Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We use Informatica Cloud Data Quality in a medium business environment.

The quality of the data improves with Informatica Cloud Data Quality. There is an address cleansing feature called AddressDoctor that cleanses and enhances the quality of the data. Additionally, several algorithms are available for use, such as correcting typo mistakes in the data, whether in alphanumeric, upper case, or lower case forms.

Informatica Cloud Data Quality has significant room for improvement. It is not stable, and there are several issues, especially on the cloud side, unlike the on-premise version which was very stable. There are problems with upgrades and patches that do not make sense and can negatively impact the existing code.

There are substantial stability issues with Informatica Cloud Data Quality on the cloud. The on-premise version was very stable, but on the cloud, the product experiences many issues with patches and upgrades disrupting functionality.

On a scale, scalability with this product would be rated as five or six out of ten.

I deal with technical support daily. The support is not very good; each ticket starts from scratch as there is no continuity between personnel handling the same ticket.

Neutral

From my experience, I have always used Informatica. I transitioned from the on-premise to the cloud version of the product.

Connecting to the cloud allows access to many connectors, which is a positive. However, the stability and performance remain issues. In terms of scalability and cloud connectivity, it is number one.

I am not involved in the pricing details. It appears to use a model based on usage, such as how many rows are processed.

I would rate the solution overall as five to six on the cloud. I would prefer my review to remain anonymous due to my H-1B status. The overall solution is rated as five to six out of 10.

Public Cloud

I use Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services predominantly for data integration. I utilize it for building data pipelines, which is a critical aspect of my job.

The most valuable feature of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for me is the availability of connectors. A connector is a piece of software that allows access to specific solutions such as D365, Snowflake, and various databases. The connectors serve as the main functionality, making data integration processes more efficient by saving time and effort that would otherwise be spent accessing data via other methods like APIs.

The tool is quite good overall, but sometimes the number of modules can be overwhelming. If the development interface could be optimized to have fewer modules, it would be greatly beneficial.

I have been using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for a year. Before that, I operated in a different environment, and I am now fully in the cloud.

I would rate the stability of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services as seven or eight. At the moment, everything seems fine and I don't have any issues with its stability.

I rate the scalability of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services as eight. There are many options available, and the licensing model is quite good, supporting our needs effectively. It's quite important to maintain its current licensing model.

The customer service and support for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is rated as eight. My impression of their support is positive, and everything is functioning well.

Positive

Previously, my solution was not cloud-based and was hosted in our data center. However, I've now transitioned to a cloud-based approach with Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services due to its suitable licensing model.

For me, the initial setup was very easy because Informatica primarily manages that. I am not responsible for setting up anything since it is provided as Software-as-a-Service.

The developers maintain their own pipelines, job schedules, and so on. I don't require dedicated people solely for maintenance.

I haven't observed a return on investment in hard figures yet, but Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services does save me a significant amount of time.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is affordable for my specific use cases, with the pricing being rated three or four on a scale where one is very cheap. The affordability may vary based on how much data is manipulated.

I evaluated a couple of options before selecting Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services. The most suitable licensing model was the deciding factor in my choice.

The overall solution is rated as eight. I plan to continue using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for data integration whenever required.

Public Cloud

Other

My use case is basically on the client side, in the energy sector in the US, specifically with Duke Energy, who are using AWS for the Data Lake portion.

People use Informatica Enterprise Data Lake because we can create the whole journey from data migration projects from the legacy system to AWS and to the Lake architecture, covering the entire journey from the source to the landing zone, then to the curated zone, and finally consumed by both downstream and upstream applications.

The main benefit of Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is that it allows you to use different types of data types, including blobs and storage; all types of data—structured, unstructured, and semi-structured—can exist in the Data Lake architecture, making it robust for retrieving data based on your filtration needs.

Its value is actually governed by the client, who combined with our company and AWS, so we all work together to use the workspace and all these things for Informatica Enterprise Data Lake.

Improvement depends upon how we can faster showcase our data in our reports, whether in Power BI, Tableau, or other formats. Improving the speed of data showcasing and filtration would be better, and though we can customize these aspects in Informatica Enterprise Data Lake, there's still room for enhancement.

One area for improvement could be in the integration part, making it smarter and having a plug-and-play approach, allowing users to retrieve data without needing to write the codes or manage the libraries and functions.

I have been working with Informatica Enterprise Data Lake for more than two years.

The stability of Informatica Enterprise Data Lake rates at nine out of ten.

The ability to scale rates at nine out of ten.

I am satisfied with the response time and quality of the technical support.

Positive

Data integration works effectively with AWS, including governance, as we run data governance tools from Collibra.

The initial setup for Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is a combination of both simple and complex elements.

While the machine learning features are available, I am not using these features. My focus is on the legacy system model to the modern model in the Studio, understanding the data flow and the data lineage, and how we can visualize our data with minimal changes, with models in the relational database.

Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is both time-saving and cost-saving to use.

Informatica Enterprise Data Lake's cost is higher, but it provides good value for the price. It comes at a reasonable price, which I would rate at eight out of ten.

Some IBM tools can be seen as competitors, but from my perspective, Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is the best tool. I only work with Informatica Enterprise Data Lake and do not have real experience with IBM.

I am now combining Snowflake and Informatica Enterprise Data Lake at the enterprise level. Data quality check is important, and Informatica Enterprise Data Lake will be the best tool for data quality checks. I have experience with data discovery, though I am not currently using it. The solution is cloud-based, mostly on AWS cloud. The technical support rates at eight out of ten. Based on my experience, I give Informatica Enterprise Data Lake a final rating of nine out of ten and recommend it to other users.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I worked on a project where we had to use these tools to execute the data quality requirements from assessment perspectives to scorecards and similar tasks.

I haven't used any other tools, so I cannot really compare. However, anything that was related to data quality from an implementation perspective was available.

I haven't used it extensively, but it has its own use cases and could be potentially useful depending on the context. The main work I did was benchmarking the data sets that were available at the time to complete the seven dimensions of data quality.

I have used Informatica Cloud Data Quality and PowerCenter for a bit, though I worked on the data quality tool mostly.

I tried both versions, the one on the data center and the one on IDMC, which is the Informatica Cloud.

Regarding infrastructure setup, I was responsible for installing Informatica Cloud Data Quality on Google infrastructure, which was straightforward. I don't recall having significant issues. The challenges were mainly related to firewalls, security rules, and allowing network connectivity.

I think it would be very useful to have the same features on the data center version available on the cloud version. I remember when I used it, there was some limitation in one of the data quality dimensions. I was not able to perform certain tasks on the cloud version, even though I could do them on the data center version.

When a customer moves from data center to cloud or a SaaS implementation on another platform provider, they shouldn't experience reduced functionality. It should be enhanced.

I used the solution for approximately four to five months.

We had a unique setup at the time that didn't function optimally, so certain tasks had to be done manually to some extent.

The solution is stable. However, the data center version currently appears more stable than the cloud version in terms of feature usage and overall smoothness.

Informatica Cloud Data Quality is a scalable solution.

The customer service team was great. They were very proactive with us.

Positive

We were presented with Informatica Cloud Data Quality immediately when we started. There weren't any other options at that time.

As a technology consultant, I worked for the client who had Informatica Cloud Data Quality already set up for us to use.

I would prefer to remain anonymous as including my name could cause some issues.

Though I'm not a data engineer by profession, it was really easy to navigate the tool.

I would rate this solution 8.5 out of 10.

Google

Google

We are using Oracle, Informatica IDQ, EDC, and Axon. These three tools are currently being used on one of our projects in the Middle East.

We recently started a project with one of our clients in Saudi Arabia, and we are using Informatica Cloud Data Quality for data quality management.

The customer required us to use Informatica Cloud Data Quality. They insisted on having it and were willing to pay more, which is fine because we tried to ensure that the tool is just a mechanism to automate activities, not the backbone for implementation.

EDC stands for Enterprise Data Catalog, IDQ stands for Informatica Data Quality, and Axon is for governance.

Mainly with data quality, we have a full data quality management suite through Informatica Cloud Data Quality itself, starting from documentation of business rules, profiling, getting any kind of issues with data quality, doing assessments, and we do these kinds of frequent measures for data quality, as well as resolving any kind of issues.

Regarding the features, the dashboards related to data quality profiling are the most powerful tool that we are using, and the integration between EDC and the data quality is very important. Having this feature provides a real understanding of the environment and also aids in quality management for whatever kind of data sources within the organizations.

The configuration of Informatica Cloud Data Quality is one of the challenges we have, especially with a limited number of users which is always a challenge when using Informatica as a tool.

Our administration team always refers to Informatica Middle East for each step, so communication is also one of our obstacles because materials to explain the steps seem not very mature. The technical team struggles, as they keep getting back to Informatica almost every day for feedback and guidance, and this should be automated somehow so that people can easily access the materials.

The tool itself is mature and everything is fine, but we have these kinds of facilitations that the tool itself needs to be improved.

I am satisfied with the quality of support I receive, but sometimes we get some delays here and there when it comes to responses, but overall, it's good.

Positive

I do not consider that Informatica Cloud Data Quality is cost effective enough, as it's very expensive and we are using another tool called OvalEdge, which is similar in some features, but not all features. OvalEdge has about 90% of the functionality of Informatica Cloud Data Quality but costs about a third of the price.

I definitely will not recommend Informatica Cloud Data Quality because it's very hard to manage the licensing model and the price is very high. My experience with Informatica Cloud Data Quality compared to OvalEdge shows that OvalEdge is better because they are very flexible, they develop connectors whenever there is a requirement, they respond immediately, and the installation and configuration of the tool is straightforward and easy to use at a third of the price of Informatica Cloud Data Quality.

Collaboration between team members is important. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Informatica Cloud Data Quality a nine out of ten.

We use Informatica Axon primarily to manage product attributes with different roles and responsibilities across various business units. This involves complex approval processes and workflows tailored to each business unit. We have four to five business units. 

Additionally, we perform data quality checks to make sure everything goes through proper authorization and adherence to compliance guidelines. 

Different teams, including our compliance group and business unit-specific groups, so there are some parallel workflows and nested workflows within Informatica Axon. The platform also enables report generation, email alerts, and other functionalities.

We have a small vendor team with expertise in Informatica, but the majority of the involvement (80%) is directly from the client, with only 20% vendor participation.

Informatica Axon has significantly improved our manual processes.

For example, if you needed to onboard a product or a particular customer, we were initially using just an Excel sheet. The exchange of Excel sheets happened via SharePoint or through emails, and then it needed approval. There are different stakeholders across regions, and we are a multi-channel company.

For example, we have teams in Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, and the US, across different regions, as well as Canada and Asia Pacific. Each business unit has different roles and responsibilities. When managing a certain set of attributes, you have to properly follow the governance process. All the governance processes were in email, SharePoint, or document before we implemented Axon.

But now, we can create forms and define that governance process, including rules and responsibilities. Many things are automated, showing how the workflow cycle goes, where it goes, and who's working on what. From a data transparency standpoint, we know what is what, where it is coming from, and what the next action is. Some quality rules we implemented automatically control who is accessing the information.

The governance process was fully manual before, but Axon helped us configure those processes, giving us more visibility, transparency, and control over the data. We don't fully use it for every business unit yet, so we are going phase by phase. So far, we have implemented it for three business units, each with different rules, regulations, and compliance requirements. We were able to accommodate all these principles.

Everyone who uses the tool likes it so far, which is a success. As we move other business units, we'll be utilizing more of its capabilities. This major win reduced the time required for manual tasks, follow-ups, and errors. It has made the process quicker and less error-prone, which is a visible benefit from the tool.

Data Integrity Challenges:

We use various Informatica products, including those for integrations and data warehousing. So, maintaining data integrity within Informatica Axon itself is not a significant challenge.

The primary challenge lies in getting everyone on board with the governance process. We have not yet fully migrated all of our organization's internal processes and interactions to Axon. We are going module by module, which sometimes requires compromising on data elements shared across different streams that haven't yet been incorporated into the governance process because governance and quality come hand in hand.

This is a gap in our internal processes and not a shortcoming of the tool itself. Governance and quality are intertwined, and while Axon assists with governance, we need to establish data quality measures beforehand. We lack some data quality elements and are actively working on improving this by cleaning up, deduplicating, and standardizing data across the organization.

The most valuable features of Informatica Axon are the reports and statistics. It provides very good insights into pending tasks, completed tasks, and areas requiring follow-up or approval. There are various checkpoints. In one report, we can see the overall status of the system. 

Additionally, Informatica Axon has many out-of-the-box features when we want to configure stuff for workflows, surpassing those of other tools we evaluated, like Collibra. But Informatica is a very established tool that offers a lot of pre-configurations when we govern the workflows. So, these out-of-the-box features are much more robust, and reporting is much more robust compared to other tools.

Data Lineage Feature:

Data lineage is there. But not everyone is into it. We have a lot of legacy applications, and consolidation of the data into our master data management is also a parallel project going on. Right now, Informatica Axon has a fantastic lineage feature, but we do not fully use that capability in our team because there are a lot of prerequisites that we need to set before we can utilize the lineage.

There are very small components where we can see some lineage. For example, if you have product dimensions or dimension-related attributes, we can see how the data lineage is going through. But for other activities, our data is distributed across different platforms and involves about 43 to 50 legacy systems. First, we are in the process of consolidating them into one hub and then do some cleanup. That would be the biggest feature for us to start with this data lineage. Right now, we don't use that capability extensively.

The user interface could be more intuitive. Currently, it's not very user-friendly, and users need to be thoroughly trained to use the tool effectively.

Additionally, more integration features, like third-party plugins for address search and other functionalities, would be helpful for users across different geographies. While some integrations exist in other Informatica products, they are not available in Axon.

Search enhancements would also be beneficial.

I have been using Informatica Axon for a couple of years.

I would rate the stability a six out of ten because there are no critical issues stopping their jobs. It's almost stable for whatever we have done. Some issues come up, and we fix them, but overall, I'll rate it six out of ten.

In our current use cases, we don't see any big challenges with Informatica Axon's performance. But when the volumes increase or we gradually onboard more users, we want to check the performance. 

For the past couple of years, we have onboard one by one and haven't faced any performance problems. But, there are some clients and case studies where they faced performance problems when multiple processes were running simultaneously. This is something we keep in mind as we onboard other business units.

I would rate the scalability six out of ten for now because we need to explore more. Other business units should also come and see how scalable it is, but for now, it's six out of ten.

There are multiple units. We have around 50 to 60 business units, and currently, only three of them are using it. It is used everyday in our organisation. 

The customer service and support were with us. It's more about fitting our data structure to Axon rather than the product's capability. 

We had to do a lot of design work and make adjustments to incorporate everything. Informatica really helped with the initial setup, but it also depends on the contract. 

We only had normal support without an Informatica consultant onboarded due to budget issues. Everything was done through tickets and our own efforts. Maybe that's another reason we struggled.

Support helped around seven out of ten. But it's beyond their contract. Support can only do certain things. For services, you need to hire an Informatica consultant. Our team wasn't ready to hire one due to budget issues. So that's the reason we faced challenges. But as far as support is concerned, they were decent.

Neutral

We didn't use another solution. Everything was manual. Informatica Axon is the one we chose. There were some other bidding processes, but I was not involved in the selection process.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a two out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy. 

Initially, we didn't have the expertise for the tool from the client's end. We had to depend on Informatica for that. There were some initial infrastructure issues. When we got the proposal and started implementing it, there were new findings that we had to fit according to our environment. 

Maybe it's because we weren't well-prepared for expectations. For example, if you want to set up and get started in a week or two, it took us two months for the initial setup and to migrate the data. We faced a lot of technical challenges.

Things didn't fit in properly, so we needed to make adjustments. But, again, it's our personal experience with our client. It might not be a common issue for others, but the initial setup was difficult, and we struggled a lot, so I would rate it as two out of ten.

But after that, it's all good. Once we set it up and started configuring things, everything was more in control, and we didn't face any problems. But the first-time setup was definitely a challenge.

It took us two months to deploy the solution. The most time-consuming part was the data structure and migration.

For us, we took two resources for the deployment process because only two were available at the time. But it depends on each project. We had two resources fully dedicated to this work.

One of them was a normal Informatica expert developer, and the other was a business analyst who was also a data modeler.

I would estimate a minimum guarantee of about 60% return on investment. We are yet to explore a lot of features, like data lineage and migration of business units. But if we migrate everything into it, we can expect a 50% to 60% return on investment, for sure.

For licensing, all I know is the number of users matters. It's not about the volume of data; it's more about the number of users. If more users are added, there's an additional cost. 

We only use out-of-the-box features and haven't asked for any customization, so we haven't incurred additional costs. However, when we migrate all 53 business units, there might be additional costs. As of now, we don't have any extra costs.

I would recommend using it because every tool and technology has its pros and cons. If it fits with your organization, especially if you already have the Informatica suite of products in your architecture, Informatica Axon will fit in very easily. Even if you are on a different stack, it might still work. 

One advantage of Informatica is that they have been in this industry for a long time. They have a strong background in handling data, which is a positive aspect of Informatica Axon. I would definitely recommend it if it meets your standards.

Overall, I would rate it a six out of ten; we have yet to utilize all the features. From the organization's standpoint, it has only helped certain business units so far. Additionally, the user intuitiveness is less, and there are some performance issues here and there. I'm not confident enough to give it a nine out of ten because we haven't fully explored the product yet. It meets expectations but does not exceed them, which is why I rate it a six.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are cataloging datasets across the organization. Cataloging information across all the tables and other files is the major use case.

The feature that allows me to search across the entire organizational database and then look through what objects are in which tables and which locations is quite handy. Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) can connect to pretty much any application, including Oracle Analytics and Power BI, and it works quite seamlessly.

I haven't really used AI yet, but I would like to use it. I may be in a better position to answer this question once I explore that feature. I also want to see integration with other Informatica products, such as IICS, to leverage the metadata from EDC.

I have been using it for about four years, I guess.

My experience with deployment of the solution was pretty straightforward.

We usually get support from our vendor and Informatica, and so far it's been great.

The response time is pretty good because we have someone in-house, who is an expert from Informatica, in our team who can help us with any sort of queries usually. The response time is pretty good. I can't complain.

Positive

I didn't work with anything similar before.

My experience with the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We hired a vendor. They were helpful.

Unfortunately, I can't really quantify it at this stage, but I can see that there's a lot of time saved.

I think the costs are reasonable for the kinds of features that Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) has.

I would rate it 9 out of 10. I really want integration with other Informatica products. For example, we have IICS.

Public Cloud

Other

I use Informatica Data Quality for data profiling before starting any migration projects to understand what the data looks like. I also run quality reports on it, with mappings written for different rules to see what data needs fixing and to identify data issues.

I build our use cases in a very customized way depending on the business needs. There are out-of-the-box features and standard profiling options that provide quick visibility of the data within a few minutes, making it easy to start discussions with the business.

One of the features that I'm looking at is match capabilities at a material level, which is currently not customizable. I often have to write code and tweak the features. Additionally, the user interface requires some technical knowledge; a more business user-friendly UI would be beneficial.

I have been using it for six years now.

The product is almost stable. I experience some restarting issues once in a while, maybe once every two to three months, which require a restart, but otherwise, it's stable.

I have never had any issues with scalability. I have used this product over multiple systems and was able to generate reports for large datasets without any performance issues.

Customer service has been decent. I am currently working to upgrade myself since I have gone out of service support. Otherwise, the response whenever I raised tickets has been satisfactory.

Positive

I previously used another solution called Suniti, which was SAP-centric. The main differences were in pricing and the connectors included in the original licenses. Informatica required me to add certain connectors to my licenses, while Suniti included many connectors in its initial licenses.

I worked with another solution called Suniti before.

I would recommend Informatica Data Quality to others. It's more user-friendly, but it would be great if the UI were more intuitive for business users. Overall, on a scale of one to ten, I would rate the solution a nine.

Other