Our use cases were working with clients who had MDM. All of them had MDM installed to begin with.
There are several features that I would consider to be the most valuable:
- Integration with workflow engines to get information out to the Data Stewardardship UI
- The Probabilistic Matching Engine
There are not really many areas of the product that need improvement. They have already moved it to the cloud and that is available at the moment. It is not really an additional feature because that capability is there, I just have not used it myself. I left just before the last company was with was moving to the cloud environment. That would be useful in my opinion if it had been available to me.
They had just upgraded the UI for it in a previous release, which was a major improvement. Three or four years ago, I would have instantly said the Stewardship UI needed an update if asked for an area that needed improvement and it would absolutely have been my first thought. But that has been done recently and they did a nice job of it.
They have good interfacing with other databases within the suite, and that is a fine feature. Because of the complete integration of the InfoSphere suite, the integration with the ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) and the other parts of InfoSphere work really well together.
I really do not think there is anything else I need. It does what it needs to do for the MDM market and its users.
I have been using IBM InfoSphere for 20 years.
The stability is fine. It is built for large scale industrial usage, so really it has to be stable. It worked without a problem at Lloyds bank where we were dealing with 300 million transactions a day. There were never any issues, so I do not see stability as being a problem.
There are no issues with scalability. So long as the company using the product puts it on the right sized platform as recommended, scalability will not be a problem.
The technical support also varied a bit depending on which employer I was with. Some of it was direct with IBM and some of it was with the third-party suppliers. But really the only difference was who it was with and not the quality of the service. All of it was pretty good as far as I was concerned. All the interactions I had with them were fine.
Actually I am no longer using MDM (Master Data Management) because of a recent job change, but I had plenty of experience with it at my previous employment. So I switched from the solution, rather than to it, due to a job change and currently use what they already have licensed. It had nothing to do with the quality of the product or its use.
I would not say that the setup is straightforward. So long as you have got IBM support it will be fine, but it is a complex tool and therefore it requires a relatively complex setup. Overall it is slightly more complex than an average data management solution. But that is because of the vast capabilities of the toolset.
The implementation varied across the three companies that I worked with, but each time we used either IBM or one of their partners to help with the implementation. There was really little room for error that way and it made sure everything was done right in the end.
While it may be costly for small and mid-sized organizations it is valuable to large organizations with demanding workflows.
The advice I might give to someone looking into this as a data management solution is that if you are the right size organization, use it. If you have got large volumes of data, need high IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), and have the money to invest in it as a solution, then it is definitely the right tool. If you are a small company, it is more likely overkill. That is not meant to say that it is expensive for what it is, but it is a costly tool. If you have got the right scale of operation, it will play out as value for money. If you are a small scale operation trying to use it, it may not be valuable for your level of usage.
On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate InfoSphere MDM overall as a product at an eight-out-of-ten. It is not closer to a ten because it really is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is clearly for larger-scale organizations, so it is not a general fit for all users.
