Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

My company works with our different customers to implement and install the solution.

The workflow in Informatica Axon is intelligent and good. Informatica Axon provides good data collection and good search criteria. In Informatica Axon, workflow and business glossary are good.

There are some limitations with Informatica Axon when one tries to connect or integrate it with Jira. For example, I can't delete any workflows after the integration process. There are issues with the integration capabilities of the tool with third-party solutions, specifically Jira.

I have experience with Informatica Axon for two to three years.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I recommend the solution to big companies because its functions are suitable for high-end companies.

The P1 support offered by the solution's technical support is very fast. If it is not P1 support, the support a user might get will be slow as it takes time. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

For data governance, I work with Informatica Axon only. I prefer Informatica Axon for enterprise metadata management at an enterprise level, data quality, and integration. I only recommend Informatica Axon, mainly for data governance.

The product's initial setup phase is very easy.

For each of our company's customers, with an installation scope in place, it doesn't take much time. The product's implementation scope differs from the installation scope. I usually help our company's customers implement the tool.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Informatica Axon is a very good product with an easy implementation phase and a lot of information about the tool available online on the internet.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We use the product to define policies and for data discovery management.

It is complicated to establish the lineage in EDC using PowerCenter mappings. We have to do the process manually every time. This particular area needs improvement.

We have been using Informatica Axon for five years.

It is a stable platform. However, we need to raise the ticket even for the smaller issues. There needs to be proper documentation available. They should provide enough information.

We have eight to ten customers for Informatica Axon. It is a scalable product.

The technical support team takes time to complete the debugging process.

The initial setup process is fine, but there are a lot of infrastructure issues. It includes errors on the node cluster for EDC. Deployment is easy, but debugging is time-consuming. Whenever we raise the ticket to the support team, they take two to three days to evaluate the issue.

The licensing price of the product depends on the organization's requirements. It is less costly than Collibra.

I recommend Informatica Axon to others and rate it a seven out of ten.

The most valuable features of Informatica MDM are the IDQ and RDM data management. PowerCenter is the most widely used feature of Informatica MDM.

Informatica MDM has a complex user interface, which could be improved.

I have been using Informatica MDM for four years.

I rate Informatica MDM an eight out of ten for stability.

I rate Informatica MDM a ten out of ten for scalability. We plan to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

I rate Informatica MDM a four or five out of ten for ease of initial setup.

Our organization's deployment process for Informatica MDM took two to three months. A third-party team did the solution's deployment. Around 10 to 12 IT specialists and engineers were required for the solution's deployment.

Informatica MDM's pricing is not cheap but comparable to other vendors.

I advise others looking into using Informatica MDM in the future to have their use cases in order and know what they want to use it for.

Overall, I rate Informatica MDM a six out of ten.

I am a consultant and I use the solution to scan databases and lineages for my clients.

We can scan anything. We can scan reports, XML and JSON files also. That's a good thing about the Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog.

IEDC can improve the comparison of lineages, which is one thing I see in other data catalog tools that Informatica does not have, basically data catalog tools.

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for three years.

I rate the stability of the solution an eight out of ten.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. We currently have ten to 15 users using the solution and our client is a medium-sized business.

I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten, because it is pretty straightforward. The solution took two to three days for the initial setup.

When deploying IEDC, one should have a server ready and a lot of open ports, but otherwise it is straightforward.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Informatica MDM for master data maintenance across our organization. We have multiple departments, like material real estate, trading, and supply. We use it for consolidation, harmonization, and central master data maintenance. We are also integrating it with the nonrecipient systems.

I like that Informatica MDM has robust matching technology. Informatica MDM is also porting the external Java applications for validations. I can consider that a must-have. It is also exposed to Rest API calls, and we can engage in real-time integrations with any third-party systems.

The configurations could be better. It is a bit confusing because we must develop two tools when building a data model in Informatica MDM. Even though Informatica MDM is a single tool, we have our hub console plus the provisioning tool within that. Whatever data model we are building in the hub console, we have to develop it in the provisioning tool again. It is double the work to create a data model. 

We are also using external calls or the Java custom plans functions. This can be both positive and negative. Since MDM as a client does not support any complex validation, we have to depend on the external call or a Java call. Every time we deployed, the entire solution was impacted if something went wrong. 

I have been using Informatica MDM for four years.

Informatica MDM can be more stable. There are some issues and some crashes, and sometimes, with the data load, we usually feel like we are doing an initial data load for any project. Sometimes, it could also be down to the production environment.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a six.

Informatica MDM is a scalable solution. We probably have 1000 direct and indirect users with multiple use cases. But people solely working with Informatica MDM might be around 200 or 300. Most users are from business IT data support.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give scalability an eight.

Technical support is very responsive.

Positive

I was using SAP MDM, which is currently end of its life, so we migrated from SAP MDM to Informatica MDM.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have to make a jar file which we have to download from the link and download it as a client in our local mission. However, there are some challenges if we deploy Informatica MDM with IDQ on-premises. The deployment time depends on the use case. One or two people can maintain this solution.

We have seen a return on investment. From a business perspective, there have been many improvements since we migrated from SAP MDM.

I would recommend Informatica MDM to potential users. Even though Informatica MDM does not come with data quality, Informatica as a whole has some of the right tools. We have embedded the MDM with the IDQ informatic data quality in ways we can interact. It is the best fit for non-SAP systems.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Informatica MDM an eight.

A lot of times, we use it for basic profiling. That's its most common use case. Currently, we are also in the process of establishing a set of ongoing processes around Data Quality that would feed into and augment our current metadata. So, from that standpoint, our usage is primarily around some of the basic dimensions of data quality, such as completeness, conformity, consistency, timeliness, accuracy, etc. We measure each of those or at least create quality rules that measure each of those aspects. We're in the process of doing this for all of the data that's currently feeding into our analytics engine. These are some use cases that we're currently doing on a daily basis.

There are a couple of valuable features. One is that it is very quick on the profiling. So, you get a very fast snapshot of the type of data that you're looking at from the profiling perspective. It can highlight anomalies in the data.

The other valuable feature of the Data Quality tool is the flexibility of using their Analyst tool to create a mapping specification, which allows you to join multiple sources of information. You can then create rules within that data set. You can apply aggregations and all other types of functions, and then you can feed that into the profiling tool. From the profiling tool, you can then create your scorecards. It can be two-step where you're using that mapping engine to integrate multiple sources. If you don't have a need for that, you can do a lot more sophisticated mappings inside their Developer tool, and then maybe do an analyst type of mapping engine. So, you can do straightforward data quality within the Analyst tool, or you can do more sophisticated data quality within the Developer tool, at least as far as the rules are concerned.

Their UI needs improvement. Their scorecards and reporting also need improvement. Their data quality reporting, especially their dashboards and scorecards, is lackluster at best. Its reporting capabilities are limited. If you want to do anything beyond its limited reporting capabilities, then you're going to have to use an external reporting tool such as Power BI or something like that.

It has a few glitches that they haven't fixed. For example, while creating a new scorecard, when you get up to a point, you have to stop and save what you've done. You have to exit and then go back into the tool to finish up your work. From the development aspect, using their scorecard tool has a couple of glitches in it. This might be a tool that they're going to eventually phase out. So, they're just not doing a lot of work on it. I've been living with it for a few years now. I've learned that I got to save my work, and then I got to get back into it to finish up what I was doing.

I have been using this solution for at least five years.

It is pretty stable.

As far as I know, it scales pretty well. The part of the problem that we have is with the way it saves the results. When it saves the result, it creates a physical copy of some of the data results and stores it. So, when we're processing, for example, 500 million rows of data, depending on the type of rules that we have and how we're doing it, it can quickly use up a lot of space. We've had some issues with some of the space and storage. It scales, but you still have to be careful how you configure it so that you don't use up all your resources. We've added a lot of disk space, and we still occasionally have problems.

Currently, we have maybe half a dozen heavy users, but we're probably going to scale that up to 20 to 25.

It is straightforward.

I would rate it a six out of ten.

We use this solution for MDM in the commercial sector. I'm a lead software engineer for EPAM Systems.

The product provides all the typical MDM capabilities like deduplication, machine survivorship, and other things. 

The downside of this solution is that the UI is terrible and not user-friendly. The solution was developed a long time ago and it no longer provides a lot of value. Our organization is considering decommissioning the solution or reducing usage. The problems seem to be more about the design and not the tool. The UI and general user experience need to be improved. Making changes on Informatica takes a lot of time compared to making changes on other MDM tools.

I've been using this solution for seven months. 

I haven't heard any complaints about stability. 

Before my time, the company used a legacy MDM solution for dealing with customers. It was created for reporting purposes, to create some compliance reporting, but its functionality didn't allow the addition of more MDM features, so they decided to build a new solution based on Informatica MDM, and from there they basically merged two solutions, the legacy one and this one into Informatica MDM.

The initial setup was carried out prior to my joining the company. 

A lot of the solutions on the market are expensive and Informatica is at the top end in terms of licensing costs. They use a bundle model so you choose what you want to include in your bundle and that's what you pay for.

Informatica MDM is a typical MDM tool. I've worked with others and they are all more or less the same. It requires more work than some other tools in terms of development and adding additional features. It has lots of features and is rated highly by Gartner. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

We are using it to understand the assets that we have from their technical metadata perspective, but we're also using it to align our business glossaries with the actual physical data location where the data is stored. Using their Claire or AI engine helps facilitate that. We've been doing that for a while.

The other thing we're trying to do is extend that metadata capability to include extended lineage and provenance attributes. We're trying to incorporate those into the existing EDC environment, and hopefully, when we get Axon, we'll try to figure out how we would expose that to the customer. We will figure out whether we're going to expose that directly or whether we're going to have to augment Axon with an additional UI layer.

From my standpoint, Informatica offers a pretty robust set of scanning tools that can scan a variety of sources of information. It offers a central repository that you can go to for interrogating and finding data. You can find the data that you're looking for based on enhanced metadata.

The other thing that we're working on is extending the existing Informatica data quality capabilities within the EDC so that we have a more robust understanding of not only what the data is and where it is located but also the quality of that data. We are doing this so that when people are looking for data, they see not only where they can find the data, but they also feel confident that the data is going to meet their needs.

The capability of the tool to scan and capture the metadata from a variety of sources is one of the capabilities that I find most useful. The central repository into which it is going to put that captured metadata is the best.

The model is somewhat flexible. There are certain aspects of the model that are not as flexible as we would like. It doesn't do certain things to a great level of depth. So, in situations where we want to drill in to do something specific, we have to essentially copy that data into our own structures in order to add that additional layer of flexibility.

Robust process management or workflow management, like Bonita, should be incorporated into the Informatica tool stack because it offers very simplistic workflow capabilities. If we had more dynamic and robust workflow capabilities, we could make use of that a lot more. Currently, we have to do a lot of pre-work outside of the Informatica tools before we can get the data loaded and start using it because they're UIs. I haven't dealt with Axon. So, I don't know exactly how that's going to change things, but with the EDC tool, I can't say the user interface is useless, but people don't use it because they find it cumbersome.

Its UI, without considering Axon, is probably their least desirable part. It has some interesting capabilities, but it is not what I would call cutting edge or super. It is not as intuitive as I would've expected. Its UI is probably prior to Axon. It is a little dated, and even Axon has been out there for a while now, but it is a little dated. That's probably why they went out and bought the company that originally made Axon.

I have been using this solution for five or six years.

It is very stable.

We're using it for our enterprise. We are not the largest enterprise in the world, but we're a pretty good size. We have 20,000 people working here and petabytes of data flowing through various systems. It is less about the people using it directly as opposed to the systems using it. It is really a matter of the system interfaces that are automating. We're trying to automate the metadata as much as possible so that when people are looking at their data, they can also see the associated metadata. Sometimes, we have to pull the metadata out of EDC and feed it into other systems so that as they're using these other systems, they can see the metadata flows with it.

I haven't dealt much with them directly, but I've had colleagues create tickets all the time. Generally, they're pretty good. 

I'm more from the end-user perspective. From a system standpoint, there is a different team that sets things up on the server and establishes various types of configurations. I do work with them, but I'm not actually doing that work. 

They have three people that are actively managing the system, and they are system administrators. There are also various people who might be testing things at any one point in time, and then there are various analysts who might be creating data to feed into the system, such as definitions of business terms. The same people may review the results once it gets into the engine. When it starts to process that data and makes the associations between the terms and the actual metadata where it is linking the two up, somebody has to go in and validate that, especially the exceptions or the ones that don't have a high enough matching score. So, there are probably three or four system admin folks, and those are more technical folks, and then you have maybe 20 people who might be putting in data, validating the data, and so on. Those are still primarily an IT function. They have subject matter expertise, but they're still reporting up through the IT group, and then, we'll eventually get to the point where we have a more robust set of business users who are reviewing and vetting that information.

I have no idea what the price actually is. It is probably not going to be the cheapest, but it is a pretty stable and robust platform from the backend standpoint. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.