solution has been scalable for the amount of data we have been processing.

We are a large company and a long-term customer, the support we have received has been good.

I have evaluated other tools.

This is a good and very valuable tool, but it has some drawbacks and there are other alternatives.

I rate Informatica Cloud Data Quality a nine out of ten.

I have worked with two clients implementing Informatica MDM. One use case was for the regulatory master data in big pharma (using multidomain edition), on premise installation. The other installation was related to several data domains implemented using Informatica multi-domain MDM edition, but hosted by vendor.

Helped identifying and reducing data duplication. Helped in improving data quality.

Its data cleansing capabilities are very valuable. The match and merge and the audit trail functionalities are very useful. Review and approval workflows are widely used by the user community.

Informatica support should be improved, as resolution of some cases takes definitely too long. Scalability of the solution should also be improved.

I would also like to have a bit more modern and friendly UI for the end-users. There should definitely be a simplified way to configure the system and set it up for the end users.

I have been working with Informatica MDM for three years - on premise and hosted version. I started with MDM 10.2, and then with version 10.3 upgrade to 10.4, which is the latest one.

Its stability is pretty good. We don't have any major concerns.

It is scalable, but its scalability should be improved especially with the hosted version.

It is a strategic MDM solution in the company, so it is extensively used.

We have had some trouble with their support from time to time. Resolution time could be improved.

We have been replacing several very old solutions which reached end of extended support life and several old bespoke systems.

It is a pretty complex product, so the initial setup is also complex. You require skilled resources to deploy this product. Its deployment can take several months.

We use an experienced system integrator and seasoned external consultants.

It is a pretty good and advanced tool, but at the same pretty complex to set up. To implement Informatica MDM, you should look for very skilled resources with past experience in deploying Informatica MDM, not competitive solutions. 

Informatica MDM is one of the best in the market in the master data management area. Make sure that you realize the potential of this solution and like with all other MDM projects - plan your roadmap carefully. Start small, enable most important capabilities and then work on enabling additional features.

Don't overengineer. Informatica MDM is very flexible in defining the underlying models, setting up workflows, enabling cleansing, etc. Hence a risk of misusing the product or make it too complex and downgrade its performance of usability. If you don't have really skilled resources who have worked with Informatica MDM, there is a good chance that the project will simply fail, or it will take you much longer than expected to deploy and benefit from this product.

I would rate Informatica MDM a nine out of ten.

Primary use case is generally for product items and demonstration. 

I like that Informatica MDM doesn't require a separate IDQ. In the IBM InfoSphere, we need exclusive data quality to identify the issues in the source system. But if you use Informatica MDM, that's not the case. The MDM itself identifies the issues and we can use the data quality tools and the score card. It's good compared to other tools. Troubleshooting is very easy and I believe performance is better than any other tool. It solves any complex queries you can connect, any complex route, any complex mappings, you can do it all with Informatica MDM.

I'd like the ability to directly connect from MDM to any of the analytical tools. It's a feature that would be very helpful for analytical reporting. When you connect to the cloud, there are multi-cloud technologies that will have some problem and when you connect from on-prem to cloud, there are more data latency issues than with other tools. The product is more expensive than other similar solutions. 

I have six years of experience with Informatica. 

It is a stable product compared to other MDM products. Other solutions like Oracle CLM and CDH are similar tools but they're not great when compared to Informatica MDM. Of course, it is very stable compared to any other MDM products.

The solution is scalable but when you do the design, you have to know what the data load will be and the number of concurrent users. Based on that you have to design the infrastructure and measure capacity. 

I've implemented this solution in three or four different projects.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

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 of this product is for data management relating to customers and contact information. It's a global resource, we ensure the quality of our customer information and primary attributes. I'm a principal data architect and we are customers of Informatica. 

The solution has improved our organization by providing data quality.

The evaluation service is a valuable feature of this product. 

Because we are moving everything to cloud and our platform is in Azure, it has an infrastructure as a service. I'd like to see a platform as a service, to avoid having to take care of the payments as an upgrade for the platform. I'd like to have email as a service, it would allow us more flexibility. But we already know that Informatica have a cloud integration service but it's not mature enough to do what's required. The service model can also be improved. 

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is not as stable as we'd like. We need to do a lot of work on the operational side because it crashes frequently, at least once a week.

Scalability is not a problem. You can't count the number of users because it's a platform that has an operational model in which we move the data. We have the data and we clean the data, but users don't have direct contact.

The technical support is very good. 

Initial setup is not complex, it takes about a week to install. We have very good consultants that carried out the deployment for us so although licensing is tricky, the development and the installation is okay.

I believe licensing is around $700,000 annually and we pay around $300,000 for support. The licensing is tricky because sometimes we need to pay for additional connectors and those are hidden costs for us.

We evaluated SAP Master Data Governance. We noticed that more people use Informatica and because it's the most widely used platform we went with it because we knew we'd be able to get access to consultants.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We are simply service providers; I don't think our relationship with Informatica is that strong. We have a financial client that has a very good relationship with Informatica. They were recently using PowerCenter and IDQ, but a couple of years ago, they purchased DIH. Recently they have been doing some POC using Informatica, Enterprise Data Catalog. They have a great relationship with Informatica. 

We don't use Informatica Data Integration Hub extensively. I enjoy using it to create multiple publishing models.

The solution is good but recently, we have stopped using this product because we were not using it extensively. If you are using Data Integration Hub, it should be as a centralized repository, where it can communicate with many systems. For our current client, we are only using it for two source systems, which are not driving big revenue. For this reason, we stopped using Data Integration Hub and started publishing the news directly.

At present, I am not sure how many sources it can communicate with (how many multiple connectors are available). Nowadays, they're coming up with many connectors. It can communicate with all of the Cloud connectors and Cloud databases. If they could leverage social media connectors, I think that would be great a great asset. If they added this feature, it would be much more scalable.

I have been using this solution for almost two years. 

We encountered a few bugs in the coding page, but we faced bigger issues with Informatica PowerCenter. The data was not loading correctly for certain multi-regional datasets; when we analyzed the data, we tracked it to the same code page from the starting point to the end. Other than that, we never faced any difficult situations.  

We never had to use their technical support. We resolved any issues ourselves and thankfully, we never experienced any problems that we could not handle. 

The initial setup was not very straightforward. Not complex, but not very simple either.

Deployment took roughly one week — 40 hours max from start to finish.

We have a team of 30 to 40 people who handle all maintenance-related issues. 

Informatica products are always increasing in price. Nowadays, many of their customers are leaving and seeking other data integration tools. That's the only drawback with Informatica. Performance and flexibility-wise, they're very user-friendly, but comparatively, their prices are a little bit too high.

Presently, everything is moving to the cloud, and moreover, many people are moving to Snowflake Data Warehouse, as it provides more scalability. I feel the usage of DIH is very limited compared to Snowflake because Snowflake holds and stores highly compressed data and allows you to use different cloud-based tools, including AWS services, DCP, and other services. Snowflake also comes with Matillion, which is a very good ETL tool.

The use of DIH is very limited. Anything that we do with DIH, can be done with Snowflake, regardless of the subscription you may have. There are plenty of use cases — you can use it to build tables and consume it from the downstream. For these reasons, I believe that DIH is currently not doing as well as Snowflake in the market.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. Performance-wise, it could be better. The performance-related Issues could be due to low infrastructure, but for whatever reason, sometimes the performance is slow.

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.