"The most valuable feature of Informatica MDM is hierarchy management. It's not something that's typically available and effective within ERPs."
"The data quality component is very good."
"The most valuable features of Informatica MDM are its reliability, match functions, and integration capabilities. The out-of-box functionality of deduplication and built-in data models ensure faster implementation."
"Informatica MDM's most valuable feature is the interconnection between multiple Master Data domains."
"It has been leading the market with hierarchy management and all the different match concepts and algorithms. They're very robust."
"It has flexibility in extending the data model."
"New tools are coming out that will enable you to achieve 90 percent of use cases with the out-of-the-box configuration, but I would like to keep Informatica tight here. Otherwise, you need a Java user edit course and other things to do multiple things that you cannot configure out of the box. They have to go through those use cases to do something if those can also be configured rather than coded."
"The Provisioning tool is something that is really handy for everyone. It is my pick as the best feature."
"It's very easy to use."
"One of the main features I have found useful is the integration with Azure active directory."
"Enables non-technical people to directly interact with the BI system."
"It has a very good feature called Excel plug-in. You just have to install the plug-in, and then it directly connects to the MDS instance where you can maintain and manage your data and publish it right through Excel. You don't need to go to the front end to make any changes. It has easy integration with SQL Server, and you can use SSIS to do the ETLs. It is a part of the Microsoft stack. It works with most of the Microsoft stuff."
"Pre-sales technical support is much better than post-sales technical support."
"Informatica MDM could improve the interdependency with integration. The solution sometimes becomes a bit difficult to change considering a lot of interdependency with the integration. There can be some improvement in the workflows and they can introduce more artificial intelligence."
"The biggest pain point for us is the documentation. Typically, you have to go through knowledge forums and knowledge groups to find out about the syntax issues for interfacing with new products. Typically, you've got to deal with someone who has been through the pain before. Their documents are not really up to date with current innovations happening in the industry. As big as they are, you can't really expect it, but that's our pain point."
"The configuration process is pretty lengthy and challenging and could be made easier to understand."
"We promote our code changes from a lower to a higher environment, which is highly complex when working with a multi-domain MDM like Informatica. This is the biggest obstacle for Informatica MDM, and I think they should change it because that's very time consuming."
"The on-prem solution is harder to learn than the cloud-based versions."
"Informatica MDM can improve the data catalog and data marketplace."
"The integration could be a bit better. The process is something new."
"The only drawback is that it does not have the matching, merging, and all true MDM components. For these, you have to use another competent called Data Quality Services (DQS). You need to plug it in and use it along with MDS for true MDM. Both of these are integrated together, but you have to do them separately, whereas, in Profisee, there are a couple of screens where you can configure the matching process, create matching rules, and other things, and everything is in one product, which is not the case with MDS. In order to implement a true MDM, you need MDS, DQS, and SSIS. You have to use MDS to store your golden records, DQS to configure and standardize all your rules and matching percentages, and SSIS to load the data to DQS and MDS. At the same time, you also need Melissa Data to clean up your addresses to validate and standardize the addresses. That's the main component of true MDM. It would be good if they can create a true matching component inside MDS and merge MDS and DQS."
"I do not like using Silverlight and Internet Explorer. The new 2019 version gets rid of that, which is one of the reasons why we are looking to switch."
"There are occasions when the solution maintains SD and we get duplications of MDS."
"It would be a better option to have an on-cloud version."
Informatica MDM is ranked 1st in Customer Data Integration with 16 reviews while Microsoft MDS is ranked 2nd in Master Data Management (MDM) Software with 5 reviews. Informatica MDM is rated 8.0, while Microsoft MDS is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Informatica MDM writes "A mature product that comes with a handy Provisioning tool and can be used for data deduplication purposes in any industry". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft MDS writes "MDS 2016 - Primitive but the price is right". Informatica MDM is most compared with SAP Master Data Governance, TIBCO EBX, Stibo STEP MDM, IBM InfoSphere MDM and Informatica PIM, whereas Microsoft MDS is most compared with Profisee, SAP Master Data Governance, TIBCO EBX, Boomi AtomSphere Master Data Hub and IBM InfoSphere MDM. See our Informatica MDM vs. Microsoft MDS report.
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Hi @Richard Tibbetts,
There's no short answer to your question. Nearly all existing MDM solutions on the market offer a broad range of patterns to ingest master data from various sources and distribute cleanse and consolidated information, also to the Azure stack. Many vendors offer prebuilt connectors for the most common sources (databases, various file types, storages, business applications including MS Dynamics, Salesforce, etc.), but also support a generic way of ingesting/exposing data via Rest APIs, file drops, etc.
MS MDS is an extension of the MS SQL server 2016. I don't know Microsoft plans to extend it, but I know that Profisee and CluedIn are very active in promoting their solutions as-built having Azure in mind and being a part of the stack.
Informatica MDM has three types of offerings these days: on-prem, hosted MDM, and cloud-native option - they differ in the functionality and integration options.
Obviously, there are many more MDM tools on the market particularly good in various data domains (products, customers/suppliers - so yours, multi-domain, etc).
I think that you should start your MDM journey by answering which current challenges you try to solve or what new capabilities you need to enable to the organisation. Once these questions are answered and based on your organization's Enterprise Architecture principles, look for the best fitting tool. It may (or may not) be the one that fits the best into the Azure Reference Architecture.
I hope this helped.
It's probably worth to add the Microsoft promotes using CluedIn as MDM solution on Azure stack. Please have a look at the Microsoft documentation:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
Last week Microsoft and CluedIn had a joined demo seesion. Perhaps you can ask for a link to a recording: https://www.linkedin.com/posts...
I agree with @InitZero...
I would add that there's no future roadmap for MDS and they don't have an Azure solution for it. Since it's a free product with an SQL license, don't expect Microsoft to invest in it.
Even though we are highly dependent upon it currently I'm starting to look towards the future where we need to find a replacement - hopefully, a PaaS solution. It would be great if Microsoft came out with something in Azure but I'm not hopeful at this point.