Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We use MDM to get more data quality. We are partners with Informatica and I'm a senior technical lead and practice architect.

The fuzzy matching capability is a great feature as is the network hierarchy which is the new concept code. 

I think the UI could be improved. We're also currently facing issues with real-time integration and if Informatica had their own it would be helpful. They need to look into the user mechanism and the security access mechanism in the data governance process. One of the major features is access control and access data management and they need to work on that because I have observed some data glitches.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The solution is stable.  

The solution is scalable. There is room for improvement in terms of scalability with the MDM SaaS. With limited data it's fine, but with a large volume the scalability is questionable, the threshold of data transaction is different. We are a service-based company, so there are limited users within the company. From the customer side, there are multiple users. 

We sometimes have technical issues and the customer support responds in a timely manner and is quite good.

The initial setup is easy. Deployment takes around 15 minutes and we have 22 internal users in our company. 

We pay an annual license. Mobile players are unable to afford the product. Different MDMs have different pricing approaches but there needs to be room for mobile players.

We went with Informatica because we have functional and non-functional requirements with respect to the market data management of our customers and Informatica is a suitable product for their needs.

This is a good solution although it's expensive and even though we are integrated with Oracle DB2, we're unable to integrate with multiple things. The market is changing and there are many more options so we have to think about the integrations of multiple databases. 

There are some additions or improvements that could be made so I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

I use the solution for enterprise-wide data discovery and traceability, providing business context to data and collaboration between different stakeholders of data.

My organization, being a service provider, uses the product to develop domain PoCs, customer PoCs, develop data management and governance use cases, etc. The major issue with enterprises are the ability to quickly develop an MVP and showcase it to business and other data users for greater buy-in. This is important as these are new technologies - and hence, users might not easily adopt.

Our organization is a service provider as compared to an end-user. We have helped multiple organizations onboard onto data management using these technologies. 

It has improved different areas for different enterprises, including the improvement in overall business outcome and business experience, imbibing a data-driven culture, having easy availability of the right and relevant data, allowing for better compliance to regulations, and providing greater data quality and privacy management.

It has also improved overall time to service data requests such as DSAR requests.

The metadata management of Informatica is great. When an organization uses developer for data integration, IDQ for Data Quality, EDC for Data Catalog, Axon for Business Glossary, DPM for data privacy management etc., Informatica tools integrate metadata from all these tools seamlessly. The advantage is getting a complete view of your enterprise data through business and data lineage - as it not only provides you with pure data lineage but also associates related data quality measures, data protection levels, etc.

Additional metadata harvesters from different major tools can be an added advantage. Informatica provides some smart connectors for harvesting metadata from some of the industry tools. That said, this can be improved a lot more.

Overall, the toolsets are really good.

Installation and configuration can be another area where Informatica can improvise a bit. It is not easy to set up and configure the tool. A proper step by step guide to ensure this process goes smooth can be a huge advantage for end customers.

I've used the solution for more than six years.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent.

Technical support is good.

Positive

Most of our customers were using excel and email-based communication for data access. These new-age solutions improve efficiency ten times or more.

The initial setup was not very straightforward. This is an area of improvement.

We, being a service provider, have implemented and configured the setup on our own.

ROI depends on the buy-in from businesses and overall adoption rates. There is a huge amount of change management and change strategy that needs to be in place to ensure users are adopting the new tools/technology.

Informatica has good pricing options and a good professional services team who can help with setup/configuration.

There are other competing good products such as Collibra, Azure Purview, Erwin, IBM CP4D, and more. All have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you are an Informatica shop, there is no need to think twice to opt for an Informatica-based Data Management product suit.

The solution helps with cataloging and obtaining the data lineage. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog also helps in identifying vital datasets, including the critical data elements and cataloging them. In our company, we have to manage the life cycle of the critical data elements and maintain the business glossary.

The definitions of the critical data elements, their linkage, lineage, as well as the relationships are managed using the solution. Informatica has been in the industry for decades, so they are one of the top SMB partners. 

At our company, along with the solution, we also use Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services REST API for app and system integrations in the packaging industry. Of our total portfolio, we integrated applications for about 20%, but we did not have any cloud presence; only a setup application was in the cloud. But for all the on-prem projects, the key components of the customer's product were integrated and governed by using Informatica. 

Data lineage is a valuable feature when, at our company, we design the physical elements and the logical components and need to identify the relation between them. 

The duplicate identification feature for two tickets, synonymous fields, or attributes is another vital aspect of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The categorization of whether data is critical or not in the business glossary is another vital feature of the tool.  

The product is difficult for an untrained professional to operate. Specialized skills need to be acquired by learning the tool and executing it for data operations. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog needs to be more user friendly, the UI is extremely complex.

For instance, if I have to view the tool, the first deterrent is that it gets highly technical. Thus, a limited number of professionals can understand the tool processes. Unless you are a data professional, it's very difficult to use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The tool operates with Power BI sometimes.  

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for eight years. 

At our company, we haven't faced any downtime or business issues with the solution. The solution allows a limited number of users, so it's easier for the vendor to manage stability. 

I believe the solution is scalable and integrates satisfactorily. Our company was successful with scalability because, for the majority of our applications, where the key data was being hosted, we could integrate the apps quite easily with the cloud.

If Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is being used, scaling the data up or down shouldn't be a problem. The solution's cloud integrations make scalability easier, unlike the on-prem version, which requires implementing complex security protocols. 

I would rate the customer support a nine out of ten. The product's support team has been highly responsive while solving the issues faced by our organization. 

Positive

At our company, during the product deployment, we had to asses our applications and APIs that would be connected, whether they were available out of the box or not. But the capabilities of customer connections are available with similar tools.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog offers custom connectivity. Therefore, the deployment process has been troublesome for our organization except for the mainframe. But as we kept using the tool we realized the integrations could be smoothly completed. At our company, we implement the product if customers are convinced to integrate the tool and make it their central, single source of data management for integrators and technicians. 

The deployment of the solution took more than a year in our organization, which included upgrades, contract renewals, and demonstrations similar to IDMC, provided by the same vendor. For deploying the on-prem version of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, a team of five engineers was needed in our company to manage the whole deployment and support process.

A couple of business analysts are needed to gather the users' requirements. Our organization has about ten members who provide on-call support on Informatica for its customers, comprising developers, business analysts, and testers. 

In our organization, we were able to derive about 70% of the critical data lineage. 

It's a costly solution. I would rate the pricing of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog as six out of ten. 

The automated data lineage feature utilization depends upon the integration, which is why, in our organization, we had all our key applications integrated that derived automated lineages. But there were unknown applications as well, which, due to the lack of integrations, needed to be manually plugged in.

The mainframe integration with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is highly complex. At our organization, due to the aforementioned complexity, we had to import all the data of the mainframe into Informatica. If you are able to integrate the tool with your core applications and systems, then the data lineage duration is pretty simple and this structure is the same for competitor tools as well. 

In our company, we might explore in the near future how Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog can assist with AI capabilities. I would overall rate the solution as eight out of ten. To anyone looking to use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, I would say if they are willing to understand the company data, then the professional should gather sufficient technical knowledge about the product or take assistance from an Informatica expert because it's not a straightforward tool. 

We had proof of concepts where certain test cases were given to improve the functionality of the vendor regarding the supply chain.

So, it was a proof of concept. It was not applied in production.

It was just illustrating the capabilities of the platform, and we were comparing it with other platforms.

If we use it comprehensively, we can improve the data quality metrics or KPIs. 

So use as much data as you process, and have a solid strategy in place. If you don't have a comprehensive approach, then you don't draw any benefits or value from such a complicated platform. So, you have to have the objectives very well set up and be part of your daily activities in order to benefit from such a platform.

I like the connectivity and richness of features for the technical team, the maturity of the product, and that it had a cloud version. There is Informatica Cloud, and it is part of the Informatica Cloud platform.

It also has integration with other data governance tools from Infromatic, which is also good. 

It offers integration with some of the latest data platforms, streaming platforms like Kafka, for example. And the setup of the platform is very challenging.

Regarding the cloud, it is deployed in the private cloud of the vendor, so it poses challenges regarding the security of the data and the confidentiality of the data. There was no offering of a cloud version deployable in the client's tenant where all the data would reside.

I used it for a couple of months because it was only demoed for the client.

It is a stable product. 

The customer servive and support could be faster. There is a slow turnaround. 

Neutral

We just compared the data profiling features or data quality features between the tools. There was a rich functionality available in the system, but we did not draw any conclusions regarding how it improved or may have improved.

It was set up by the vendor for the demo. To deploy the Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, you need at least two admins and architects. 

It enables business processes by providing trusted data that can be integrated into many processes around data.

It's very expensive. It's subscription-based. There are several levels of subscription.

The price is high, but the competitors are even higher and more experienced, like Collibra.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I would recommend it due to the consistency of vision and very good integration between different products of Informatica. It offers wide coverage, the widest coverage of technologies from the major players.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog was used by our company as proof of concept for projects related to comprehensive data governance. 

The solution has multiple valuable features for metadata collection from multiple data sources or technologies. The solution manages data and acts as a central hub for setting up data governance processes. 

The automated scanning of metadata from data sources is one of the most vital features of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The solution comprises attribute features and AI capabilities for automatic relationship discovery between different datasets.

Another powerful feature of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is data lineage. The whole path of data transformation from one location to another using certain technologies is represented in Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The solution integrates seamlessly with other products from the vendor and allows the creation of comprehensive data governance processes.

The aforementioned integrations facilitate the coverage of semantic layers in addition to the technical data. There is another business glossary product from Informatica that easily integrates with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog to consume data harvested by Data Catalog, which makes a powerful combination. 

The user interface of the product needs to be improved. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog captures huge amounts of data and along with this data, the interface becomes comprehensible only for users with advanced technical knowledge. Even for advanced users, it becomes challenging to move around vast amounts of data collected by the solution. 

Some competitors of Informatica are trying to implement some brilliant ideas, but they lack the coverage provided by Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The data lineage feature can also be further improved.

While using the solution, the data is being transmitted outside the client's network to the Informatica cloud, which can be a security concern; the vendor can solve this by enabling the product as part of a public cloud like Azure, AWS, or Google. The aforementioned scenario can be a concern for institutions like banks where there are legal restrictions and data needs to be fully under control. 

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for a year. It was used in two different projects in our company, each of them concluded in six months. 

I would rate the stability of the product as seven out of ten. 

The customer support is satisfying, but the turnaround or response time is quite long as the vendor needs to support a huge number of customers daily. At our company, we have noticed that there are experts in the support team who can provide effective solutions. 

The tool's initial setup is complex. I had experience with the on-prem deployment of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, but I believe the cloud version is easier to set up. The solution's deployment takes around three to six months.

About four to five professionals are required, including technical administrators and data governance experts, for the on-prem deployment of the solution; for cloud deployment, three professionals might be enough. 

It's a very expensive solution. 

Informatica covers the widest area of technologies in comparison to other vendors and they also have a network of partners who develop add-ons for extending functionalities or data source technologies which could be integrated with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The solution provider has a wide partner ecosystem to provide features on APIs and special custom formats that could be imported or integrated into varying processes. 

The solution's features can be extended and the vendor provides useful documentation and training on it. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is a reliable platform due to its extensibility and cooperation with other partners. I would overall rate the product an eight out of ten. I would definitely recommend others to use the solution, given that there isn't a requirement for in-depth analysis. 

The critical data lineage feature acts as a link between every aspect of data governance, including an explanation of the data journey and its history which reflects the business growth. The powerful AI capabilities of the solution allow you to automate the management of massive amounts of data, especially the aspect of associating technical metadata with business terms.

When dealing with millions of data attributes its not possible to manage data manually, therefore Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is needed to automate 60 to 80 percent of data association between business terms and harvested technical terms.

If the Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog deployment is carried out efficiently, it can greatly impact your organization and enable business capabilities to further improve business processes. 

I use the solution for preparing the data according to the data quality rules.

The mapping and mapplet features are valuable. The product improves data quality. The processes are running smoothly. The interface is good. Data integration is easy.

I use the solution to integrate on-premise and cloud products. There are issues with connectors to cloud applications. The integration process is not easy. The customer experience must be improved. When we implemented it, we did it with the help of Informatica professionals. I would not recommend them as an implementer. They didn't have any experience. It was very hard. The customer experience was not good. It's hard to understand the new features of the HR list. The tool must have more options for connectors. It is hard to connect to some of the applications. The remediation process is not straightforward.

I have been using the solution for one and a half years.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a six out of ten. It is a bit complex to scale. We have 20 users.

The technical support is not good. The support team must improve the quality of support.

The product is cloud-based.

We got a 50% discount.

We couldn’t deliver the full project. I will not recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

In my company, we use Informatica Cloud Data Integration because I work in the insurance sector, where we use the tool for data migration from one environment to another. We also use Informatica Cloud Data Integration in scenarios where the clients switch from their legacy system to Informatica Cloud using Azure Synapse, because of which we have to migrate all the data to Azure Synapse.

The most valuable features of the solution are pushdown, optimization, and partitioning, which can be used for frequent data loading, especially when we have a huge data volume in our company.

While my company operates on the cloud, we have seen that Informatica Cloud Data Integration has some performance issues causing it to lag. I feel that Informatica is still in the process of improving its cloud. Sometimes, there are connectivity shoes in the product causing it to have multiple issues, because of which the solution hangs or lags. The product may have issues because they are new to the market and are trying to improve their services.

I have been using Informatica Cloud Data Integration for two years. 

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

The solution can be easily scaled up since we just need to take the aid of some PIM processor and increase the data volume as per what we want.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have an experience of more than ten years with Informatica PowerCenter.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration's on-premises version is very good, considering the faster performance and efficiency it provides. Informatica Cloud Data Integration's cloud version is also getting enhanced since Informatica has been regularly doing some patching to increase the product's performance. Considering the current scenario, Informatica PowerCenter is a good product, especially its on-premises version.

The deployment doesn't take much time, and only a few minutes are needed to deploy the solution.

I rate the product's price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is the cheapest and ten is the most expensive. The product is a bit expensive.

In the cloud, Informatica has migrated to a different environment in a single platform named IDMC, on which one can have cloud data migration, cloud application integration, data quality, and data governance, making everything combined with a single platform. Earlier in our company, we had to rely on different software or platforms for each functionality, but now we can use a single URL and work on a single platform.

I would like to speak about Informatica Cloud Data Integration's performance, which is too slow but works overall as a tool. To those planning to use Informatica Cloud, I would say that it is the second-best product in the marketplace, and soon it will become the leading product.

On a daily basis, the product has been increasing their overall availability and performance .On a weekly basis, the product gives out some new updates while fixing its old defects. It will be a good product in the coming years. Improvements in the current product will continue for some time.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.

We were trying to publish a compendium of all our various assets using an Oracle-based data warehouse. We also had vendor-based solutions like Epic for electronic medical records on an SQL Server base. We had many research systems on various platforms because it's a cancer research institution. 

We wanted to pull together a comprehensive data catalog to show people all the different assets we had and where they could go to find things. If there were vendor-based definitions of things, we'd pull in the definitions and various attributes. It's a heterogeneous environment data-wise. We get a lot of value from a comprehensive enterprise catalog.

It's available on our intranet through a data governance portal. You could go there for a catalog, quality reports, etc. In a year, there may have been 500 unique visitors. It was my job to publicize it, but I didn't necessarily do a good job. I worked with research groups and clinicians to get their stuff on it, and they would tell other people about it. The nice thing about Informatica is that it was easy to link from our internal web portal to their catalog. I had excellent developers working for me. It didn't require much development, and it took less and less as time went on. 

I like EDC's self-service capabilities. You can put the catalog on the intranet inside the organization, so users can search for something. People in the research world have specialized systems, and you might find data from various places that sound similar. 

The purpose of the Enterprise Data Catalog was to build an internally searchable catalog of stuff. You may not have permission to see this data but at least you could find out where it was and contact the person who owns it. 

Interoperability is one area where EDC has room for improvement. It was challenging when the faculty took over the data world and had specific vendors they wanted to use, and some were not particularly open platforms. 

It was a challenge to promote data visibility while also jumping through hoops to take some of the proprietary things and make them part of the calling, especially when the vendor doesn't necessarily support interoperability. You need to export things from a vendor program and import them again. 

We used Informatica for a lot of the data governance stuff I worked with when I joined the company, including things like cataloging and profiling data. The organization has really changed a lot in the last year and went with Informatica EDC. They're moving from the on-prem version to the cloud.

Informatica is a strong company, and EDC is a solid platform. 

The scalability is excellent. Informatica really knows what it's doing. They're smart people and great engineers. 

Informatica's customer service and support were decent. They listen to their customers. If something is missing or wasn't working, they will put it on their roadmap. They were listening to customers for roadmap stuff. 

We wound up building a staging database to pull stuff out of the EDC, stage it, and then access that. It was open, so we would often have an intermediary layer at Oracle. If we wanted to show, for example, data quality over time, we would have a weekly quality process that would run. We staged that in an Oracle database, and the portal could access that.

We had to build Informatica pipelines and do some Azure work to feed data to them. With data warehousing, you typically have static data that is timestamped daily or weekly and sometimes monthly or annually.  We were trying to get real-time data, like blood pressure monitoring and stuff like that. That was a lot of work. I didn't do it. The integration team. 

When I joined the company, it was an Oracle-based solution. Then Epic took over, which was SQL Server-based. After that, they went to Azure. Now, all the analytics are supposed to be on this platform, and it's not particularly open. 

Setting up Informatica EDC is usually pretty straightforward. The challenge is working with vendors like Oracle and Microsoft, which have APIs for integrating things. You can query what they have. They want it to play well with other vendors because they know customers don't only have one brand of product. In some cases, you get vendors in there that are, "No, we're not going to do that because we're so special." It was a challenge. The platform of choice for data initiatives at the cancer research institution is Palantir. 

We didn't look for an alternative, but Azure has its own catalog.

I rate Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog nine out of 10. It's a great solution, and I was happy with it. It did everything I wanted, and Informatica dramatically increased the integration points over time. When we started, it was like Oracle and SQL Server, but now they're adding NoSQL databases and others.

Informatica has user groups and listens to user input. One of the people that worked for me hosts an annual Informatica user group in Houston. You can try to build your own Oracle-based or SQL-based solution. They listened to the market, and they're working on improving the interoperability. Maybe it works better with Palantir since I left, but they work across all platforms. They're making it Cloud-based. I didn't know anything about them before I got here. I was dropped into a department where Informatica had been for at least five or six years, and it was a good choice.