Collibra Platform Reviews

We use Collibra for IT data governance, specifically for GDPR compliance. Our company is in the banking and financial institution sector and we are customers of Collibra. 

In general, this is a valuable solution for us. Collibra provides a good view of where my data is, the type of data we have across the landscape, how it's getting utilized, the quality in terms of correct calibration, and whether the integrity is uniform across the landscape. Everything is in sync and Collibra is a central repository that provides a good snapshot of understanding along with holding the integrity, confidentiality, and security of our data. 

Data discovery would be the major area that requires improvement across the landscape and I'd also like to see data redundancies. Those are the two areas where improvements could be made. A lot of countries have laws that don't allow most of the data to flow into the cloud. That issue needs to be addressed when it comes to personal data protection laws. Collibra needs to take into consideration the local laws and the concerns of those countries.

 I've been using this solution for well over two years. 

The main technical support is from Collibra which has local partners. It's not a critical application that requires 24/7 support so they're available five days a week during work hours. 

In terms of the tool, the initial set up is not a problem, but there can be many legacy factors in any organization that can affect deployment.  Implementation needs to be understood so that the tool can be aligned to the IT setup of the organization. In that sense, implementation is always a challenge. 

We deployed in-house in consultation with Collibra, and implementation took about eight months. We have about 80 users throughout our organization including CTOs, CIO,s and the board which have become more sensitive to data protection over the years. 

There are other companies with solutions in this field; IBM, Informatica and they provide a lot of competition. I believe Collibra has a good standard and is an early bird in this area, I believe they'll keep that lead as they move forward in line with this constantly evolving field. 

It's important to have a clear understanding of your IT landscape and its features and whether they really match up with the roadmap of governance in terms of compliance. Those issues need to be assessed before choosing a solution. 

This is a cost-effective product and to my mind has all the ingredients to satisfy compliance requirements as well as ease of implementation. I recommend this solution and rate it eight out of 10. 

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.

The solution that I had worked on was related to the technical implementation of metadata for capturing analytics. That said, that particular implementation missed the bus with using it for business use and getting a proper buy-in from the users.

We learned some lessons on a past implementation, and with the new implementation, we're going beyond the data catalog and looking at the OwlIQ, data quality, as well as data lineage. We're really selecting some of the best modules within Collibra's toolset.

Right now, we're just implementing it. We're still in the purchasing process, however, having experience with it, I would say a great feature is its usability on the engagement with enterprise functionality. The crowdsourcing and just making it very accessible is foundational. At the end of the day, it always comes down to terms. For example, we might be saying the same exact term, however, have completely different meanings. It brings to light just the nuances, especially within a larger enterprise organization, a global organization. In organizations of this size, we've realized just how different our terminology views are. It sheds a good light on this and helps clarify. 

The data lineage piece is very useful for us. The ability to understand data flows, where systems and changes originate, is great. A lot of time you might have something on paper that isn't necessarily working in real life. This product brings about the right visibility to have the right conversations between business and IT.

There is a good community setup around the solution that can provide insights. 

It's not necessarily a tool specific, however, with any sort of application, there's an investment as far as the way in which you need to use it. There is a lot of upfront work that has to be considered. That's just a common reality with any software implementation. There's a lot of pre-work. You just don't turn on the lights assume it's going to work exactly as you envisioned. There is input and planning required.

If anything, I would say that the licensing is one area that could get improved. We have basically three roles: an admin, an editor, and a view-only role. It is limiting. For example, we want view-only, however, if we want users to be able to approve workflows, they need editor rights. That makes sense, except it doesn't necessarily meet all the business cases we have. In some instances, you might just need proper approvals, and you are not necessarily asking anyone to edit things. Yet in order for them to approve, they must have edit rights.

The last implementation was very much focused more on IT and capturing more of the IT view of data and even data definitions really focused on data standards, such as how we're going to name the technical fields or how we're going to name the entities. This new deployment is really much more focused on not just the IT side but on the business side and the operational side. It's based more so around analytics and operational governance. I'm hoping to use more of the modules and have a better, more favorable opinion of the solution's capabilities. While overall I have the sense it's good, the last company I was with didn't have the right business partners and it really just became another IT tool, which wasn't helpful to the company as a whole.

The initial setup requires more of a trial and error approach and there isn't too much documentation available to help you figure things out. There needs to be more online support around the sharing of best practices. There are a lot of use cases and people like the tool. That said, you hear a lot of pain points around large amounts of data being ingested and creating backlogs of data that need to be cataloged and there's really no way to prioritize it. 

Ultimately, it's a tool that should help to coordinate a lot of efforts and it would be nice to be able to look at something and understand how another experience could be similar or you can get a lesson learned before you actually make it your own lesson to learn.

This is more of a data governance tool, not necessarily a centralized tool for data cleansing. However, with the data quality module, that's the next evolution that's possible. Looking at data quality issues and then ultimately not necessarily being able to correct them, there's a lost opportunity. Data changes all the time. We're measuring it all the time. It would be advantageous to build this into more of a data quality tool in which users could cleanse data that could go back to source systems. That said, that's encroaching on more of the MDM solution.

I've been using the solution for about two years or so at this point. 

It's largely a good, stable solution. This is not an MDM solution. From a governance standpoint, there are some things that Collibra does better than some of its competitors, however, there's always something about having multiple tools and getting users to accept the multiple tools. It would be great if they could partner with an MDM solution provider to give more of a seamless look and feel.

In the last implementation, I do not recall dealing with bugs or glitches. In this new implementation, it's still too early to tell. 

The scalability potential is all around the framework that's specific to the company. It'd be good to have some general best practices from Collibra's standpoint. That said, is scalable, however, first and foremost, you need to implement it and really look at how the tool is functioning out of the box before you put your own strategy on it. 

Many times though, projects as they go, you're really not afforded that freedom. You might have a specific use case and you're trying to get that implemented so you'll get a quick win from a governance standpoint and so you can continue to incrementally add value. It's a balance due to the fact that, as we're trying to provide a solution, governance is an investment for sure. While there's certainly scalability potential there are structures that need to be in place from a foundational standpoint for it to scale as you need it to.

In the last implementation, there were about 20 users on the product. In that case, it was not that extensively used. Doing a data warehouse migration from Cloudera to Azure, things were collected, however, what was missing was the business definitions and the scenario-based understanding. Due to the implementation the last time, it offered a very flat view of the data. You didn't understand how everything was related or how things were scenario-based, et cetera. You couldn't get a sense of how fields are ultimately connected, and the KPIs that they ultimately built didn't help with understanding. The intention was that it was going to be an enterprise data catalog and it missed that chance. 

I haven't been in touch with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

The implementation is not that easy. All the sell sheets and everything makes it seem as though it's more structured. Here you have this catalog, however, in reality, you have to define the structure including the data that you're going to be collecting, how you're going to define it, what those workflows are, what the user groups are, et cetera. There's a whole change management initiative even beyond just turning it on. 

With any application, whether it's cloud-based, but especially if it's on-prem, there is a level of pre-work that needs to be done. It's not just a turn-it-on type of event. Overall, that's sometimes lost in the process.

Getting it installed and all that is pretty straightforward if you can get a system integrator, or maybe if you have the in-house knowledge, however, it's really the strategy that's behind it that makes for an easy or difficult rollout.

The community is pretty good, however, I haven't necessarily found anything that's like user groups that can help guide implementation. A lot of it is you make a mistake and you have to go back and try to remedy it. There is a lot of trial and error involved.

We handled the entire implementation ourselves, in-house. 

While I do not have a sense of the version number, I would say that we are not on the latest version of the solution at this time. 

I would advise new users looking at getting it implemented to really use the out-of-box features before you overlay your specific strategy on it. Upfront investigations and creating a repeatable framework of how this will ultimately operate are important to the success of the solution. One of the crucial early factors is to get this as part of an operating fabric within your company. There's a lot of pre-work and pre-thought that needs to be in place in that sense. Having well-engaged business folks as part of it will help with the level of success as well. This is not necessarily a big bang type of development and release. It's very incremental. You've got to think backward as far as the user experience - of how things are going to be searched and located - and bring that back to your IT process.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I'm not a part of the tech team. I'm definitely part of the master data management, wherein we are providing services with respect to master data. Our services are focused on just the business-specific areas such as pharma commercials and pharma supply chains, and we have also built the lineage in R&D areas.

In some specific use cases, we are mapping the processes, the respective sources and basically using the entire asset model of Collibra, starting from process, to attributes, to data modeling. We are tracking everything in Collibra.

Metadata management is one of the key aspects of the product we really appreciate. 

The lineage is one of the important features as well. We felt the asset model is very good. 

We have tried implementing some of the out-of-the-box workflows of Collibra however, we have also used some customized workflows. Customized workflows in terms of data stewardship, assigning basic roles and responsibilities, for issue management, et cetera. They are very useful in setting up the proper governance. Previously, our metadata and repositories were scattered. Since using Collibra, they're all coming into a centralized location. 

Overall, it is a good tool, due to the fact that, with other tools, in some or other way they are lacking certain capabilities.

There are extract, transform, and load tools wherein you can track the data lineage. You can track technical lineage, though not exactly proper lineage. That said, Collibra is a good tool to track, everything starting from process to the attribute table column level. 

It is user-friendly. I could easily go into the Collibra UI and explore the key features.

The solution has very good online assistance. Collibra University is definitely a great help. There are all of these free resources wherein wherever you are stuck, you can go and check and come back and fix items.

What we have done is, we have internally set up a self-service process. We could set up a self-service process within Collibra wherein business stakeholders can come and they can onboard themselves on Collibra. My team specifically is just educating them and helping them following the best practices of Collibra asset model and community. We are setting up their roles and responsibilities, community managers, the manager stewardship, et cetera. We can set everything up so that users can come and onboard themselves.

Right now, its maturity is at, I would say, a moderate level. The plan is to expand it to use it for full maturity. It cannot be directly integrated as a data quality tool, for example.

Collibra doesn't provide support for integration for SAP Info Steward directly with Collibra. Going forward, we are planning to use Collibra and trying to replace other, I would say, other peripheral tools in the architecture so that we can make it more automated and have proper governance control in that.

In general, the solution isn't quite in a nascent stage, where we are using the data quality rules, business rules, everything we are exploring how to implement and then further integrating it with other platforms and use cases with respect to business areas. 

I haven't used the solution for very long. I joined my organization almost eight to nine months ago, however, I've been using it for the past six or seven months. It's been under a year at this point. 

The solution is stable. We can definitely rely on it. If it's a storage solution, other maintenance, and other cost perspectives come into play. However, we are not using it that way. It does not have storage capability. We are exploring how to better complement that with a Data Modeler. That said, we have no issues with it crashing or freezing and there are no bugs or glitches.

I have not tried to expand the solution and therefore cannot speak to the scalability of the product.

The solution is extensively being used. It's likely that we might increase usage.

Right now it is limited to a few use cases, however, Collibra has been identified as a solution that should be used to scale up. It should basically be used under full maturity. We are trying to basically onboard many, many more businesses. 

For now, for example, we just have a pharma supply chain. However, we are in touch with the other stakeholders. We are trying to convince them by showing them the capability of Collibra, so that they can better manage their data.

The objective is to onboard people on Collibra and no other data governance tool. This is one tool which, will be a place of central governance. There have been some businesses that are using Ataccama or SAP MDM. However, Collibra is the one that is supposed to grow further. There is no plan to stop using it.

Our company is very much in touch with technical support. That said, I am part of the master data management team and therefore I do not contact them directly. However, the core tech team definitely is regularly in touch with the Collibra tech support team. 

I personally have just attended a couple of sessions with Collibra consultants, wherein they provided an overview of what they have done for GSK until now.

My entire team is new, so we had a couple of sessions with Collibra folks. They provided very good support and a very helpful overview.

I was not a part of the initial setup. I joined the company after it was implemented. I cannot speak to the implementation or deployment process. I have no insights into that aspect of the product.

Collibra initiated the implementation somewhere around July 2019.

While I do not have too much insight into the licensing aspect of the solution, I can say that we are not charged monthly. We might have to pay on a yearly basis.

I can't speak to the pricing. I'm unsure as to if it is expensive or reasonably priced. 

We are not a reseller. We are likely only a customer and end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're currently using. I don't know ht eversion number off-hand. 

I would recommend the solution to other organizations. There are not many competitors in the market for checking the data lineage and there are some data modeling tools. It's just that it's more about how an organization visualizes and how they want to track the lineage. Collibra is definitely a good tool from a governance perspective.

Right now, our plan is to basically use the Collibra lineage entirely, in data lakes, in metadata management, et cetera. Basically, we want to integrate everywhere so that nothing bypasses the governance.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the solution at a seven.

We are using the product mainly for metadata management as well as some data governance practices such as roles and responsibilities set up. We're also using different workflows - mainly approval workflows or request access workflows where people can actually request access to data. We have use cases based on different teams, based on what they need. It's mainly the glossaries, such as business glossaries, data dictionaries, and report catalogs.

The product is becoming the source of truth for the different business terms, acronyms, measures, etc. At least, this is the goal. Also, I would say the report catalog where the people can go and see what reports there are and can request access to the data if they need to is great. 

The data lineage from the source up to the reporting tools has been very helpful. It's also been very beneficial to be able to run some impact analysis. The visualization property can visualize the overall picture to see how the different assets are connected. This is also very beneficial to our organization. Of course, then there's the social aspect. You can command or you can use different workflows. 

Basically, it's helped our organization in a myriad of ways.

You can tailor the solution to your needs. You can really create different office drives and different attributes or relations that you can customize for your needs, which is a great thing. 

The diagrams are really great due to the fact that there are validations. The search capabilities and the different filters are all great aspects.

It's a user-friendly tool, even for non-technical people. That was one of the reasons why we chose it. It has very good social adoption. There isn't much training needed.

The solution needs to be controlled. It can go sometimes out of hand.

The speed sometimes, especially now, since we have moved to the Collibra Cloud, has not been the best. The management of the speed of the tool is not that great. It's also partially impacted by the fact that we need to use a VPN and we have got a lot of security measures. Sometimes it's not working well together with everything else. That is the main pain point that we are having.

Occasionally we get little bugs that occur, however, this is typical.

We would like to have a data lineage feature. It's just like on a different module. That's already available, as well as some advanced connectors. 

From my perspective, I would like to see improvement in the dashboard creation, to make it easier to create a really nice dashboard, and to also be able to play with the user interface when it comes to those dashboards. 

We haven't used the solution much, however, we have used it within the last 18 months or so.

We do occasionally have bugs in the system.

Now, after we have moved to the Collibra Cloud, we have to do some re-indexing and some restarting. We are at the stage where we are getting to something of a normal state. Sometimes there are some issues, however, we hope that it's just temporary.

We need to scale it more and more, however, that's why also be moved to the cloud. We believe that it will be better in terms of scalability.

There are two types of users and two types of licensing. One group is able to alter the information. Then there are users that can see the content. We have about 500-600 people who have accessed the solution in the past three months.

I am not the one who actually deals with the support, however, I know that some people are dealing with them quite a lot. My understanding is that the quality of technical support depends on if you really emphasize the importance of the issue. Then they react quite well. You really have to make sure that you've set up the importance, the criticality, of that issue properly.

Previously, we had a tool called Samantha, which is quite a local product. It was purchased by Alteryx.

If I compare Samantha and Collibra, they are actually two different worlds. We are quite independent with Collibra and therefore, we can basically really create any kind of item by ourselves rather than using the other tool, Samantha. We were relying too heavily on developers previously. It wasn't ideal.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. I wasn't the one who was taking care of it from a technical point of view, however, if I remember correctly, my colleagues didn't have any problems with it. When it comes to the user interface and how to work everything, it was really straightforward. 

A great advantage is that Collibra has got Collibra University where you have a lot of materials and videos, and tutorials as to how to use Collibra. We also have the Collibra community and documentation where you can search for information. This is really great asset for us.

Now that we are on the cloud, maintenance in terms of updates, etc. will be handled by Collibra. We are developing our own connectors as well, and we'll need occasional maintenance for that.

We haven't specifically tried to measure any ROI. It's not something that I can accurately answer.

You pay for a one year license for the whole Collibra. Then, you have some modules which are paid separately, such as the data lineage or the privacy and security module and others or insights, so that you can access some metrics. Licensing is also based on what you pay for each alter-license. It means that, if you want someone to actually create content in Collibra, you need to have an alter license, which is quite costly.

The way it's done, it ensures that the people who actually use the solution are trained and they can correctly control the content, and how it's created and how it's governed, as opposed to having a free-for-all. It is a good model. That said, it can be costly.

We're just a customer.

We fought pretty hard to have Collibra as opposed to Axon from Informatica. For us, getting Collibra was crucial, and we're really enjoying working with it.

I'd advise people to start small and try to implement small pieces in a POC so you can gauge how it will work on a larger scale. It's important to really have a look at various use cases as well.

You really want to work to sell it to the final users so that it will have a heavier adoption rate.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I've been working with multiple companies, but with two of the companies we have been using Collibra mostly for data governance. With these companies, our use case is all about metadata governance, lineage, and data-related policy management. We're doing policy management directly inside Collibra and we're also using it for issue management on the analytics side.

If someone has a data concern, they just call me in and then put that concern into Collibra as a front-end UI for the data stewards and data scientists, and we start processing them.

We have benefited greatly from Collibra's data governance reporting. If we want to know more about a specific data element, we can use Collibra to get a picture of the whole history of it.

For example, who is the business owner for it? Where is the data coming from (especially when you have different sources which come through) and who was all touching it? And if I wanted to add a rule, like a business rule or a data quality rule for that particular data element, how or where do I keep it? It's like one central place, but for all these items.

I like the lineage feature the most because I don't think there's any other tool that actually depicts the data flow from multiple sources and the connectivities between every data element inside those sources.

I don't think there's any other solution where you can view multiple systems and multiple sources and data places and you can just write it down. It's a lot of work to initially organize but there's no other tools to do lineage like Collibra does it.

The connectors are not very sophisticated. They can do, for example, Informatica and Tableau, but the connectors themselves could be improved.

I recently got a subscription for another 600K for Collibra for one more year, so the author licenses are not used much. And they keep changing the UI platform; that can also be improved.

From an administration perspective, I like the white-glove onboarding part of Collibra. That was actually nice and I really liked that. For administration in general, I like that you can use Collibra however you want. It's more raw and easily adaptable.

So you can cook it or you can steam it or you can make changes to it in a lot of different ways, but it would also be nice if there were an already available analytics tools like Tableau at hand. Though it is easily adaptable and you'll have a completed end product which you can really leverage.

I've been using Collibra Governance for five or six years.

In terms of scalability, it's more like adopting; it's more like a shark. You have to keep feeding it and then it will grow. It depends on how many systems you're using. I worked for a union bank earlier when we set up Collibra and we were able to push in 3000, 30,000, 30,000 data elements. It's great when all the data is available because the team had been doing data analysis for more than a year prior to getting onto Collibra.

At my current company, the data analysis started at the same time along with the data governance and I think I hardly have 300 data elements. So it works on however much you feed it.

And if you have a huge data dictionary and business glossary already available, well and good. Instead of putting it in an Excel sheet, you can put it on Collibra and then you can actually walk through it. But if not, then you have to start feeding it, and it might take at least two years until you get proper food for the tool.

The technical support is okay, definitely not bad. I think they have a 24 hour SLA, but again, it's a data governance tool, so if it breaks and it's not available for a day or so, it's not going to create any business loss. It's more of an understanding kind of tool, and if the SLA is a bit delayed it won't be much of a problem.

The only comment I have is that some of the technical support teams in privacy, security, infrastructure, etc., could be more available during US timezones. That would have made our onboarding process easier.

We went through setup with the white-glove onboarding program. I actually gave feedback to Collibra as well, because the process is a little unusual, but I appreciate it.

The one thing I found a bit difficult when properly onboarding with Collibra and setting it up is that some of the Collibra teams we're working with, like in the security, privacy, and infrastructure teams, are in the European timezone and not the US timezone. Because of this, it becomes a little uncomfortable. It would be great if they could change things around so that there's also somebody available in the US.

It's not just one single technical support team when you are setting up Collibra; you have a lot of different puzzle pieces to work with. That's what the white-glove onboarding is all about. So it actually takes five to six weeks to completely set up, from starting with the solution to getting the software installed and all the nodes set up.

Whether it's on-premises or online, in both cases the whole setup takes five to six weeks and in this time frame I also need to have the company-related IT support people available. And it's just hard for me because most of Collibra's support teams are on Europe time. It could even take up to eight weeks.

Regarding implementation, we need to have the role-setting, we need to have the workspace in the UI in the front end, we need to build the communities, the groups, etc. So it's more like a whole structure that you have to build, and it's a lot of work.

It's more raw, so you can change it however you want. But the thing is, there's not much of a guideline and it depends on your company and organization as well. So you have to ask, how do you want to do the structure? Then you first have to find the communities, and you'll have to set up the groups and the UI, and what comes back, and it's just more about adopting the software to your needs.

Our data officer was very interested in doing it. So she's fully on. And we had an administrator, a developer and the business. We had around three or four business owners to set up the first part before we adopted the rest of the businesses. Of course I was there, too, and there was one more project manager. All in all, we implemented Collibra with only about eight people. As for ongoing maintenance, we only require one administrator.

We have not seen ROI yet. Again, it's more like a dictionary. You buy a dictionary at home, so whenever you want it, you use it. What is the value of getting the dictionary? I don't know. It depends on your talent. If your team does not have good talent, then the dictionaries are more useful. It gets easier to navigate. And if you don't have the dictionary, it's going to be hard.

I think they have a trust issue.  I did not like the way they recently went through the process. They were like, "Finish this SOW first, only then will we sign the other SOW." Or, "Finish this code." I didn't like that much.

And they're also very hard. They don't negotiate much: The first price is the first price. We tried our vendor management team contracts that our negotiation people use, but they did not negotiate at all, nothing at all. The very first price they quoted, they almost always stuck to the same price, within 95-98%. Always the same price; hardly anything went down. So that's one thing. They shouldn't do that.

Generally, when all the vendors quote, first they quote and then we start negotiating it. They might then reduce the quote or just provide a different way of getting around. Collibra were very rigid cost-wise, so they should improve that or maybe come up with some plan on how to negotiate.

I think we considered Informatica and one or two others that I can't remember off the top of my head. Informatica was the actual challenger to Collibra before we finalized the cost and everything.

It was cheaper, and it was another good one from an analytics perspective. But we know that, industry-wise, Collibra is number one from a data governance perspective. That's one of the reasons why we went with Collibra, even though the rest of the tools' setup cost and maintenance were cheaper.

It's a very niche product. It's nice to use and easy to promote. You don't have to have all the user licenses - you can also get the author licenses. If you have 10 author licenses, you can get up to 50,000 consumer licenses. It's nice to know you have a mobile component in that regard.

If you're doing a lot of training as well, you need to do proper training with your data team, and with your business team, try to use it as a business tool instead of a technical tool. Employ it as much as you feed it, because then it's that much more useful.

And then having the business rules, the data governance and data quality rules, everything in one place, is nice to have. If you try to utilize it, the data lineage is number one, because there's awesome capability in it. So just try to use it and you'll start loving it.

I would rate Collibra a seven out of ten.

We use it for metadata management, data lineage, and automated governance processes. I am working on the SaaS deployment, but I have also worked on the on-premise deployment. I am currently using its latest version.

We get to see the end-to-end data life cycle or the data flow in our organization. In my previous project, I implemented the Collibra Governance solution. We got the metadata right from the landing layer, and then throughout the intermediate layer, that is, the staging layer, the application layer, and the data warehouse layer. We then connected all the metadata together. So, in one single go, you can see how your data is landing, how it is getting transformed while it is moving throughout, and who is consuming this data through the reports, and in which report it is getting used. You can see the entire snapshot in one single click, which is a great feature for an organization.

The end-to-end solution itself is great. The most valuable is the workload feature that Collibra offers. There is a vast amount of flexibility in terms of how much we can customize. It gives us a lot of options to implement for a lot of purposes.

One problem is the data lineage, especially extracting the ETL transformation from different ETL tools and identifying how the data is getting changed from one layer to different layers and how the transformation is applied. It doesn't support all the ETL tools for extracting the transformation logic. It supports some of the tools, but there are still some tools that need to be supported. 

There is also a small pain point in terms of integration. There is a little bit of change in their strategy from Collibra's end. Earlier, they used to offer two solutions. One was out of the box, and one was a custom-built solution for which they used to provide a dual connector. Now the focus from the Collibra side is more on using the out of the box connector. They are discouraging doing the custom integration. That leaves us with two problems. The first problem is that the out-of-the-box connecter is not yet enabled for a lot of systems, and the second problem is that the out-of-the-box connecter has certain limitations. If we want to tweak those as per our needs, it is not possible. However, the custom-built is still supported, and you can still build a custom integration by using the API, but it is not very encouraged by Collibra.

Its dashboard also needs to be improved. There are options to use the HTML code to customize your dashboard, but it has a lot of limitations.

I have been using it for two and a half years.

It is a stable product. In the past, whenever a new version was introduced, there were a few issues, and a few things didn't work, but Collibra has improved the quality now. In the last couple of upgrades, I have not seen such an issue.

It supports the entire enterprise's data governance, which means that you can have a vast amount of metadata and bring metadata from any system. That could mean millions of tables and columns. I haven't seen its performance deteriorate too much. It is just that when you are trying to integrate with a new system and you are also trying to profile the data, it can give some challenges with a huge data set.

It is used very heavily in my latest project. The customer has a lot of expectations. They are trying to replace the existing system and want to completely move to Collibra Governance. So, it is being used pretty extensively, and they will add more and more to it.

I would rate their technical support as medium. I have had several interactions with Collibra. The response is usually within eight hours. You may or may not get a good answer in the first go. You may have to do a follow-up, again explain the question, and then they get back.

I have some experience with Informatica EDC and Axon, which together provide a data governance solution. The main difference is that Informatica has separated the business and technical aspects of data governance. EDC or Enterprise Data Catalog handles the data catalogs, integration, and harvesting the metadata, and Axon focuses on the business aspect of data governance, such as data lineage, data quality, and workflows. Collibra has everything in one solution. As far as integrations are concerned, Informatica has the edge over Collibra. It provides more connectors and more flexibility for building custom solutions.

If you are using the SaaS version, it is very straightforward. Otherwise, it could have complications. You won't realize those complications in the beginning because the product really starts running. However, when you start bringing the metadata from different sources, you will realize that there are some configuration changes that you need to make. Maybe the connectivity is not happening, and some firewalls need to be opened. Collibra is no longer providing the on-premise option for new customers. They are asking everyone to go for the cloud version.

In terms of deployment duration, if you are using a SaaS version, it hardly takes a day to get your product up and running. Implementing the use cases is an ongoing process. It typically takes six months to a year for implementing the high priority use cases.

It does not generally require a lot of people for deployment, but it also depends on the use cases. Generally, two to four people are enough. In terms of the team, we have a Collibra workflow developer, metamodel developer, Collibra architect, and integration developer. They all handle different aspects of the work.

In terms of maintenance, it does require maintenance, and you have to keep updating it. Most of the stuff is done automatically for you, but you still need to verify your custom code to check if anything is broken.

I have worked with two or three implementations. Even though my current client has a lot of expectations from Collibra, they have not realized the full ROI. They are still exploring it and have not yet reached that stage where they can make a decision. One of my earlier customers was pretty happy and satisfied with this solution, and they did realize the ROI.

I think it is on a yearly basis, but I'm not involved with the pricing session, so I have no idea. There are several licenses for different models. You get one license per product, but a lot of features are controlled separately through different licenses. So, as and when you want to use a feature, you have to procure the license for that feature.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but I would say that before starting the implementation, just understand what the product is, what it can do, and what it cannot do. Don't focus too much on the technical aspects of the product. Data governance should be used from the business point of view.

Data governance was a new concept for me. By using this product, I got to know a lot of different aspects of data governance, and how should you go about implementing it. One main lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that don't just focus on bringing the metadata from the whole system and dumping it into the tool. It will become unreadable for other users. You will end up with too much data that no one is using. It is better to start small.

I would rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten. There are two main bottlenecks for my use cases that can cause trouble for me. It needs better data lineage functionality for extracting the transformations. It also needs better integration. I would like to see more connectors and more flexibility in terms of integrating it with different systems. 

We're a very large pharmaceutical organization so it's difficult to quantify exactly how many users are using Collibra.

Within our organization, there is a data governance team that we had set up. I am the person in charge of that team. While working on the data governance processes, we thought of leveraging Collibra for things like data dictionaries, developing data lineage, ensuring that business artifacts like KPI catalogs and board catalogs can be built within Collibra itself. 

This solution has done a lot for our organization and the trust amongst the data that we've been using has definitely improved. Earlier, these things were happening in silos, there were people who were doing manual documentation. Now, things are centrally available on Collibra, so it is more of a centralized platform. People are now able to track what is happening in the background of the data that they are using. Essentially, it has provided us with more trust and transparency — this is the real benefit that we've got out of Collibra.

Also, connecting the dots — things that used to be done in silos, now we have a centralized platform. Every team is aligned with what others are doing. It is not as if I am reporting a KPI, which has an "A" definition and somebody else is reporting a KPI with a "B" definition. When things are consolidated from a country level or a regional level and you're trying to present it to the leadership team, then there is a different picture to it. You're not using consistent calculations and definitions. This ability has been really effective for our organization.

It's a one-stop solution for all of our queries related to data that we are leveraging for our reporting. Pharma is totally dependent on what people are turning out as a report and what analysis or analytics they can derive out of it. From there, leadership accordingly makes a decision. It gives us more confidence in having a go-to platform that acts as a one-stop-shop solution for all of our queries.

Due to technological advancement and data becoming more critical for all reporting and analytics purposes, we are no longer restricted to primitive tools like Excel, etc. Earlier, we were leveraging these tools because we used to source data directly from data sources, but now, things have moved to the Azure platform and we have much more freedom in the cloud.

It's now really important for technical people to have some kind of lineage for these data sources because currently, we are not just leveraging data from the source and reporting it somewhere. We have thousands of reports with some transformation that occurs in between. Data is moving from one layer to another — all types, including raw, curated, and rich.

When our technical team works on it and our business demands new modifications, it becomes difficult for them to track that lineage and what impact it's going to have on the upstream and downstream system. This is one functionality of Collibra that we have leveraged extensively. 

We are in the process of migrating all our data sources towards the data lake — some has already been done and more is on the way. We want to connect all of our reports, which are either based on ClickView, Tableau, or PBA, directly to Collibra, as our data platform. If a business user wants to track down a KPI in a report to the rawest data from which we are sourcing it, there are a number of layers and transformations happening in between.

It is important for business users to track what is happening in the background. Are we leveraging the right thing? Are we applying the right kind of transformation or the right business-logic to arrive at a certain KPI? At the same time, the IT team needs to be able to know what kind of lineages there are. For example, If I make a change to one of these things, what impact will it have on the backend? This is one of the powerful functions of Collibra which we as an organization think is really useful — as an organization, we have been reaping the benefits thanks to this solution.

I am a business person — I am a team leader. My duty is to ensure that the data governance processes are set up; that's how I started to use Collibra. There are certain limitations I have observed in Collibra. With regards to our data lake, Collibra doesn't give us direct connectivity to the Azure Data Lake. We have to establish data lineages. We have to browse those files manually and then connect them via Collibra — that's how data dictionaries get published. Overall, it's quite a manual type of process which needs a lot of human intervention.

I've been hearing that tools like Talent are going to be available soon, which we hope to leverage in the near future. Talent is similar to other ETL or Informatica-type tools. It directly connects to the source system, captures all the transformation tools, and provides you with a spreadsheet that talks about data lineage, which can be fed into Collibra. If this functionality could be improved, it would be a great time-saving solution. It would require less effort and it would be a more automated kind of system, less dependent on human operation, which means that it would be less prone to errors as well.

We create and issue the management of workflows with Collibra. In regards to workflows, I find that they can be made very simple. For example, a request goes directly to the person who is in charge of that particular asset and some simpler workflows can be assigned to it. Recently, I find that the default process of issue management in Collibra is really complex — It wasn't really helpful to us.

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

If deployed correctly and leveraged properly by the people, if the commercialization of the product within your organization, post-deployment, is good and you're able to transfer that value to people, then this solution definitely has huge power. In terms of data governance, as I mentioned, it can be a one-stop solution for all of your data governance needs. 

If commercialization, onboarding, and value from Collibra are conveyed properly to the teams, then definitely it's a powerful data governance tool.

No. Things were happening in silos. Everybody had their own way of doing data governance. There wasn't any connection or central platform to do that. Everybody was using their own method, platform, files, etc.

We have one person from our leadership team who has experience in data governance — 20 years of experience. Similarly, we had certain technical team members as well. The initial setup was a collaborative effort. Overall, I found the process to be a little complex. 

You actually need to get into a lot of theory to be able to understand the backend of Collibra and then be in a position to be able to implement it. Initially, it's a little complex but now that I've spent one and a half years working on it, I find it a little easier, but at the time of initiation, we found it to be a little complex.

Deployment took us roughly nine to ten months. 

Our data governance lead oversaw the initial deployment. In my team, there were around five team members who were supporting us through deployment. There were two technical members from the same organization that I worked for who were actually involved in the technical assessment. Then there were onshore business people, too. This was all new to our company — we just made decisions and then we started to go ahead with them. 

There was one expert from Collibra that our organization has partnered with because it was a new thing for us. That person actually acted as a guide and mentor, leading workshops and assessments — showing us what should go into Collibra. In a nutshell, these were all the people who were involved.

From a technical perspective, maintenance is required after deployment. We have a dedicated team who looks after this, we don't have to do anything. From an operation perspective, for the maintenance of the asset, you have to ensure that your information is real-time and updated on a regular basis. You cannot just feed this information once and then never look at it — in the data world, things keep on changing. You need to ensure that those dynamics are being catered to. From an operational perspective, yes, there are monthly processes in place that are there to ensure that whatever we have posted on Collibra is up to date and relevant.

From a technical perspective, I cannot contribute much because there is a dedicated team that makes all of the decisions. If we are upgrading Collibra, they are the ones who get the notification, they work with the team and then they agree on the next steps and then we just get notified that new features are going to be available. 

I was not involved in the licensing of this solution. 

We evaluated the pros and cons of another tool (I forget the name of it). From a forward-looking approach and long-term perspective, I think Collibra is far more powerful than the other tool.

Before you deploy or implement Collibra, just ensure that you have certain use cases that really qualify for leveraging Collibra. Assessment and evaluation are really important, first. Benefit analysis is the most important key.

What are the transformational changes that Collibra is going to bring? If it's going to improve your ROI by deploying it, then migrate over to it; just don't do it because everyone else is doing it — that's not a good enough reason. 

There are certain tools out there that can analyze data and generate reports with a few simple clicks. Collibra doesn't work like that until you have the ground knowledge of the metamodel — how the backend works and how your assets should be categorized. You cannot expect to directly deploy Collibra. You need certain experts in that area who do extensive research and understand the backend of Collibra, only then can you proceed with it. Once you are pro with it, it becomes much easier, but initially, it does require some research and hard work.

From what I have leveraged out of Collibra thus far, on a scale from one to ten, I would give it a rating of seven.