erwin Data Intelligence by Quest Reviews

The three big areas that we use it for right now: metadata management as a whole, versioning of metadata, and metadata mappings and automation. We have started to adopt data profiling from this tool, but it is an ongoing process. I will be adding these capabilities to my team probably in Q1 of this year.

It is improving just a small piece of our company. We are an extremely big company. Implementing this to the company, there is probably a zero percent adoption rate because I think it is only implemented in the development team of our platform. 

If you look at this from the perspective of the platform that we are delivering, the adoption rate is around 90 percent because almost every area and step somehow touches the tool. We, as a program, are delivering a data-oriented platform, and erwin DI is helping us build that for our customers. 

The tool is not like Outlook where everyone in the company really uses it or SharePoint that is company-wide. We are using this in our program as a tool to help my technical analysts, data modelers, developers, etc.

The possibility to write automation scripts is the biggest benefit for us. We have several products with metadata and metadata mapping capabilities. The big difference when we were choosing this product was the ability to run automation scripts against metadata and metadata mappings. Right now, we have a very high level of automation based on these automation scripts, so it's really the core feature for us.

I'm working as a solution architect in one of the biggest projects and we really need to deliver quickly. The natural thing was that we went through the automation and started adopting some small pieces. Now, we have all our software development processes built around the automation capabilities. I can estimate that we lowered our time to market by 70 percent right now using these automation scripts, which is a really big thing.

The second best feature that we are heavily using in our project is the capability to create the mappings and treat them as a documentation. This has shown us the mappings to the different stakeholders, have some reviews, etc. Having this in one product is very nice.

The SDK behind this entire product needs improvement. The company really should focus more on this because we were finding some inconsistencies on the LDK level. Everything worked fine from the UI perspective, but when we started doing some deep automation scripts going through multiple API calls inside the tool, then only some pieces of it work or it would not return the exact data it was supposed to do. This is the number one area for improvement.

The tool provides the WSDL API as another point to access the data. This is the same story as with the SDK. We are heavily using this API and are finding some inconsistencies in its responses, especially as we are going for more nonstandard features inside. The team has been fixing this for us, so we have some support. This was probably overlooked by the product team to focus more on the UI rather than on the API.

We have been using the product for two and a half years.

There have been no issues with the stability from the erwin DI platform. We haven't encountered any problems for the last two and a half years.

It is maintained by another team. erwin is maintained by the team who generally maintains our platform. However, the effort is close to zero because there is nothing happening. Hold the backups and everything is automated by default on our shared platforms on which it is installed. 

It is a Java-based platform. So, if there would be some issues with the performance of this platform, we would probably migrate this to a bigger server. Therefore, it can scale. 

It does not have fancy cloud scaling tools capabilities, but we don't need this. For this type of tool and deployment, it's sufficient.

We have around 40 users. All the roles are very different because half of the developers work with different technologies. One-fourth of the users are technical analysts. The rest of the users are data modelers.

We have used the technical support several times. It's really different based on the complexity of the task. Usually, they meet their SLAs for fixes and changes in the required support time.

We did not previously use another product.

We used this product even before it was bought by erwin. Before, it was a company called AnalytiX DS. Then, after two years ago, erwin bought this company and their product, doing some rebranding. So, we started using this product as version 8.0, then it was migrated to version 8.3. Now, we are using version 9.0. We went through a few versions of this product.

The initial setup was not so simple, but it wasn't hard. If it would be between a one and five, with one being easy and five being hard, I would put it at a two. 

It was a new tool with new features. It had to be installed on-premise. Therefore, we struggled a bit with it. We were using it for quite a complex task, so we needed it to go through areas that would be potentially supported with the tool. The work associated with this initial setup to define that was not so easy, just to go through everything. 

Some companies have an initial packet that they show you everything in a very structured way. When we were implementing this, we really needed to discover what we needed rather than be given the documentation showing that this is here, this can contribute to your use case, and so on. We needed a lot of effort from our side. In comparison, I'm leading some other PoCs right now with other vendors in different areas. Those vendors contribute highly to me being capable to assess their tools, install and use them. 

The deployment took two days and was nothing special. It was just a simple Java application with a back-end database.

Migrating my team to use this tool properly, do some training, putting some capabilities so does people have some reason to use the tool, that took us around three months. Because we are using this for automation, the automation is an ongoing process lasting continuously for these two and a half years because we are adopting and changing to the new requirements. So, it's like continuous improvement and continuous delivery here.

I was involved from the very beginning of the PoC, actively checking the very basic capabilities. Then, I designed how we would use it, leading the whole automation stream around this tool. So, I was involved from the very beginning to the full implementation.

It took us around three months to introduce this tool.

If you count that it takes 70 percent less time to deliver and multiply this by 40 people who work around the development process, this is a big time savings that we can use for more development. From my perspective, there is a very big return on investment for this tool.

The licensing cost is around $7,000 for user. This is an estimation. 

There is an additional fee for the server maintenance.

We evaluated four products and chose erwin. None of the competitors had this out-of-the-box automation feature. This was the biggest thing for me because we were looking for a tool which would allow us to do big scale automation. When I was searching for this tool, my responsibility was to find a tool that could be used in our development process and core automation product. We built the whole development lifecycle and everything. In our platform, we are doing some development around automation capabilities. Usually people have a manual process and they automate some parts of it, we went the other way. We were searching for automation capabilities and built our entire process around its capabilities to use them as much as we could. The key differentiator straight from the very beginning was the automation capability.

Other competitors were showing us that they had an API and we could use that to automate somewhere else. Automating somewhere else means to me that I need to create some other platform, server, etc., then maintain it with some other resources to just make it run. This was really not enough for us. In addition, erwin already had some written automation templates on the PoC level which showed us that they had something that worked. 

At the PoC level, erwin was able to convince the customer (us) that this is the automation, this is how it runs, and you can use it almost straightaway.

I learned how to automate in the data area and how this is very different from any CI/CD development platforms that I was working on before. I learned that we need totally different things to automate properly in the data area. We need very accurate metadata. We need precise mappings reviewed by different data stakeholders. 

I would rate this product as an eight (out of 10). I can imagine some capabilities for this product that would make it even better.

This solution is still an experiment for us. My company is in the process of defining the data governance process, which is not settled right now. We have used erwin DG for the purpose of getting acquainted with data governance from a technical point of view. We want to see how it fits in our organization because data governance is neither IT nor a business matter. It is in-between. We have to put the proper organization in place in order for an IT solution to meet all the requirements. This has been in the works for almost two years now, where we have been formerly under an experiment with erwin DG.

We are not fully using it as we would if it were in production running regular operations. What we have done with the tool is have a metamodel for our data and try to see how it fits with the requirements of our project, businesses, and IT. We have two cases that are fully documented under erwin DG. What we are trying to do right now is to integrate all our regulatory obligations, including laws and regulations at the French and European levels. This would enable us to make a bridge between the businesses and the law.

This is a SaaS solution maintained by erwin.

This type of solution was key to moving our entire company in the right direction by getting everyone to think about data governance.

It is very complete. Whatever you need, you can find it. While the presentation of results can be a bit confusing at first, there is a wide range of widgets that enables the user to find the proper information quickly. The presentation of information is something very valuable.

The direct integration of processes and organization into the tool is something very nice. We feel there is a lot potential for us in this. Although we have not configured it yet, this product could bridge the space between business and IT, then a lot of processes related to data governance to be handled through the tool. This gives it that all in one aspect which shows high potential.

The mapping is good. 

If we are talking about the business side of the product, maybe the Data Literacy could be made a bit simpler. You have to put your hands on it, so there is room for improvement.

We have been using it for two years (July 2018).

The stability is very good.

As far as I can see, it is scalable.

We have approximately 10 people, so we are starting to use it on a small scale. We have data governance people, myself, a colleague in IT, four or five business users, and a data architect.

Their support is very good. They have very good technical expertise of the product. 

We previously used Excel. We switched to erwin DG because it had the best benefit-cost ratio and showed a lot of potential.

The initial setup was very straightforward. However, if we are talking about the opening of the service and setting up our metadata model, it was not straightforward at all.  

The initial deployment took less than two weeks.

Our implementation strategy is small in scope because we are still in the experimentation phase. We just provide a few users with access for people involved in the implementation. We just let them play with it. Now, we are just adding new use cases to the model.

We used erwin's consultants. We would not have been able to do the initial deployment without them. They did the deployment with two people (a technical person and a consultant), though they were not full-time. 

The opening up of the service by erwin was extremely simple and flawless. It is just that you find yourself confronted with an empty shell and you will have to fill that shell. The configuration and structuring of this is not straightforward at all. This requires modeling and is not accessible to everyone in the company.

As an experimentation, we are not fully in production. Therefore, it's absolutely impossible to have a return on investment right now.

erwin is cheaper than other solutions and this should appeal to other buyers. It has a good price tag.

We are a public company who is obligated to open our purchasing to a wide range of providers. For example, we were in touch with Collibra, Informatica, and a few others.

erwin DG was less complex at first sight and cheaper than other solutions. It also fulfilled what we wanted 100 percent and was the right fit for the maturity of our governance process. It was not too big or small; it was in-between. 

erwin is very good for companies who have a very structured, data governance process. It puts every possible tool around a company's data. This is very good for companies who are mature with their data. However, if a company is just looking for a tool to showcase their data in a data catalog, then I would advise companies to be careful because erwin is sometimes really complex to master and configure. Once it is set up, you have to put your hands in the gears of the software to model how your data works. It is more of a company process modeler than a directory of all data available you need and can access. Industrial companies over 30 to 40 years in age are struggling to find what data they may have and it may prove to be difficult for them to use erwin directly.

What we have done with the lineage is valuable, but manual. For the IT dictionary, automation is possible. However, we have not installed the plugin that allows us to do this. Right now, all the data that we have configured for the lineage has been inputted by hand. I would rate this feature as average.

We have not tested the automation.

I would rate this solution as seven (out of 10) since we have not experienced all the functionalities of the product yet.