Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

The features that I have found most valuable are, first of all, that it comes as part of this whole bundle of Informatica tools. So if you've been implementing Informatica MDM across a business, you'd often find it comes with it. It's been thrown in as a sweetener. The adoption of it is often the challenge because as part of your MDM project, governance is seen as something beyond the MDM and is often restrictive. So this tool actually, for the first time, when you talk to data governance teams, gives a holistic view of what a data governance team can do with this tool.

Collecting a knowledge repository, creating a business glossary and visualizing the data lineage are quite fundamental as part of your data governance team's work. Once they see it in Axon, it becomes relatively easy for them to visualize what they have to do. Otherwise, it is often a challenge for them to grasp what their role is and what are they supposed to do. Informatica Axon provides that visualization which helps a lot.

In terms of what could be improved, they need to create a rules repository. Business rules for the attributes that you have, keeping them in that central repository, and governance of them is something which Axon is lacking a bit. The Informatica Data Quality tool actually caters to that, so that's probably why they have not built that up in the Axon, but it is definitely something that can be built in to this product, as well.

I have been using Informatica Axon for about four years.

Informatica Axon is stable.

Informatica Axon is scalable.

I have had experience with their technical support. It is definitely there, as in it's quite robust and is a mature tool. You do get enough technical support from Infomatica while implementing it.

The initial setup is purely straightforward.

In terms of price, Informatica products are all a bit pricier than the rest of the market. But if you want to go for products from that stable, I think you'll have to pay a price.

If you have an Informatica installation already, be it IDQ or Informatica MDM, then Axon is the right choice. It's a no-brainer to have Axon.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Informatica Axon an eight.

We used Informatica Enterprise Information Catalog to find hidden data assets in our organization. We have data spread across disparate systems like Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, Redshift, mainframes, etc. Informatica EIC has connectivity to a surprising number of systems and we use this to our advantage creating connections to most of our data sources. We used a 40 node hortonworks cluster and ran the scanners to crawl through our data swamp. It has ran for three days now and we have a fair understanding of our data sources.

• Lineage
• Provenance
• Flow of data through various sources
• Data domain discovery to find out sensitive data.

One thing we find very useful is a feature which lets us know who are the stakeholders of a particular data source, and if you are making any changes to a source, then which users must be informed prior. 

Many dark data silos were identified and many hidden assets were uncovered. It helped IT in initial data integration efforts. We were creating data lake-based on MapR Converged Data Platform EIC, which helped us in initial prep.

Speed. The solution is bit slow.

Six to seven months as of October 2017.

Yes. Installation of the product is bit challenging. It is not straightforward and requires many configurations.

A few bugs here and there.

No.

Technical support and Informatica Professional Services are friendly and helpful. They helped us iron out the installation issues and provided training for our team on how to use the product. 

We used to use Metadata Manager from Informatica, Ab Initio, and Ataccama Data Quality Analyzer. It was a custom made solution based on integration of the above mentioned products. It was difficult to maintain, scale, and required cross team collaboration, which kind of slowed done our pace of operations. Our team does not specialize in Software and IT functionality. EIC provided a one stop solution instead of a lego bricks like solution.

It was kind of complex. It required many prerequisites and required a team of professionals well-versed in Linux and big data technologies.

We implemented it in collaboration between our in-house IT folks and Informatica Professional Services. Informatica sent a team of subject matter experts, who had considerable amount of understanding about the project and the big data ecosystem.

We are yet to recover the full cost of the product, but it seems good thus far. 

Licensing is simple, but cost is bit steep.

No. We are not aware of any other product that solves this problem.

The product requires more polishing and hardening. It might take few more releases until the full power and capabilities of this product are unleashed. 

I particularly value data replication and data sync jobs. Replication allows us to fully replicate all objects from Shop Floor Data Collection (SFDC) to in-house/on-premises database in one job.

I also appreciate the flexibility of the reset target option to reflect the source object structural changes to be implemented on the target database table side. This is awesome.

It helped the organization to always have the backup of SFDC data in-house for data warehousing purposes.

• Stable connectivity: No matter what, our business requires steady, stable, and consistent connectivity. Regardless of how many columns in an SFDC object or how many rows in an SFDC object, we must have steady connectivity.
• Performance also needs to be significantly improved, especially when connecting to SFDC for read and write operations.

I have used this product for five years.

There are stability issues, especially when connecting to SFDC. At times, we do see connection time-out errors, though we have changed the properties in Informatica secure agent properties. We have also noticed that sometimes it does not cooperate well with SFDC read and write operations.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support can be described as average.

The client was using data loader, but as the demand increased to replicate the data and frequency of data replication, they moved on to Informatica Cloud.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. You just have to login to the server where you want to download, install, and run the Informatica secure agent

The pricing structure is good, but having to pay for extra drivers to be used in an ICS environment makes me a little nervous.

The client had already purchased this solution and it was up and running in all of their different environments

It’s a great product which allows the connection to a number of cloud based technologies such as Workday and Salesforce.

Excel-like, so adoption is easy with users. The exporting and importing of information makes data management easier.

We have been able to assimilate our vendor products enhance the data for our web sites and other internal systems and then sync the data out to our customer facing systems with updated prices and product information. It is helping our purchase orders to be more accurate to our vendors.

The job scheduler needs improvement.

3 years

The deployment went very well. We contracted with a smart partner who specializes in product information data implementations. This made all the difference.

Customer Service:

Excellent

Technical Support:

Excellent

This was new for us to move our product data to this system.

Our data was complex so our implementation was. Our contractor who had worked with this tool as an implementer really helped us to configure the data.

Vendor team.

We reduced product data setup time from 1.5 hours to 30 minutes.

The primary use case of this solution is centralizing and mastering the data. It is also used for centralizing the data between your administrator and customer.

The most important features are the mastering of the data and the UI intuitiveness.

I find this solution to be the most efficient, immersive, and robust.

Also, they have a feature map that is flexible and robust.

They need more feature flexibility, as it is not fully developed.

I have been using this solution for approximately 11 to 13 months.

I have not contacted technical support. We have a team in our company for support and maintenance.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to see the business needs and the requirements.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

On-premises

• Matching, merging and survivorship
• Maintaining cross reference and merge history information

A lot of my pharmaceutical clients had to implement an Aggregate Spend application to track how much money they are spending on their prescribing physicians. This was need to comply with the Sunshine Act and their was a need to uniquely and unambiguously identify these physicians. The Informatica MDM tool provided a very robust and cost effective solution to implement a single view of physicians.

The major area of improvement is its GUI front end. The out of the box solution call Informatica Data Director is not at all user friendly, it is a data stewardship tool. A user friendly and feature rich front end will be a great improvement.

I've been using it for over eight years.

Only minor issues which can usually be resolved by the Informatica Support team.

Never when the implementation and sizing guidelines were followed.

Never when the implementation and sizing guidelines were followed.

Customer Service: Customer service is very timely and consists of very capable and competent staff.Technical Support: Technical Support is very timely and consists of very capable and competent staff.

I was implementing the Siebel UCM product before while working for Oracle. I had to switch because my client opted for the Informatica/Siperian MDM solution. I have been implementing this product ever since.

The initial set up and configuration is fairly straight forward, which is one of the strengths of this product.

I have implemented this solution with vendor teams as well as in-house ones. A rigorous Vendor Selection process including reference checks are a must if using a vendor to ensure successful implementation. I prefer to work with in-house teams so that it becomes a great learning process for everyone who will have to enhance, maintain and support the MDM application.

In most of the implementations we used relative implementation costs rather than ROI and the Informatica MDM solution is very cost effective.

It varies by the size of the projects based upon number of sources, data volumes and quality, complexities, etc.

Most of my clients go through a Product Evaluation and Recommendation phase during their MDM implementation and the other options usually evaluated are solution offerings from IBM, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Trillium, etc.

Always start by forming a robust Data Governance organization to ensure implementation of good data quality standards, policies and processes.

The use case for Informatica Cloud APi and App Integration is creating service connectors or integrating applications using API calls or REST services. We interconnect different applications and can extend functionality of that integration using APIs in order to connect with third-party applications. We are partners with Informatica. 

The most valuable feature for me is the easy interface; it has a great look and feel, and the functionality is so easy. The friendly interface means we can easily create applications and integration processes to interconnect different applications.

I'd like to see a change in Informatica's pricing model. It's a common issue with Informatica in their cloud offerings. 

The solution is scalable and stable. 

The support process is good and similar to the support offered for all Informatica solutions. We have access to the portal and raise a ticket when we need to. 

The initial setup is straightforward and part of the Informatica Cloud Data Management service.

As mentioned, the pricing model needs to be improved but maintenance and deployment are included in the cost. 

I recommend this solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

Address correction batch mode and suggestion list

Billing/customer contact departments used to verify all addresses manually, it used to take weeks. Now that we run all the addresses through AddressDoctor, we know what is a deliverable address and what is not, and we see the suggestion list for the addresses which are not deliverable. Great in reducing human effort and errors.

Suggestion list and batch mode

5 months

None

None

None

Customer Service: 8/10Technical Support: 8/10

A little complex, in configuring the suggestion list in the admin console and content management.

Vendor, very goo knowledge and experience.

I know it reduced a lot human effort which in turn means savings but I don't know the exact figure.