Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog Reviews

The product is used for data governance. It's a tool for data governance, a technical metadata dictionary, and a data lineage repository.

So far, we have been pleased with its capabilities. 

It has a wide coverage of technologies. 

The solution scales well.

It is stable and reliable. 

The technical support has been helpful.

The initial setup is very, very difficult. 

The solution is quite expensive. 

I would like them to extend the coverage to other technologies like web services and programming languages.

I've been using the solution for six months. 

It is stable, and it is reliable. The performance is good. We haven't dealt with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We can scale the product.

We have about 50 users on the solution right now. It's not used too extensively just yet. It will be in the future, however. We do also have plans to increase usage. 

We've used technical support previously and found them to be quite good. We are satisfied with the level of support we can get. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup is not straightforward. We found it to be quite difficult. It took us about two weeks to deploy it.

We have ten people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks, including a team leader and project manager. 

The implementation can be done in-house with a lot of effort.

I'm not sure of the exact cost, however, the range is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's very expensive. 

I'm not an experienced user of it. I used it in workshops, and I use other Informatica products, so I have some relevant knowledge.

I deal with the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the product nine out of ten and can recommend it to others to use. 

We primarily used the solution because we wanted to be aware of metadata management solutions for our Data Lake, in order to manage the assets in the Data Lake and also to manage the ETL or the data ingestion into the Data Lake.

The solution has an excellent data profiler.

The way that the solution scans is very useful. 

The discovery worked well for the AS400, which is a very old database.

It is not the best solution on the market. 

They don't have a good solution for SSIS scanning, and we don't have the good solution for Microsoft OLAP and Microsoft Tabular. 

Another thing that can be improved is their ability to add custom screens or custom views and manage the custom server and customs views. Currently, it is pretty closed. You cannot add columns to the views, which makes the views very narrow. In order to see data, you have to do a lot of clicks just to get to a particular field.

They have to improve their relationship discovery tool. They say that they have AI inside, but this AI did not automatically find relationships or suggested relationships between entities.

The solution needs better support for data discovery or scans.

I've been using the solution for almost two years.

The solution isn't too stable. If it crashes, it takes time to boot it back up. It's not as stable as you would expect it to be for this type of solution, which is concerning.

We have five people using the solution as of right now.

Potentially, it is scalable, but is not automatically scalable. If you needed to scale it out, then you would have to add some more nodes in order to be able to support the scalability. As long as you are in the boundaries of your initial setup, then it won't scale. However, if you are exceeding that, then you have to increase memory and data store and maybe even some machines to your cluster in order to support the scalability.

Technical support could be improved. From an implementation standpoint, their "customer success" team proved to be unhelpful and did not make what turned out to be a complex set up any easier.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was very, very complex. It took us a few months to complete the entire set up. There were a lot of bugs during installation. Also, when we wanted to upgrade from, I believe it was a 10.2.1 to 10.2.2, our production environment was down for a few weeks just because of the update. It was not a straightforward experience.

We had a very complicated environment, so when we worked on this, we also implemented the SDK or the API mechanism that came with the suite. Therefore, there were four people working on the setup for this environment. We also had support from the local integrator and we had a lot of support from some specialists from India.

We had an integrator and some specialists from India assist us in the implementation.

Most of the work we did by ourselves, but we wanted some help from a local integrator. They had a process that they called "customer success". We had a weekly call with them, with the customer success team. The customer success representative brought in the product team for discussions, but it didn't really help us, to be honest.

It requires between one and two people to handle maintenance on the solution currently.

We ran a proof of concept or a full selection process and we compared it with some other tools. We selected this tool because it had better support for AS400, which was our main source.

We decided to stop the project because it was too much effort and we couldn't benefit from the solution. We saw that it required a lot of effort just to make it work, so we decided to stop the implementation. We stopped using the solution about two months ago.

If other companies attempt to implement this solution, I would suggest that they try to stick to the features which are there and don't try to extend it because it is not that extendable.

In our case, we needed to get a better contract with the local integrator and make sure that they got paid only upon successful completion of the project. Instead, we paid upfront. I'd advise other companies not to make that same mistake. 

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

We use the product for building static and automatic data lineages.

It is more complicated to extract data using the product compared to Visio. The system could display the details on the screen. Additionally, they should add AI features and the capability to provide data streaming insights.

We have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for two and a half years.

The product seems stable enough.

We have 30 Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog users in our organization.

The product requires maintenance.

I advise others to understand their business use cases. I rate Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog a three out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is to extract technical metadata, tag the data dictionary, and profiling. We also use it for lineage and relationship aspects.

I recommend Informatica to my clients based in the finance and banking sectors. It has been very helpful.

The most valuable feature is its ability to extract metadata from various sources- be it an old SaaS application or the latest cloud application. They have a custom resource that allows us to customize no matter which source system we have, and we can customize it to extract the technical metadata.

They are moving from on-premises to the cloud. I expect all the on-premises features in the cloud version as well.

I have been using the product since 2019.

It is a perfectly stable solution and a leader in data governance tools in the current market.

The scalability is tough. For example, if you want to increase the scalability in the middle of the project, it would be a challenging process, but it is doable. As consultants, we analyze the requirements from the client end and, based on that, suggest the infrastructure for scalability.

Customer service is a piece of cake if you are a premium member. You need to raise a ticket, and they will immediately respond. For example, they will let you know if it is a limitation; if it is a bug, they will provide you with emergency bug fixes.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. If we compare version 10.4 and version 10.5, they had a major architectural change in terms of infrastructure. The setup for version 10.5 became easier.

The deployment was straightforward, and it took 10-15 minutes to deploy the solution, including migrating technical metadata (importing and exporting).

I would recommend that rather than implementing it on a complete whole enterprise project, start with some small system or a small project first. And from there on, you can move on one step at a time.

I would rate the product an eight out of ten.

We used Informatica Enterprise Information Catalog to find hidden data assets in our organization. We have data spread across disparate systems like Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, Redshift, mainframes, etc. Informatica EIC has connectivity to a surprising number of systems and we use this to our advantage creating connections to most of our data sources. We used a 40 node hortonworks cluster and ran the scanners to crawl through our data swamp. It has ran for three days now and we have a fair understanding of our data sources.

• Lineage
• Provenance
• Flow of data through various sources
• Data domain discovery to find out sensitive data.

One thing we find very useful is a feature which lets us know who are the stakeholders of a particular data source, and if you are making any changes to a source, then which users must be informed prior. 

Many dark data silos were identified and many hidden assets were uncovered. It helped IT in initial data integration efforts. We were creating data lake-based on MapR Converged Data Platform EIC, which helped us in initial prep.

Speed. The solution is bit slow.

Six to seven months as of October 2017.

Yes. Installation of the product is bit challenging. It is not straightforward and requires many configurations.

A few bugs here and there.

No.

Technical support and Informatica Professional Services are friendly and helpful. They helped us iron out the installation issues and provided training for our team on how to use the product. 

We used to use Metadata Manager from Informatica, Ab Initio, and Ataccama Data Quality Analyzer. It was a custom made solution based on integration of the above mentioned products. It was difficult to maintain, scale, and required cross team collaboration, which kind of slowed done our pace of operations. Our team does not specialize in Software and IT functionality. EIC provided a one stop solution instead of a lego bricks like solution.

It was kind of complex. It required many prerequisites and required a team of professionals well-versed in Linux and big data technologies.

We implemented it in collaboration between our in-house IT folks and Informatica Professional Services. Informatica sent a team of subject matter experts, who had considerable amount of understanding about the project and the big data ecosystem.

We are yet to recover the full cost of the product, but it seems good thus far. 

Licensing is simple, but cost is bit steep.

No. We are not aware of any other product that solves this problem.

The product requires more polishing and hardening. It might take few more releases until the full power and capabilities of this product are unleashed.