Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

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. 

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 primarily use the solution for tasks such as masking. It's used to mask the customer data.

We are using end-to-end features of Informatica. Everything comes under the product. We really like that the solution is part of a bigger use case that can all be under one umbrella system.

There are new features that are being built to help more closely link all of the solutions we use, and we like that they are always thinking about how each product interplays with the other.

We've used the solution for quite some time, so in our organization, the product is pretty mature.

There are lots of use cases surrounding the use of the product.

The integration could be a bit better. The process is something new. 

They need to include more documentation and support around the build.

It's my understanding that they are currently fixing quite a bit and building in updated capabilities in the upcoming version. We'll have to see what that looks like.

The general design of the resolution could simply be tweaked a bit.

I've been working with the solution for five or six years at this point. It's been quite a while.

We've worked on both the Windows and Linux platforms and have not had any issues with stability. It's been very good in both cases, and we have not faced any errors. There are no bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash.

We have 100 user licenses and we are using them in real-time. We work with an Indian bank that often requires more users. We can implement MDM to accommodate their needs at any given time.

I've worked with support from Oracle and a few other vendors, so I can compare it to those experiences. When I compare with other vendors, Informatica support is better, feedback-wise. Their documentation is great. They are very responsive to their customer base and very quick to respond to inquiries. We're very satisfied with their level of service.

I don't really have experience with other solutions. I only really know MDM.

The initial set up's complexity or simplicity depends on the requirements of the organization. Some have simpler implementation cases. Others are more complex. I would say for the simple to medium cases, the installation and deployment is very straightforward. 

When it comes to bigger builds, we need to be a bit careful in order to configure a few more settings to make it work properly. In general, the solution has simple to medium level complexity during the set up process.

The time for development usually takes a few days. It does depend on who is setting everything up. If you are well informed on the solution, the deployment process itself may only be a few hours. For a downtime point of view, you don't have too much time between products. Depending on when you do it, you can have 0% downtime as well, however, it would need to be strategically planned.

The solution has a couple of pricing models. You can go via can go a number of records, number of CPU, and various other items. I don't know what current model we follow. 

My experience on pricing is maybe four to five years old. I don't know what the current model is based on in our organization.

Although we're on version 10.3, we're working to move over to 10.4 soon. We're about to upgrade.

If you look at the Gartner quadrant, MDM is the top product. There are a few platforms available, however, I don't have good experience with other products in order to compare and to recommend. From my personal point of view, definitely I would recommend MDM.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We're still testing a few capabilities that the solution provides, however, we aren't using them yet. We do plan to implement them in the future. Since we aren't extensively using the core features, I'm not giving them a higher score. We need to see how things progress.

I use the solution in my company for data ingestion and the ETL process. Though in our company, we started to use the product for data cataloging, we still use it for ETL and data integration.

Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is a product that was recommended to our company after we got in touch with various product vendors, and all of them suggested that Informatica is the best in the market, especially as per Gartner's report. A lot of reports were available for the product around five or six years ago, which was before our company decided to use Informatica Enterprise Data Lake. Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is probably the right fit for our infrastructure.

Governance, data dictionary, and data cataloging are not available in Informatica Enterprise Data Lake. A lot of businesses are facing issues related to understanding the area revolving around insights of data.

At Informatica Enterprise Data Lake's level, in our company, we have a lot of redundant data in a lot of our core systems. The basic thing that our company wants is for the product to develop a reporting layer and access data from the document layer so that we can avoid duplication in projects, databases, and data.

There is a lot of maintenance to be done owing to the instability users may face every time because of the huge processing capacity as the company has around more than 50 nodes, which causes a lot of maintenance issues because of which a lot of people don't benefit from the platform as it functions in a slow manner.

Informatica Enterprise Data Lake's setup process was complex since it doesn't support a lot of real-time systems. Every time, we have to find different tools we can use in our company with the solution since it doesn't support many real-time systems. Even if our company invests in some tools, Informatica Enterprise Data Lake creates too many small files with some issues, which we cannot read because we invested in HBase and Kudu, but performance-wise, the process is slow.

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Lake for four to five years.

The area revolving around the stability of the product depends on how we have set up the clusters in our company. In our company, if we consider high availability tools for every service, we distribute services according to multiple racks and nodes, meaning we self-structure them to fix the issues.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. If you want to expand the tool, it's not a big task, but there is a need to procure the hardware and space in Cloudera, where our has stored Informatica Enterprise Data Lake. The process of using the tool's scalability option is well documented.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.
Considering so many dashboards built into the product, more than 100 users of the solution. The tool's reporting layer is also used in our company.

I have experience with the solution's technical support. The solution provided by the support team for the product is fine, but there is some time delay when it comes to certain issues. The support takes time to review the logs and get a solution, meaning the support is able to resolve the issues even though it takes time.

I rate the technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

My company uses Informatica EDC for cataloging along with Informatica Analyst.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The product's deployment phase was carried out with the help of some professional services, but it was not with the help of a third-party professional service. My company could manage migrations and upgrades with our own in-house support team.

The licenses attached to the solution are highly priced. Informatica has licensing models for every product and for every feature, like the web service feature, which is something my company doesn't like. When our company buys a product, it should come with all these features. I would give the product a low rating in the area of pricing.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.

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.

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.