Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

It comes with lot of features and is a one-stop-shop solution for integration, data modeling, and data governance. Everything can be built under one particular umbrella. If any issues come up, then there won't be any blame game saying that it could be an integration issue or an MDM hub issue because it's wholly owned by Informatica. That's the biggest advantage of Informatica MDM over that of any other tools that are available on the market.

It has given us a lot of flexibility in terms of solutions.

This is a costly solution. We have several customers who evaluate it but then look for other solutions because of the cost.

At present, Informatica MDM comes as an on-premises or cloud-based solution. I would like to see them offer a SaaS-based MDM model. I think they are working on it.

I've worked with Informatica MDM for close to a year.

We have not had any performance issues.

It is a scalable solution.

The technical support is good depending on the SLA. Sometimes, they do have a busy schedule. When I contacted them for issues, someone joined the call if he/she was ready. Otherwise, we have had to wait for a day or two.

Informatica MDM is a costly solution because it comes as a bundle. They are also globally positioning themselves and are definitely working on very upgraded technologies. If someone wanted to do it on the cloud, they have a lot of flexibility because they upgrade themselves according to the current needs. It definitely comes with a lot of features and that's the reason why it's costly.

The licensing cost should be approximately one million dollars. It's about four to five times that of other vendors.

Take a look at your budget first and then proceed with this solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I give Informatica MDM a nine.

We essentially use Informatica Axon to set up a data governance framework for a corporation, usually a medium-sized or large organization.

The dictionary, the search, and the ratings are without a doubt the most beneficial components of this solution. 

Socializing data governance is one of the examples, but I'm not sure what the others were. For instance, if you locate a specific data attribute, you can grade its accuracy by assigning it a star rating between 0 and 5. 

When someone else conducts a search, they might discover whether employees at the company believe the data to be of high quality.

In terms of additional features, I believe it is quite rich. As I previously stated, it is a fairly mature product.

The main issue probably has nothing to do with end users, but installation can definitely be simplified. Also, I believe that this is something that they are already working on it, but it needs to be provided as a service. 

The Microsoft version, Purview, is now available as a cloud service, it must be provided as a service rather than just installation. You do not need to go through the installation, you literally create an account in five minutes. That is something they need to do. I believe that it is already something they are on working on, but I don't believe it has yet been released.

Over the past year, I have definitely used Informatica Axon.

I have worked with Informatica Axon for two years.

We are always working with the latest version.

Informatica Axon is a stable product.

It's a fairly mature product. For many years, it has been the market leader.

Informatica Axon is a scalable solution.

The smallest organization would have 500 users.

Any of the multinational corporations could be the largest. It's quite pricey. 

It is commonly used by large multinational corporations.

It has two or three user interfaces, one for everyone in the organization, one for specific data analysts, and one for IT technical staff.

Like many organizations, technical support responds quickly at times. It can take some time. It's about average, in my opinion. I wouldn't say it's particularly good or bad. It's average.

I would rate the technical support a three and a half out of five.

Neutral

I am just really familiar with Azure DevOps as a deployment technology.

Some of the Azure services, such as Database and Purview, and Informatica tools, such as Axon, and Data Governance, are among the things I am familiar with.

Informatica Professional Services should absolutely perform the installation due to its complexity. Additionally, training is required for end-client configuration. It is not something you can pick up and configure immediately.

Although there is no cloud version of it yet, it can be deployed in the cloud as a virtual machine, or VM.

Axon itself, you normally allow anywhere between five and ten days to conduct the installation configuration together, and that's not elapsed time. It normally takes a week to two weeks to install and configure an initial setup. This is elapsed time, not necessarily man hours. You will always need additional configuration to be done. Although the actual installation and configuration might be completed in a few weeks, getting it ready for use by the organization might take six months.

We do not have a technical team. I was the person who deployed this solution.

It was a challenge, but I did it for the POC.

Informatica Professional Services was consulted when it came time for the client's actual installation.

Axon can typically be present; the technical installation only requires one person, and a second data specialist is typically required for configuration. Normally two. Additional technical setup and data configuration are required.

It is definitely high if used properly, but many organizations spend all of the money and then fail to use it to its full potential. It is unquestionably a good investment if used properly.

It depends on how the client uses it.

Pricing is determined by the number of licensed users as well as the number of Core CPUs. 

You can imagine how expensive it would be for a company with 10,000 users, but it all depends on how many analyst user licenses they require. 

I believe there is a flat fee for the end user. 

It is not expensive, but individual licenses are required for technical users, data analysts, data stewards, and the data governance team, which can add up if you have a large number of them.

Different clients may have different licensing costs, but it is based on a yearly paid license. It is renewed every year. There is an initial licensing fee as well as an annual renewal fee.

They are very expensive, and they charge a lot because they know they are number one. I would rate them a five out of five. Five being the most expensive.

I would definitely recommend it. If they can afford it. I strongly advise them to use it. But, before diving into Axon or any of the other governance tools, make sure they understand their data landscape thoroughly because the tool will not help them with that. They will fail if they do not have good data practices in place.

I'm a freelancer, but the consultancy I went through is also independent, but they do have a partner relationship with Informatica, as they do with many vendors.

I would rate Informatica Axon a nine out of ten.

Axon is a platform that lets everyone see all the data assets, business glossaries, lineage, catalog, classification, etc., but the real activities are being done on EDC.

We have only been using Axon for a short time in my organization, and we are decommissioning it, but I used the solution at my previous organization for data governance projects. Data owners, software developers, and architects all access the solution. In total, we have around 150 to 200 users on it. 

Axon has a marketplace that allows you to showcase all the assets the data owner has, so they can request access. That's one feature we use extensively.  Axon also offers great visibility and intuitive searchability, allowing you to easily search data assets. You can check the lineage and see the work EDC does. EDC handles all the classification, cataloging, and lineage. It's integrated with Axon, and anyone can see that.

Though EDC has maximum coverage, a few things were not available to scan, but I think EDC is evolving to address this issue.

I have been working on Informatica EDC and Axon for nine months.

Axon is stable.

Scaling isn't a problem. It depends on how the implementation is done. Kafka is scalable If the implementation has an image, and it would definitely be scalable on the cloud. We run Axon on our private cloud instead of a Kubernetes cluster. If we wanted to implement it on Kubernetes, we could scale it easily. 

I rate Informatica support eight out of 10. 

We tried an open-source solution, but we stopped it midway through the project and adopted EDC and Axon. We also started using Atlas and Ranger.

Setting up Axon wasn't too complicated. One to three people were involved. It took about three months to implement the solution and onboard various data assets. It was a continuous process, which means we were onboarding new assets as soon as we got them. After deployment, we only need one person for maintenance. They handle this in addition to some other responsibilities.

I can't give an ROI measured in dollars, but we see qualitative benefits. You gain the confidence of our customers because they know their data is secure and only accessible to those with authorization. Data quality is improving. We are gaining our customers' confidence, and they rely on us for data classification.  

EDC comes with an Enterprise Licensing Agreement, whereas Axon is a yearly subscription. That is an expensive affair. I don't know the exact cost because the asset management team handles that. We only tell them how many licenses to get.  The administrator who manages the platform distributes the licenses, and we provide them to data owners who are making policy changes.

Axon is sold separately, and it's subscription-based. Usually, EDC is included in a big data package as an enterprise license. It would be nice if EDC and Axon could be bundled in one enterprise license.

Every tool is evolving. New technology platforms and applications are coming out all the time, like Databricks, Scala, IBM Db2, z/OS, etc. 

I rate Informatica Axon eight out of 10. It's a leading solution in the data governance segment. If you're looking for a quick and easy implementation, I recommend Informatica EDC and Axon.

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.

We use the solution to validate emails, telephone numbers, and postal codes. It can also create some data quality rules using the Cloud app's data quality function.

It offers enhanced usability with the ability to create rules quickly using its AI engine. This feature simplifies rule creation by allowing users to specify their needs, and the system generates the necessary scripts, acting as a significant accelerator. 

Another advantage is its seamless integration with other Informatica capabilities, making data quality a deeply embedded part of the solution. Informatica has a strong history in data quality with its on-premise product. All those powerful capabilities are now available in the cloud, making this product even more robust.

Accessing data as a service is essential, especially for validations requiring external data services. This goes beyond basic syntactic checks, like ensuring an email address contains the @ symbol or .com domain. Instead, it's about advanced validation, such as verifying if an email address exists or if a phone number is valid. 

These services are in high demand, especially for regions like China, Argentina, and other parts of Latin America. While such capabilities were initially more common in the United States, they are now increasingly required globally.

Five to six people are using this solution.

Informatica Support is one of the best services available in the market now.

Positive

Many clients acquired this product because of the ROI.

Informatica is one of the most expensive solutions available in the market.

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

In the past, people used Informatica MDM because it was one of the leading tools at that point in time to work on an on-premises model. It was the leading tool in the market, offering vast customization options and matching and merging options that were better compared to other solutions. The way the data lineage or the customization options it gave, the tool was good. Now, the tool has a changed dynamic, and it is currently available on the cloud. Apart from Informatica MDM, there are other tools, as well as the market, that are completely on the cloud.

The feature of the product that has been most helpful in improving data quality revolves around Informatica DQ or IDQ, which is one of the tools Informatica offers. IDQ helps cater to the scoring of the data, clean up the data, and integrate it.

In terms of the room for improvement required in the product, I would say that the product is still in the maturing phase, specifically on the cloud. The product is not too user-friendly to do the configurations. There are a couple of areas in the product where I feel improvements can be made, but if I consider the algorithms used in the match process, the tool is very robust.

I have been using Informatica MDM for nine to ten years. My company is a partner of Informatica, and we also implement the tool.

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

In terms of scalability, I would say that the product is currently more available in the cloud. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten. The scalability on the cloud is good. On the cloud, by default, the tool becomes quite scalable.

Informatica provides premium products. The product is mainly meant for enterprise-level customers because the tool is available at the premium cost.

I have not used the technical support provided by the product. If you asked me about the support offered for the tool's on-premises model, I would say they were really good. We really liked Informatica's support. With the cloud, I'm not aware of the support.

If one is a difficult setup and ten is easy, I rate the product's initial setup phase as a five.

If you are talking about the product on the cloud, the initial configuration must be done. There is quite a lot of refresh which takes place every time we have to publish something, and then we have to wait for some time. It is not that you make a change, but you can see it immediately in the tool. The wait period is quite long. If you are a first timer, it takes time for that person to figure out the product. Once you get the hang of it, then it becomes easy.

An end-to-end implementation would take nine to ten months, or maybe a little more than that, depending upon the customer's desired features.

The tool does give a good ROI.

The product is not very pocket-friendly for small and medium-sized businesses, and it is understandable because of the kind of features the tool gives.

On a scale of one to ten, if one is a cheap solution and ten is an expensive one, I rate the tool's price as seven.

Informatica MDM is able to handle complex data integration scenarios with the help of IDCM, which offers the power of an ETL tool.

Speaking about the AI part, I feel the product is still in the maturing phase.

My first preference would be for Welkio, and only after that would I prefer Informatica MDM, so I would say that it won't be my first choice.

I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

At our company, we use Informatica MDM for data architecture and numerous other aspects of data warehouse, such as data designing or modeling. We recommend Informatica products to our customers based on their use cases, data volume, budget, and environment suitability.  

The product isn't mature enough to provide suitable connectors to various data engines. The performance of the solution in transporting data between data lakes and Big data infrastructure is not up to the mark. At our company, we use a similar solution called Spark, which is much better than Informatica MDM in terms of performance and speed. The data support capabilities of Informatica MDM can be improved. 

It's a stable product without any bugs or glitches. But overall Kafka is a better product than Informatica MDM. 

The product exhibits satisfying scalability. 

The tech support is satisfying from the vendor. The support team was able to respond and solve the issues in a very short time. I would rate the tech support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

Informatica MDM easily integrates with the Informatica environment as well as with third-party tools. But for some integrations, for instance, when Informatica MDM is integrated with SAP, the functionality slows down drastically; the task that would take five minutes with Spark takes five hours with Informatica MDM.

The same scenario occurs when Kafka is integrated with Informatica MDM. For popular database integrations such as Oracle and SQL, Informatica MDM functions well enough. 

The initial setup of the solution is straightforward. Our company professionals suggest that Informatica MDM should be on a Linux server instead of Windows. 

The product is very expensive compared to other competitor tools. Informatica MDM is not meant for small businesses but rather used by large enterprises like banks or government organizations. Informatica MDM can be purchased as a stand-alone product and doesn't come in an Informatica bundle. The support for Informatica MDM is not included in the standard licensing fees and must be purchased separately.  

I recommend that others test Informatica MDM with different integration tools before making a purchase decision. I also advise others to evaluate the use cases before choosing a product. Other popular competitor tools in the market include Collibra and SAP MDG. 

Informatica MDM fits our organization's use cases perfectly. When a customer of our company has a plethora of business products, VOCs need to be implemented, even if it's a different MDM solution than Informatica MDM.

Some customers depend on a single technology ERP, while others work with Oracle ERP or SAP, and sometimes they are using ERP and Informatica MDM in combination or migrating from one ERP to another. These use cases will impact the setup that already exists on the customer's site, and thus, the solution needs to be configured accordingly. I would rate Informatica MDM as eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for party data management. The tool ensures that the information is the same in every business system so that all the systems have the same view of what parties are involved in an agreement.

It is easy to create REST-based interfaces of the master data objects. It can be used for reading, creating, and modifying the master data objects of the parties, their addresses, and contact information. The creation and modification features always consider the data quality rules, and it is a very powerful way to provide a data interface to master data objects. It is missing in many other tools.

The solution meets the performance needs of my organization. There isn't much that Informatica doesn't do. The maintenance of the data quality rules has been improved. It’s a lot better than it was when we started. Replacing the old SOAP APIs with the new REST APIs is a great improvement. It’s still a work in progress. Some interfaces still use the old SOAP APIs.

The management of different properties is sometimes divided between different user interfaces. The tool should provide a unified user interface to manage the data objects.

I have been working with the tool for ten years.

The tool can scale according to our needs.

The initial setup was not difficult. We had very good support from Informatica’s professional services.

The team was a mix of in-house, vendor and other consultants.

The product has a high price point. However, it does not lack features. TIBCO EBX and Profisee are much cheaper. However, they lack features that Informatica MDM provides out of the box. Though the list price of Informatica MDM is high, it is negotiable.

I do not have experience with the new workflow engine. It is much more extensible because it is a full business process engine. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

My company works with our different customers to implement and install the solution.

The workflow in Informatica Axon is intelligent and good. Informatica Axon provides good data collection and good search criteria. In Informatica Axon, workflow and business glossary are good.

There are some limitations with Informatica Axon when one tries to connect or integrate it with Jira. For example, I can't delete any workflows after the integration process. There are issues with the integration capabilities of the tool with third-party solutions, specifically Jira.

I have experience with Informatica Axon for two to three years.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I recommend the solution to big companies because its functions are suitable for high-end companies.

The P1 support offered by the solution's technical support is very fast. If it is not P1 support, the support a user might get will be slow as it takes time. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

For data governance, I work with Informatica Axon only. I prefer Informatica Axon for enterprise metadata management at an enterprise level, data quality, and integration. I only recommend Informatica Axon, mainly for data governance.

The product's initial setup phase is very easy.

For each of our company's customers, with an installation scope in place, it doesn't take much time. The product's implementation scope differs from the installation scope. I usually help our company's customers implement the tool.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Informatica Axon is a very good product with an easy implementation phase and a lot of information about the tool available online on the internet.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I use Informatica MDM to align data in my company.

The ability to aggregate and put together data from around fifty sources into one environment allows us to have a preview of everything in a single place, which is something we did not have previously in our company.

The most valuable feature I see in Informatica MDM stems from everything that touches the area of data governance.

I think everything related to the APIs and the manageability of the APIs in Informatica MDM are areas where improvements are required.

I have been using Informatica MDM for five years. I use the solution's latest version. I am a user of the solution.

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

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

Around 250 users of the solution exist in my company.

There is a need to use the solution in my company at least three times a week.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with other solutions. I switched to Informatica MDM from other solutions since it offers better scalability options and interoperability.

I rate the product's initial setup a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process.

My company has deployed Informatica MDM with the services offered by our cloud partner.

Informatica MDM's deployment phase takes around a year to be completed.

Two people, who are data engineers specialized in Informatica MDM, are required for the deployment phase of the product.

Informatica MDM's deployment phase was carried out with the help of my company's in-house team and Informatica's partner.

I rate Informatica MDM's price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price.

Ideally, only one person is required to take care of the maintenance part of the product, but with the number of terminals where the solution is deployed, there may be a need for three or four people.

I recommend the solution to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.