Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

I use Informatica Data Quality to consolidate master data across our organization, ensuring consistent and high-quality data. Combining MDM and data quality features, we address issues like customer data inaccuracies. Additionally, we document business terms in our data catalog for a unified view across the company.

The profiling feature in Informatica Data Quality is incredibly effective for data governance. It helps identify data types and potential duplicates, streamlining the detection process. It also suggests matches with predefined fields in our catalog.

There is room for improvement in the Data Marketplace aspect. Specifically, we found some basic functionalities lacking, like transparent integration of quality indicators. Customizability and additional features in the Data Marketplace would be welcomed in future updates. 

I have been working with Informatica Data Quality for three years.

I would rate the stability of the solution as an eight out of ten.

Scalability with Informatica had some initial challenges, especially when ingesting metadata into the data catalog due to the large volume of source systems and data. While it eventually worked, it took considerable time. Overall, I would rate it a six out of ten for scalability at the moment.

Initially, a few hundred users were using Informatica, but now it is a few thousand. 

The technical support is good. I would rate them at a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Maintenance and troubleshooting are handled solely by the vendor.

Informatica's licensing cost is among the highest in the market. I would rate it as a five out of ten in terms of costliness. With Informatica, we have a single bundled agreement covering the entire solution based on total capacity rather than specific modules. 

Before choosing Informatica, we evaluated various vendors, including IBM and Microsoft. Initially, we considered a best-of-breed approach, but Informatica emerged as the preferred choice for three out of four key areas: MDM, data quality, and data marketplace. While there were some limitations in certain tools like the data marketplace and data catalog, we opted for Informatica's complete suite to avoid additional integration efforts and to capitalize on its strengths in critical areas.

The rule-based strategies feature in Informatica Data Quality has greatly benefited our data quality initiatives. With predefined rules in place, it provides a solid framework for assessing data quality. While data quality ultimately depends on source system updates, these rules give valuable insights and are heavily used alongside automatic profiling for effective data management.

Informatica Data Quality works within our IT setup for analyzing and reporting on data quality. It doesn't directly integrate with other tools, but it gives us clear insights. Data flows from sources to Informatica for analysis, and then to data stewards for updates, but there is no integration back to the original applications yet.

Navigating between modules within Informatica isn't always seamless. For instance, actions in the catalog might not be visible in the data marketplace.

Overall, I would rate Informatica Data Quality as an eight out of ten.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is being used for recording enterprise assets, such as customers' products and vehicles. 

We a consulting service that provides information on how to enter the catalog or forms to collect the data catalog and enter them into Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog.

The most valuable feature of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is it provides clients with a full view of the enterprise data assets. For example, how many data assets they have and who owns them.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog could improve by having a much better user interface. It is not user-friendly.

In a new release of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, it would be beneficial to have some new features including data sharing.

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for approximately three months.

The solution is stable. There are some issues that can arise with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, but the vendor can resolve them.

We have 10 people that use the solution.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog sends support to our clients if they are having problems.

The initial setup of the Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog can be difficult. It can take approximately one week to install all the components, such as metadata.

There are vendors to do the installation and it can cost a lot of money over the week that it takes.

I recommend this solution to others. There is a large market in China for Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog.

I rate Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog a seven out of ten.

We are using Informatica Cloud Data Integration in a large organization, and we have customers all across the world. 

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is for migrating data from a source to a target. The major advantage of working with this solution is that it can handle large amounts of data. The drawback is the performance is a bit slow but it can handle a large amount of data compared to other tools.

The most valuable feature of Informatica Cloud Data Integration is Pushback. You are able to push the data to the solution itself, and it can handle the queries. It helps us a lot. With other tools, the burden is kept on the server.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration can improve by being more user-friendly. When you're working with the solution a lot of technical knowledge is required. It's not a solution that anyone can use properly, you need knowledge of what's happening at the back end, such as SQL. When you get stuck, you need to look into your logic. For other tools, such as Dell Boomi, anyone can use them.

In a future release, the UI should be more developed to allow more features.

I have been using Informatica Cloud Data Integration for approximately four months.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is stable. 

I rate the stability of Informatica Cloud Data Integration a four out of five.

There are some performance issues sometimes.

We have more than 50 developers using the solution in my company.

I rate the scalability of Informatica Cloud Data Integration a three out of five.

The support from Informatica Cloud Data Integration is great. They respond quickly and if there is an issue it can be resolved fast.

I rate the support from Informatica Cloud Data Integration a four out of five.

Positive

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is famously known for its high price. The vendor targets large enterprises, and not medium or small companies. These large companies, and organizations, handle large amounts of data. If you go into any large bank, such as American or Canadian banks, these banks use this solution because it is more reliable, secure, and has more functionality.

There can be extra changes, such as using the cloud.

I rate the price of Informatica Cloud Data Integration a two out of five.

This is a good tool and others should use it. This solution is known for its ability to handle large amounts of data and in the market, there are not that many tools available. However, there are competitors in the market, such as Oracle and IBM.

If an organization's data is very limited and they are not using large amounts of data, then I would suggest going for a smaller targeting solution, such as Dell Boomi. When it comes to large and secure data, I would recommend others to use this solution or SAP BODS or IBM.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration has a nice GDP rating and a good European market.

I rate Informatica Cloud Data Integration a seven out of ten.

I'm a senior architect and we are partners with Informatica. 

The solution offers good data governance.

I've found that whatever functionalities are available on-prem, can become a bit of a challenge sometimes in the cloud. There are no simple rules for customization so they need to be applied which is a challenge on the cloud side.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

Informatica stability is great. Even now, Purview has evolved a lot, but we haven't used it to the same extent. 

The solution is scalable. 

We are partnered with Informatica, so we don't have an issue with technical support. 

Positive

Our preference is Purview when we're asked for a cloud solution because it's a cloud native and the same applies when taking cost into account. Deployment is easier with Purview. If an organization is going for a hybrid solution and there's a lot of governance and complex rules involved, my first choice is Informatica. If that's not the case then I go for Purview.

Without experience, it may be somewhat difficult but I don't find it particularly complex because there's a lot of training and documentation available. We've already had a lot of experience so it's a piece of cake for us. 

Licensing costs are not fixed and I know that Informatica offers discounted prices to certain customers. Microsoft is cheaper.

The solution is suitable for enterprise or mid-size organizations. But if there are customer-related or different domain issues and it has some kind of regulatory impact and a lot of external agencies come into the picture, then it's always good to go with the Informatica Axon.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

I use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for searching for PII data, tagging different kinds of data, and for data lineage.

These are the features I found useful in Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog: one is its data profiling is good. The data lineage is also okay, though it had a few issues to be solved. The data domain discovery for the solution is good, though it was hard to implement.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is hard to set up, so this is an area for improvement, e.g. it would be good if they make it easier to set up, because the project was made 80% of the time of the setup. Another area for improvement is its ease of use, because the interface is not as user-friendly.

I've been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for the last three years, and the last time I used it was three days ago.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is not as stable.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is an easily scalable solution.

The technical support for Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is not so good, because it took a lot of time for them to solve simple problems.

The set up for this solution was not easy.

My advice to other people who want to implement Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is that they need to be sure that it can deliver the expectations they have about the data catalog, because after our implementation, we weren't able to use it a lot.

I'm rating Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog seven out of ten.

The solution is used for real-time validation of the addresses entered by end-users in the MDM solution and validation of the addresses which are received via the inbound interfaces. 

Apart from validation, this service is used to enrich the address data, for example, entered addresses include country, city, and street name. The service returns additional characteristics, for example, postal code (if it can be derived from the other attributes), which are then written back in the requesting system. It's used for Master Data Management in our case.

The overall quality of the addresses associated with other master data entities (Customer, Supplier, physical locations, etc.) has improved significantly. Addresses have now standardized format per country of origin - this means that addresses located in one country have a bit different template than in others. This is a consequence of the fact that Informatica uses various country postal authorities to provide the content used by the Address Verification service. As explained earlier, we use the results of AV service to enrich the address information in some cases. 

Due to improved quality of addresses, the user satisfaction of our MDM solution has increased. Also, the connected systems receive more complete data from MDM. Address Verification service helps in ensuring proper data governance of the master data which is used in many critical processes across the whole enterprise.

The product is easy to set up thanks to pretty good documentation. 

It supports several ways of using it (real-time, batch mode) and has testing capabilities. 

The pricing model is clear. 

The service returns good results which vary depending on the country of the address origin. In case there are multiple matching addresses, this service returns all of them which allows our end of the process or the end-user to select the best matching record. The speed of returning the validated addresses is really great.

The product is really good in its current form; it's hard to imagine what can be improved. It's easy to integrate via the exposed APIs, hence, also in this aspect, I don't see much that can be changed.

The only thing that I can imagine that might be improved is how the available transactions verify addresses used. These transactions have a valid end date and must be used within the agreed timeframe. Sometimes it's difficult to predict how many transactions will be required. In the worst case, some of them might be lost if not used on time.

I've used the solution for more than one year.

There is no single issue with the stability since we started using it (more than 1 year ago).

The scalability is very high.

We previously used Google APIs, however, that was for another client. Hence, there was no real switch as such.

The product is very easy to set up and offers good documentation.

We handled the implementation in-house.

I'd advise users to try to predict the expected usage of the service. The unused transactions may be lost if not used on time.

We looked at both Google and Experian.

It is generally used for the data integration between multiple ERPs. We have ERPs, and then we have third-party exchanges that sell products. The third parties are partnered up with some of the customers, so they create deeds, and we pull in orders and quote requests.

We're trying to get to the latest version. We're two revisions behind right now. It is a local install. 

It is on-prem, and we're trying to get to all-cloud. We do use the cloud for configuration, but we deploy it to the agents locally. We're using the cloud instance of Informatica to deploy to, and we're currently on Azure.

In the latest version, I like the outlay of the business roles creation. I like seeing that visualization as you're building it, as opposed to going through metatables or XML mappings. We liked that piece, and it makes it more intuitive for the business. 

Its GUI interface definitely helps visualize what we're trying to accomplish. There is always a disconnect between IT and the business, and it helps in creating the feeds that follow the business process flows with some of the types involved with the business.

It is so broad in what it can do. Their services have expanded beyond what they originally built it out to be. The best thing I like about it is that each time they add a new service to the platform, it easily integrates with the core, which is really nice.

The biggest pain point for us is the documentation. Typically, you have to go through knowledge forums and knowledge groups to find out about the syntax issues for interfacing with new products. Typically, you've got to deal with someone who has been through the pain before. Their documents are not really up to date with current innovations happening in the industry. As big as they are, you can't really expect it, but that's our pain point.

We've been using this solution for about four years.

We love it. It is very stable. It is probably the best thing we've seen in a while.

It can out scale our ERP. So, scalability is not an issue for us. However, it can overload our system, but that is not related to the scalability of MDM. It is related to the scalability of the system it feeds.

We have five business roles that are using it, and there are two admins who are supporting it. Basically, it is supporting an environment of about 5 billion in revenue. That's a lot for that amount of revenue. It is a lot of people.

We're trying to extend or expand more modules. We have MDM, and we're going into Supplier 360 and Product 360. We found that it is the most robust platform to integrate with our e-commerce platform. Basically, we have four different e-commerce realms, and we're going to consolidate them. So, Informatica helps with the supplier stuff coming in, harmonizing the data, propagating it out to the sites. In the future, the four sites are going to be combined and consolidated into one site, and then we'll be dealing with four different ERPs, and Informatica will be very key in that as well.

Their technical support is excellent. Whenever we had issues, they were pretty quick to respond. There was never an issue in finding them. The longest we had to wait for getting a resolution was a couple of hours.

I walked into this, so I don't know what they had before.

I wasn't involved with its setup.

It is expensive. That's probably the biggest drawback. The business has heartache paying the license, but that's mainly because they don't realize what value it brings. The key thing about the MDM solution is that it is in the backend, and no one sees what it is actually doing. You don't know it is a problem until it is not there.

I would advise making sure that you have a very well-defined design before you decide you need an MDM. In our case, after MDM was in place and we turned it on, we realized that there are other processes that we needed to refactor for the purpose of MDM, which extended the rollout. This was not an MDM issue. It was a process issue in the business. That's why you need to make sure that the design is well defined. It helps to have their partners involved as well. We're dealing with Informatica consulting today to help design a Supplier 360 portal. 

It is hard to find people who are well versed in Informatica. It is hard to pluck one out of the place. You've got to go and poach for them. They're not out there open and looking for jobs.

I would rate Informatica MDM an eight out of 10.

The MDM solution is capable of integrating multiple systems, so it helped us to solve the purpose of centralizing the depository as well as the standardization of mass data. It takes away all the ambiguity around data integrity issues or all the process challenges which happen when every stage of a process uses a different source as master data. 

The solution's ability to integrate with different solutions is a big selling point for us. It's also quite powerful and customizable. I really enjoy its match and merge capabilities.

When it comes to UI look and feel and user experience, Informatica is not as good as other solutions.

There are some MDM solutions that come with an integrated view, which includes your transactional and master and all other data together and helps you get a 360 view of the object. That's where I think Informatica is not as powerful or as agile in the way other solutions are out of the box. 

It's quite simple to scale the solution. We have about 30,000 users, but I don't see a limitation on the solution that would stop you from having more.

Technical support is pretty good. It does take time. Some solutions are not fixed, but they have releases and updates that deal with the issues, so, I don't see a lag in support in that sense.

In 2010, there were only maybe three solutions: SAP, IBM, and Informatica. Before that, we didn't really have a centralized mass data contract, so it was more of an application grievance. With Informatica, we gained centralization of mass data, and also had governance and quality as part of a data management practice, and I think, at the time, the full package was available with Informatica as compared to other options.

I was not the installer, so I'm unsure of how complex the initial setup was.

We use the on-premises version of the solution.

I would recommend the product, but it depends on your business and other solutions you might already be using. If you're only using SAP, I don't think you'll need Informatica. If you're using Oracle products, you don't even need SAP.

However, if you're looking for an essential repository with very good integration capabilities, want to have a longterm sustainable solution, and you have multiple ESPs, as well as a wider organization setup, then I think Informatica is the best.

I would rate the solution at eight or nine out of ten.