Collibra Governance Reviews

Previously, I was in high-tech, now I'm in healthcare. In both instances, we used this solution to increase data literacy and business literacy. In short, we were building out business glossaries, coming to an agreement on term definitions, understanding what reports mean, what the metrics and calculations mean — essentially getting it all documented in an enterprise-facing view. That was the bulk of the focus in my prior company — along with some reference data. At my current company, we are focused heavily on bringing in data dictionaries, including schema tables and columns, and understanding what data is in which database. We also look at what data is flowing from database to database and how it's used in Tableau reports or in a business or archive.

Currently, we're on-premises, but we're planning on moving to the cloud later this year.

Over the last 12 months, we've had 643 unique new users. Most of our users tend to be what I would call "data geeks". They are the ones that understand the value of and/or the aspect of leadership to catalog their metadata for their data dictionaries, etc. The business users have not had as much adoption at my current company because that's not the particular strategy at this time. At my prior company, that was the singular strategy — to increase business literacy.

In regard to my previous company, for eight years, our primary customers were business users, not technical users. They just wanted to come in and say, "What does it mean? Who do I talk to if I have questions? Where do I go for more information? How does this relate to that, and how do those things affect me in my business world?" That was a fantastic use case at my prior company. In my current company, we're utilizing the tool specifically to support our data management strategy. Our technology risk office is very much supporting us in the effort to do the cataloging of all of the metadata for all of the systems that we're utilizing, cross-functionally.

Maintenance must be defined. As with any software product that exists, there are regular maintenance upgrades that occur that the company pushes out. If you're on-prem, you can choose to do it sooner versus later. In the Cloud, they push it to you unless you state that you wish to wait. From a maintenance perspective, I have talked to other customers who are in a cloud environment. They say that the maintenance has basically dropped to nil. For on-prem customers, it does require a little more maintenance because obviously, you've got to make sure that the servers are up and running, etc. In my prior role at my previous company, I was responsible for the business IT side of it, which meant I kind of managed the platform. I just didn't manage the server.

I took care of the customers, etc. I'm not even a technical person at all, but still, it was not difficult for me. From a maintenance perspective, I don't feel that it is difficult.

If you have custom integrations that have been created, then it will require a little bit more maintenance because those integrations need to be monitored. Some customers require a lot of integration, and some customers don't. It really depends upon the use case. Custom integration is really where it gets more challenging. Depending on whether it's a one-way integration or a two-way data feed, it can get pretty complex. Two-way data feeds are always custom. But that's something that will be on the customer anyway, not Collibra.

We've only just relaunched this solution within the last 15 months. Currently, we only have about 240,000 assets in the tool, but we have a roadmap and plan to onboard a number of our customers. We'll probably double or triple our users over the next 12 months. 

This solution has brought our very diverse cross-functional business teams to one enterprise-facing view, where they can see business glossaries that have been compiled by other teams. From here, they can leverage and understand what reports have been created. If the report exists already, why recreate it? 

Our data management strategy is to start cataloging our data dictionaries and our business glossaries to ensure that we have a common platform across the company. This is helpful when a database is being retired or being converted over to another one. A lot of work goes into documenting what that data attribute means, or what that field name means in regard to a particular report, or in a particular database.

I'm always putting in enhancement requests because we want everything to be perfect for us. We understand that there are thousands of companies that use the tool and many of them use it in different ways. They should allow the customer to have some additional flexibility.

Take Microsoft for example. Sometimes companies do something cool because their software programmer thinks it's cool, but for the user experience, it stinks. Something as simple as "Why did you decrease the font size from 12, down to nine on every page? Now eyes over 40, can't read it". As it relates to this specific software, I think that getting more feedback from users on changes to the software before implementing it would increased value for them. Overall, they're really great. We meet with our Collibra rep every other week. We talk about what's working, and what's not working. They're a fantastic company to collaborate with. Still, when they just go ahead and implement new things, a bunch of new tickets open, wanting it to go back to the way it used to be. 

As far as the functionality of the tool is concerned, it's pretty slick. It's very comprehensive. Still, sometimes they create an interface or an integration without thinking about how the business is going to use it. Virtually all software companies do this. Oracle does it, Informatica does it — every tool does it. They make changes and then they're like, "Oh, I didn't know you were going to use it like that". Why? nine-tenths of their customers use it like that. I think it's a common business challenge that any company has. They're just trying to appeal to a vast audience of customers.

They should consider that what makes a financial institution happy will not necessarily make a healthcare institution happy, which will not necessarily make a high-tech vertical happy either.

There's a lot of things available in their Data Intelligence Cloud that are not available on-premise. For me, if they could boost the search functionality so that if somebody types in a word, it automatically will pull up similar terms first — that would be nice. For business users, instead of what is just the most common volume of content in your tool, now they have a very cool faceted search. It would be very similar to Amazon. You can refine your search down to a fly's eyelash if you'd like. I see a lot of people in the community commenting that this would be a big help.

I have used this solution every day for the last eight years.

It's a pretty stable tool. In the last year, we've only had one time where there was a significant issue. We found out that it was simply because during an upgrade it required more server memory than the prior version did. Overall, that was a minor hiccup and it was quickly resolved.

Collibra has roughly half a dozen different products with which you can buy additional licenses for that will do amazing things. If you're interested in GDPR, you can buy that software — a module. If you're interested in what I would call a significant data lineage, you can buy that product, get a catalog, and it's available for data ingestions automatically. In today's world, this is pretty much essential. There's a lot of capabilities as far as scalability and expanding usage across the business.

It's easy to do that if the business users are being encouraged by their management to use it. I think you might agree that no matter what company you work for, nobody's going to use the tool unless their leadership tells them to — they're comfortable in their own box. It's like, "I'm busy. Don't bother me unless I have to do something." That's the case for what we have done both at the company I'm at now and my prior company. It's that leadership gained, cross-functionally that we have as one enterprise united under one tool. That's a pretty powerful thing to encourage people to do. The implementation of a tool like Collibra is far more effective if you have leadership executive sponsorship. I think that's hands-down, one of the most important things to ensure the healthy adoption of a solution.

Sure, you can use it without embracing it, but the teams that have embraced it are the ones that have leadership that says, "I understand the value of it, let's do this and get creative with it." These are the teams that are the most robust at using it; they have really learned how to use the tool and are constantly pushing the limits of it. From a scalability standpoint, the workloads come out of the box, but a lot of the workflows are made for the most common use case. As such, most customers customize the workflows. From that standpoint, it's very scalable.

I always recommend to anyone who is considering going with Collibra, to ensure that they have someone that will be trained on building the customized workflows — you're going to need them. Sure, you can pay Collibra to do that; you can pay the professional services to do that and they'll do a fantastic job, but it's expensive. It's a lot cheaper to invest in somebody in your own company to get some training. You can really scale quickly if you have somebody in-house that can create customized workflows and manage them.

The technical support is very good. 

As with any vendor, you can get out-of-the-box support, or you can buy additional support. Both at my prior company and at my current company, we have engaged with professional services and we meet with them once a month just to say, "Hey, I've got this weird thing I'm trying to do and I ran into this problem." Although it's not required, if you really want to accelerate the usage of the tool and the adoption of it, I always advise other people to talk with users at other companies and to consider paying for some coaching services or professional services. Even if it's just one call a month for an hour, it's still worth it, especially when you're trying to do very creative things, as most customers want. You gave me Mickey Mouse and I want to make it Donald Duck — a lot of companies do that.

The Collibra Professional Services guides are great — they're fantastic actually. I've never had a bad experience in the eight years I've been using this solution. I've never had a bad experience with their support staff, both on the technical side and on the business side.

The initial setup is not that difficult. I cannot speak to moving to the cloud because we have not done that yet, but I hear that it's not very difficult. It's been a couple of years since I have set up the platform, but as far as upgrading to a major new version, it's actually pretty straightforward. Collibra has actually done a fantastic job over the last few years to make this whole experience a lot easier. Years ago it was not as easy as it is now.

It's matured a tremendous amount over the last few years. absolutely tremendously. The company has been around for over 12 years now. When they first launched, it was a completely different animal. Now, it's a very robust metadata management and data governance tool.

One and a half, full-time employees are required for maintenance. 

I am not sure how long deployment took at our current company. I have heard from other customers who use the platform that it can take anywhere from one to three months, depending upon the complexity and how much testing they want to do. It also depends on the amount of customization they want to do. That's one of the great things about this tool — you can customize the heck out of it. If you go with everything out of the box, it's pretty straightforward and doesn't take very long. I would say deployment takes less than a month.

It's more of a soft benefit versus a hard benefit. What is the value of saving someone time? I did a cost analysis at my previous company. Our CFO used some vocabulary and some acronyms that I had never heard of — and I'd been with the company for 13 years. It took me 20 minutes — and I'm really good at sleuthing — to figure out what those things meant. I added those into our Collibra instance so that other users could quickly find out what those things meant. If you look at it from that standpoint, right after an "all-hands", our usage of our Collibra solution always spiked.

Everybody was like, "What did he mean when he said that? If it took me 20 minutes to find out what X, Y, Z meant, and it took me two minutes to get it into Collibra, then if a hundred people saved time because it took them only two minutes to find out, too — can you put a value on that? Yes. You can say, X dollars per hour, FTE, and how much time that saves. I did that very briefly just for one use case and my boss said, "Nevermind, they get it." 

I think that's the biggest value — how do you save employees time? Because everybody's too busy to waste time.

I think all software is expensive, but that's just me. Still, I would say it's probably in line with what other vendors charge for licensing. I would just say it's probably comparable. I have not done a side-by-side comparison in about three years, so I can't speak as to what's going on currently.

There's a baseline product called Data Governance Center. That is what I would consider their baseline product. You can choose to purchase other licenses, whether it's the data catalog, their privacy module for GDPR, or their Data Lineage modules — there are plenty of different licensing options. Some of them are user-based, and as with any company, the more you buy, the more of a discount you get.

You can buy as little or as much as you want. It just depends upon what your budget is. I've talked to some financial institutions that have just thrown so much money at the tool. It just makes my jaw drop to the floor — it's insane. We're doing almost what they're doing at a third of the cost. It really just depends upon your strategy.

The question is how do you help new users understand and leverage this solution to get people to come in, start using it, and understand what they're doing? Well, we've got three people that help onboard our business users.

Every use case is different because every business team wants to use the tool in a different way. It's all about business consultation, but Collibra doesn't have anything to do with that. I used to run a users meetup group for Collibra in the Bay Area. I've talked to many customers who have used Collibra, and all of them experience the same challenges — how do I get my business users? Even technical users that are on the business side want to know how to get them to onboard and adopt.

That's the piece that will really make or break in your implementation. So, make sure you have some type of stewardship team in place, whether it's on the business side or the technical side, just to help onboard new users. This is absolutely critical because as with any tool, it takes some adoption and some communication and collaboration.

When you first buy the software, you could just buy it and figure it out yourself, or you could buy their Coaching Services and their Quick Start packages. I would strongly recommend investing upfront. There is a Quick Start package, which is basically paying Collibra to help you, whether it's standing it up, whether it's your initial implementation, etc. I think it takes 10 days. I highly encourage taking this route. It will really accelerate your installation and decrease frustration. Make sure you've got leadership or executive support regarding what you're trying to do for your strategy.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that you can never assume what somebody means when they use a word. I've got 35 years of business experience under my belt. I've come to coin the phrase "What's your operational definition of that word?" You can be 45 minutes into a meeting with 10 people using the same word and find out halfway through the meeting that you're talking about four different things or two different things and everybody's frustrated and walks away.

You need to understand the meaning of the vocabulary, whether it's data vocabulary or business vocabulary. Doing so will absolutely accelerate your business and save people so much time. That's one of the things I really like about the Collibra platform. From talking to other companies, other people, and friends of mine, I know that other companies that use tools similar to Collibra — even they say the same thing. You need a data catalog, that will allow your business to quickly find what they're looking for and help you understand what that means in the context of the conversation they're having.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Collibra Governance a rating of eight.

We mostly use Collibra Governance for governance-related tasks like building business glossaries and creating policies.

Collibra Governance comes with a lot of features, and we have used it in one of our projects for metadata management and data lineage. I have used the solution to create governance rules and a centralized repository for business glossaries.

The solution's metadata management is pretty novice and could be improved.

I have been using Collibra Governance for around one year.

I rate Collibra Governance a nine out of ten for stability.

Collibra Governance is more suitable for medium-level and enterprise businesses.

I rate Collibra Governance a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support was good, but there was a delay in their response time, possibly because of the time zones.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is simple.

The solution's deployment will not take more than a week and can be done in five working days.

The solution's pricing is moderate and not very expensive.

Informatica is coming up with some level of data governance. erwin Data Modeler is quickly emerging as a competitor for Collibra in the coming days.

Collibra Governance is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to organize data. The IT team has access to the data and knows where it is stored, but when it comes to legal compliances and various regulations, the business itself does not have control over where the data is stored and how it is stored. Typically, the business wants to have control over where the data is stored, the various data classifications, and data sensitivity. That is the main reason why we use Collibra Governance.

I appreciate the range of features it has. Based on the reviews of some of the other tools we use, we find that the other tools lack in certain areas. If I had to choose a comprehensive tool across all the fields of data governance, I would opt for Collibra Governance.

The most valuable feature is the Technical Lineage. The fact that you can trace the auditability of a particular field or attribute across various systems is very useful.

There are a few things that need improvement. From a usability perspective, customers usually find some areas of the solution a bit complex. It takes a long time for the customers to get used to the UI and the interface. Another thing that the customers complain about when they opt for Collibra is the pricing. There are fees for additional features which mess with the customers' overall budgets.

I've been using Collibra Governance for about two and a half years.

It is a very stable solution. I would give it a nine out of ten. It works very well compared to other solutions on the market.

The scalability of the solution is good. I give it an eight out of ten.

The response time of technical support is typically high.

Neutral

Nowadays, most customers are looking into Microsoft Stack, so we use Microsoft Purview as well, although Calibra Governance is our preferred choice since it's much more stable than Purview.

Up until now, Collibra Governance has been the market leader and is always the first one to add new features. Purview tries to bring out a lot of features as fast as possible, but those features are not very stable and have a lot of bugs. Purview has the upper hand when it comes to the usability of the app system. It is easier for customers to understand the feature list while using Purview. For example, after using both solutions for a few weeks, they usually have a better grasp of Purview than Callibra Governance.

Since it is a SaaS platform in a way, the solution is deployed on Collibra cloud. The deployment is pretty straightforward since Collibra deploys it on its own. It takes about a week to get the core of the system up and running. After, we configure it to fit the specific needs.

On a scale from one to ten, the simplicity of the setup would be an eight.

Collibra Governance's pricing is based on its features. You get what you pay for. There are other solutions that are cost-effective but lower quality. With Collibra, you get a fair-value product if you pay a bit more.

I would not recommend using the Big Bang approach with Collibra Governance. You should understand the bigger picture of what you want to do. Start off with a few systems and four small modules. Get feedback from the business and then continuously evolve it. It is better to have the implementation spread out over a one-year period than have it crammed down within three to six months while trying to implement everything at once.

I would say that Collibra Governance is suitable for small to medium businesses. 

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

I am part of implementing the workflow through it, setting up the glossaries, and importing the assets to Collibra Governance. 

I would say customization is the most valuable. The workflow is very good and has been embedded. It also has a great user interface.

I would like to see a feature using the runtime dashboard. As of now, we can create the dashboard using the snapshot of the report. But I would recommend having a dashboard that runs the data on the back end.

I have been using Collibra Governance for the past eight months.

I am finding that there is stability in Collibra Governance.

It is scalable and we have the ability to add more users.  Currently, we have one hundred and fifty users.

I was not involved during the setup.

I would say definitely worth the expense. Data governance takes time to see the output and results.

I would rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

I have been working on Collibra for a data governance assignment. Along with that, we also use Ataccama for data quality purposes. It is a Collibra/Ataccama mixture that we use.

We would like to have out-of-the-box automation. We have leveraged some of the out-of-the-box workflows. Collibra does have the workflows such as the creation of business assets. We designed tools to tag the sensitivity information in Collibra and embedded scripts into the workflow. We then deployed that workflow so the user can upload a sheet with metadata and the tags will get tagged across those columns.

Collibra's lineage is a very powerful feature. We have integrated Collibra with Azure and ADLS storage and we create lineage diagrams using the two tools.

This solution does not have an out-of-the-box connector for the cloud platform. If a client does not want their data sent out of their own server, it will be very difficult to ensure this. You can install Collibra Jobserver and DGC on your machine, but you cannot install a newer solution. This is a restriction for us. 

We have been using this solution for one and a half years.

This is a stable solution. If you have data sources for which Collibra can provide an out-of-the-box connector, then it is stable. You can schedule your job to pull metadata or data out of your source system, with Collibra as a connector. However, if you have something out-of-the-box which Collibra does not support as a connector, that is a challenge. 

If you have Teradata or Oracle as a system, you can build that lineage into thw Collibra platform but if you want to build something on Azure, there is no direct way to do this because they don't support that.

This is a scalable solution. 

Collibra are very supportive. If you need anything, they have a customer support portal where you can raise a ticket and they reply immediately. 

Positive

Collibra does have its own university so when we started this assignment, we went through the courses. After that, it was quite easy to complete the setup. 

This is a very good tool and they have upgraded many features including an ADF connector and ADLS connector. You can write your own connector and customize it in the workflow.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

Collibra Governance can be deployed on-premise and in the cloud. The solutions can be used for lineage data quality, business glossary, and data cataloging.

The most valuable features of Collibra Governance are that it is user-friendly and easy to use.

The price of Collibra Governance could improve.

I have been using Collibra Governance for more than two years.

We have approximately 30 business users. 

The technical support was good from Collibra Governance.

The intial setup for Collibra Governance is mostly straightforward except for the workflows. The workflows are not that straightforward. There is a learning curve.

The full implementation took approximately four months.

We have approximately four people for the deployment and maintenance of Collibra Governance.

There are different levels of licenses. For example, some users can only do read-only licenses, and others have the stewardship license where they can give access to users.

The license for Collibra Governance is expensive.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, I am trying out a new data governance tool very soon. Collibra has bought a new data quality solution, but it is not integrated yet. We are all waiting for the integration of the data quality solution. OwlDQ is the name of the solution they have bought.

All right, sir.

I rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

We use the solution mostly for a client. There are a port catalog and dashboard cataloging features that they use. That said, the principal use case, even though there are a number of use cases, is using it as a business glossary for terms throughout the institution.

We're saving a ton of time. There are complex terms like year to date, et cetera, and defining what university means or what college means, and the validations between certain aspects of the organization allow us to have a single source of truth for agreements on that information pulling from whatever status system. It's basically eliminating any data systems that might have been used previously and eliminating any last-minute scramble or days of back and forth questioning from stakeholders to other analysts, trying to figure out what the single source of truth is. This product creates a central repository for terms in their metadata and provides a platform for further changes and approvals for that.

It's incredibly easy to use. As far as the user-friendly aspect is concerned, it's good. The search function within Collibra for desktop is pretty cool with many hotkeys, and especially for having to build a business glossary, if somebody's confused about a term, they can use the hotkey to pull it up on Collibra for desktop, wherever they are.

With the application installed, you don't necessarily have to go to Collibra to utilize it. 

I do like the workflow customization feature as we're able to customize workflows that give ownership to the stewardship organization rather than have to rely on out-of-the-box workflows. You make it an IT function. The IT department can set it up and then put it in the hand of the stewardship organization through customization and a feedback loop, with the stewards able to make it do what they need.

The tried and true features and functions are solid. These features develop in a very good direction as new releases come through.

The stability is good.

The scalability is there if a company would like to expand. 

There are still some new features being released and unveiled such as the certification workflows or questionnaires for dashboard certification, and stuff like that, that will improve a lot as releases go on. There are just minor things here and there that can change. 

Every time you change or publish a new questionnaire for certification, you have to basically go into the code and update the new version of the questionnaire. Just little things here and there like that will, as features improve, be improved as well. 

Much like other tools, some things can be a little bit immature sometimes.

I'm a little bit limited in some of the features that we have available. It can be a little bit clunky or require extra Windows that aren't necessarily needed. It can get a little bit over-complicated here. It would be nice to have some of the workflow functionalities a bit more usable. There could be more advanced customizations and more added features.

I've used the solution for about six months at this point. 

In general, the stability has been good. there have been no hiccups or issues of any kind. It seems to be reliable. 

The solution seems to be very scalable, from what I have witnessed so far. if a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

It's my understanding that we have around 200 users on the solution right now. We have several admin users and 200 business users. I'm not sure of the exact size. It may even be more than that at this point. 

It's a solution we're actively using. I'd say we are using it a moderate amount. 

I haven't personally been in touch with technical support. I know my team has, however, I have not heard any feedback. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I wasn't a part of the initial setup process. I can't speak to how simple or complex the process was in terms of implementation.

As I was not a part of the implementation process, I'm not sure if an integrator or consultant was used to assist in the setup process. 

We're partners. 

We're using the most recent version of the solution at this time. What I've been doing is product management on developing features and workflows for the customers or for the stakeholders.

The insight I would have for others considering the solution would be that it's a blank canvas. What makes it effective is understanding the use cases very well with the customer and designing the product to appropriately fill that need. The better you can understand the use case, the better that you can design it in a user-friendly fashion and get feedback from the stakeholders and get by in and organizational and ownership of the data that are you using, the more success you're going to have.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I'm satisfied with what we've done so far. And I'm looking forward to working with the solution in the future.

Our use cases include connecting a lot of legacy data systems to our logical components. For example, if somebody has a question that they post to us and say, "Tell me everywhere in our organization where we have a policy stored?" the primary use case is to logically define what a policy is, and then we use Collibra to tie that logical construct to a technical implementation. We may have six or eight, however many, different admin systems. We bring in the schemas of the way that those systems look, and then how a policy exists in this database and this table and this column, for example, in that legacy system. 

The second use case that we implement is the ability to track the provenance or the lineage as to how something changes over time. For example, if we bring data in from a legacy system and we use some tool set (e.g. Azure Data Factory) to extract the data into a Hadoop data lake, and then perform some transformations on it, we want to be able to track it; "It came from the source system here, and this field got changed to this name, and we applied this transformation on this field and it eventually shows up on this report here."

We use it to track where a policy exists and also how it got there: it exists on this report and here's how it got on that report, here are all the steps that it took getting through to that particular report from the actual source system itself. Because quite often what we're finding is that our business users will get a report and they'll say, "I think your report's wrong. How did you get that value on that report?" That provenance or lineage is what helps answer those questions.

We have data stewards who are the resources that if somebody proposes a new logical asset based on what they think the customer means, these data stewards are the ones that would get together and look at what's being proposed and make sure it works across all of our business units for a generic implementation, or create business unit specific terms if required. They're the ones that say a particular system or term or logical construct is ready for consumption by end users.

Another group we have is the end users. We try to have people use Collibra by asking, "Don't tell me what system you want to get access to, tell me what you're looking for in business terms/constructs." In our example, it would be the question, "Tell me about all the policies in our system." They would go to Collibra and "shop" for that data and pick a policy and put it into the shopping cart basket that Collibra provides as part of their interface. Then they would submit that request for approval/access to the underlying data.

We also have data stewards who approve the use of new/updated business terminology and end users who are looking for their data to make business decisions. We also have some power users who are the resources who are setting the direction for the application of where we want to go with it, (e.g. new workflows or new functionality within Collibra).

For us, the Collibra application is an on-premise installation (although we use IaaS VMs to host it on cloud); it is not their SaaS implementation.

One of the biggest questions that we had was we didn't know what to with the our tons of legacy systems. The company I work for is a fairly old company, it's over 120 years old within the insurance industry. There are lots of systems that have been around for upwards of say 40 or 50 years, so we're trying to consolidate and bring those down to target, to go from say 15 systems down to three. But not knowing what's in those other systems makes it difficult to do that rationalization. It's enabled us to first understand what we have and then to figure out how we get down to the target state architecture with a reduced number of target systems.

Out of box ingestions of technical metadata as well as ease of use for setting up new business metadata for users to represent their business terms

Collibra is very good at talking to modern database systems such as a normal RDBMS (e.g.DB2, SQL server or Oracle). Where it isn't great is with older technologies that you'll typically find in finance or insurance industries (e.g. VSAM or ISAM, or those types of older technologies). It just doesn't connect with them very easily. They do provide an ability to use a separate product called MuleSoft, which they used to license (as a bundle) up until last year until Salesforce bought MuleSoft, and that division is happening in 2021. With this 'bolt-on', you could go and get that data, but you had to write that code and maintain it yourself. It wasn't an out-of-box (OOB) feature, which is what we really liked from the Collibra offering. Our only way to access these older technologies was to create a MuleSoft flow, maintain, and deploy it. This leaves us with technical debt which will need to continually be maintained. In fact, we built all our custom Mulesoft flows using Mule 3.x and will soon be pushed to upgrade to Mule 4.x. This will not be a simple upgrade and will likely result in additional cost to bring in consulting resources more familiar with the technology. Since we do have a lot of older legacy systems, things that aren't greenfield, if you will, it adds a lot more overhead than what we were originally led to believe when we originally purchased the product.

We're not that deep into the Collibra product yet because it's only been a couple of years. We do like their ability to automate the workflows, such that, for example, if somebody comes in to say, "I want to request access to this data," you can build your own workflows to automate the approval process. There are some that are out-of-box, I think they could go a little bit further with some of their out-of-box workflows instead of having to create a workflow manually, get somebody to code it, and implement it. I think they could offer a bit more in that respect.

The second item that I think they could do better at is to have other products, or have things where they have a set of taxonomy per industry that says, "Here's what a policy is. Here's what a customer is," that kind of thing. They don't implement that out-of-box in Collibra, you have to do that yourself, whereas other products bring that to the table. Informatica, I believe, has their own insurance industry or industry specific taxonomy that would come with the product.

It makes adding the new logical constructs to Collibra a more manual workup to take care of. The classification becomes more manual because you don't get that out-of-box to say, "Hey, I recognize that that's a policy, because I know that about that and the taxonomy." You have to manually make that connection.

I have been using Collibra Governance for about two and a half years.

Collibra Governance's stability is quite good. It doesn't take a lot of maintenance to deal with it, it just runs. It doesn't cause a ton of issues and it doesn't require a lot of upgrades (we usually upgrade once/year). In the couple of years we've done, I think, two upgrades on it. The one thing that we're disappointed with is that 5.7.7 is their last on-premise implementation that you can do. You have to go to a SaaS offering by Collibra, after it's just been released end of November.

Being the industry that we're in, we're very risk averse, so our use of SaaS offerings isn't that large, and our company isn't prepared to put a lot into the cloud, especially when it comes to personally identifiable information (PII). We're very nervous about that. With that limitation, we would have preferred that Collibra would have extended the timeline of their on-premise offerings beyond this.

I don't have a lot to say about scalability because we haven't had the system pushed that hard. I think we started out with an initial 25 users, and we might have a couple of hundred now. We haven't had any complaints from end users in terms of not returning information in a timely fashion or the system isn't working as good as I would expect. We haven't had enough experience to comment on that. Our current installation is approximately 175 users with about 15-25 concurrent usage. We went with the vendor recommended VM sizings although we did put all services for Collibra on one VM (except JobServer and Connect as recommended). For larger implementations, Collibra will recommend that you split out services (e.g. DGC, Search, Repository) onto separate VMs to allow performance tuning but our implementation hasn't come to that yet. 

In my experience technical support is pretty good. They're fairly responsive. If I enter a case, I'll usually hear back either later that day, so maybe a five or an eight hour turnaround, or definitely within two business days. I find if it's beyond a basic question, it takes a little bit to get it pushed to another level, to their second level support. Sometimes it takes a while for them to say, "I don't know the answer, now I'll ask second level to assist me with that." Getting past the first level, like most vendors, is a bit difficult because they want the call answered there, but it is not unreasonable in any respect

We previously used the IBM Information Governance Catalog, IGC. We had used that as part of the whole suite (e.g. Information Analyzer, InfoSphere, etc.). We went out and did vendor assessments and had demos from the vendors come in to set a strategic direction. We determined what our strategic platform was going to be in terms of a data catalog. IGC just quite frankly wasn't anywhere in the realm of what Collibra could offer in comparison. It felt like comparing Windows 3.1 to a Windows 95 interface. Collibra is known as the 'Cadillac' offering from a user perspective. There are some things that it is not as technically good for, such as Alation is quite good at crowdsourcing or crowd approval approach. But in our opinion, Collibra offered the most features from one product overall. It's a bit on the pricier end, but when we looked at the Gartner Quadrants and Forrester Waves, it was always consistently either one or two up there with, say, Informatica or other tool sets like that.

That's actually what my role is, as the technical lead. I'm the one who did the installation, and is responsible for patching and that kind of stuff. I'm not an end-user of it as much, I don't go into it every day to do workflows or create the data, but if there's a technical request or something, that's where I would get engaged.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. I found the Collibra pre-sales and their support pretty helpful. They got back to you in a timely manner to be able to do the setup. It wasn't a difficult implementation by any stretch. It was about what I expected in terms of the timeline that they had provided for us and what we needed to do.

In terms of the actual installation process, it was maybe a couple of days start to finish once the hardware and everything was there. Then you continue to do your configuration as time goes on to connect to different systems and whatnot.

Most of that was put forth on advice from the vendors. We said here's the usage count that we plan to have, here's how many systems we're targeting originally. We looked to Collibra to give us the recommendation as to VM sizing and implementing. We didn't really create our own, we used theirs and customized it slightly for our environments, but it was mostly a vendor-provided plan of implementation.

We used in-house resources to build/deploy the IaaS environment and complete the installation of Collibra. We have used 3rd party firms to develop custom Mulesoft flows for connecting legacy systems and custom workflows

We've had good ROI, because when we look at the amount of time invested, it's not necessarily dollars out the door; it's more about manual work avoidance. Instead of having somebody have to manually enter all of these different systems and characteristics, we can do integrations between our source systems and Collibra to get that automatically and refresh it. As people make changes to source systems as time goes on, we can automatically bring those into Collibra. It has allowed us to do one of the projects that we had on the books for this year, which was to understand what our critical systems were. Not only for disaster recovery, but where is our most important data about our customers? Where does that reside and how can we take that data and join it to understand more about our customers and their needs?

In our scenario, we have different business units with the same customer, but we can't make that realization that it's the same customer in different business units because of the way the systems grew separately over the years. Collibra is the one that's allowing us to tie that together. It opens up additional revenue streams with the ability to say, "Hey, I noticed you bought a product for this business unit from us. Did you know we also sell this product for this other business unit?" It allows us that cross-selling opportunity or upselling if you will (aka Revenue generation). That's a bit difficult to articulate or quantify in hard dollars, because there are so many steps going from a lead all the way to a sale. But we certainly believe that the information that Collibra has been able to provide us has helped or augmented our revenue generation streams. In a way it is a sales enablement tool.

In terms of pricing, it's not bad. You pay more money for the author licenses, which is where you do most of your entry and whatnot. Whereas consumers are basically viewing information and using the tool to say, "Hey, I want to look at this data." I think what we would like to get to eventually might be an enterprise license, rather than having to say, "I'm going to pay for 50 authors or 100 authors." At some point in the future, I could see us wanting an enterprise license.

They may offer that now, but it wasn't at a price that was palatable for our company at this point. Plus, we needed a few years to get uptake in it to justify going to that high level. It's just more money licensing wise, but not unrealistic, in my opinion. The money is well spent for the product and the services we're getting.

We just found that IGC was way behind the times. IBM had not really put any money into their product, it didn't connect with any of the systems that we wanted to do. It simply just didn't fill our needs.

We did look at the Informatica product and we did look at Alation.

I think what we found with Alation is that it was good. The user interface was impeccable, but it was not what we would consider the whole package. It was very good at the catalog portion, but in terms of interconnectivity with different systems, it did not have workflow, which was a key characteristic that we were looking for. Alation was a fairly new company. It was only maybe three or four years old at the time when we looked. There was concern about the staying power for that particular vendor. Not that their product wasn't good, it just wasn't as full a product as we would have had with Collibra but built on something for workflow, which we weren't interested in. We were looking for one product to do that.

The Informatica offering was quite good as well, but in our investigations and interviews with other companies in our industry, Informatica is quite a complex product to get up and running and to maintain. It's not cheap either, but when we looked at what it would take to care and feed our maintenance on the Informatica side of the house, in comparison to what we could do with Collibra, we chose Collibra.

Everything seems to be going the route of software as a service these days. It does take away somewhat your ability to customize like you want. Some products allow you to do that better with their SaaS offering than others. I would say that the data catalog space changes quite rapidly. When we did our investigation a couple of years ago, Alation hadn't been in business that long, they've continued to grow and maybe their offering has become better. Just because we chose something two or three years ago, doesn't mean that we shouldn't re-evaluate that in another couple of years to say, "Is this still the strategic product for us?"

There tends to be a lot of vertical integration going on. We once thought, "Well, let's just buy IBM because everything works with IBM." That doesn't seem to work any more. There seems to be a lot of best of the breed. But when you do that, there can be a lot of interoperability there that just doesn't work out. That people who like the IBM's of the world say, "We'll just buy our product because everything integrates." It truly doesn't in our experience.

You have to do your homework and definitely interview other customers to understand their experience for what is good and bad, because of course, sales isn't going to tell you that. But do your homework and make sure that you're talking to people who have not only installed the system, but have been able to use it for a few years, to see what's good about it, what's bad, and what they might have done differently. We talked to a number of different customers in the insurance field, in Canada, the U.S. and in Europe, and learned different things that we would have never considered on our criteria had we not talked to them.

On a scale of one to ten, I would peg it at a seven and a half, eight. I would put it higher, only except it doesn't connect as well to our legacy systems without additional programming and a separate tool, which they used to license as the whole product, but when MuleSoft got bought out by Salesforce, that business relationship was severed. Now we have to buy that MuleSoft product separately from Collibra. Now we have a data governance product that used to include MuleSoft (but does not now,) and now we have to deal with a second vendor to get that. It was nice when it was all one product. If they're going to say, "Use MuleSoft to get at your legacy systems," fine, sell me that product. But they won't do that anymore because Salesforce owns it.