Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We use Axon for controlled and governed data sharing as well as for the policies and principles from a data governance perspective. Our use case was for an airport company and we used Axon in tandem with Datacat Log EDC. We customize data search and data sharing. We have a partnership with Informatica. 

The management of the policy is very useful. The ability to customize data search and data sharing is useful. The solution has all the necessary features. 

The GUI needs to be a little more user-friendly and appealing. Salesforce, for example, although in a different category, is very user-friendly and I think if they were to include some of the Salesforce principles, it would be helpful. Informatica needs to do a better job in terms of educating users. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is stable and dependable as long as we keep an eye on the servers. 

The solution is scalable. 

The support process needs to be more agile. 

The initial setup took a few days. It wasn't very complex but there were some initial challenges because we were trying to setup the Informatica Data catalog, EDC, at the same time. The deployment was reasonable but not very smooth. We have around 300 users.

Licensing costs are generally on the higher side.

Collibra was a solution we evaluated but Informatica was the final choice.

I rate this solution seven out of 10.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is being used for recording enterprise assets, such as customers' products and vehicles. 

We a consulting service that provides information on how to enter the catalog or forms to collect the data catalog and enter them into Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog.

The most valuable feature of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is it provides clients with a full view of the enterprise data assets. For example, how many data assets they have and who owns them.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog could improve by having a much better user interface. It is not user-friendly.

In a new release of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, it would be beneficial to have some new features including data sharing.

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for approximately three months.

The solution is stable. There are some issues that can arise with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, but the vendor can resolve them.

We have 10 people that use the solution.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog sends support to our clients if they are having problems.

The initial setup of the Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog can be difficult. It can take approximately one week to install all the components, such as metadata.

There are vendors to do the installation and it can cost a lot of money over the week that it takes.

I recommend this solution to others. There is a large market in China for Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog.

I rate Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog a seven out of ten.

The client has integrated all their internal systems and external systems using Informatica Cloud Data Integration, including all transactional information for different systems, such as SAP ECC or SAP HANA as a business intelligence suite. The solution is used to exchange data between the invoices in Italy and USA, and to exchange information about materials using all sectors around the world. We use the solution to establish a connection between different systems. For example, to generate payments for different companies such as human services, data warehouses, and external companies.

The solution is straightforward. We can build on a process the first time and implement it. In one single view, it's possible to understand, make the connections, define the strategies, monitor the process, and verify performance.

The solution is a unique platform that makes high-velocity development possible, independently from the connection. The connection is fantastic because the solution has connectors for all types of external systems, SAP, Salesforce, and different databases working on the cloud or on-premises.

We can implement Data Integration with Data Quality in the same platform, using just one license to implement. It's not necessary to install different types of platforms or features and the solution is user-friendly.

The solution has great integration with metadata management.

The main issue preventing Brazilian companies from migrating to Informatica Cloud Data Integration from on-prem is the price. The license is now based on subscriptions, which is a change from the past. This has caused Brazilian customers to hesitate, wondering if they should migrate or not. The technology is fantastic, but the price is terrible for the customers. They are forced to migrate because the platform is a must in terms of technology. However, the price is too high causing a big problem here in Brazil.

I have been using the solution since 2019.

I give the stability a ten out of ten.

It is very easy to scale the Informatica platform. I have never seen another platform that is so easy to implement. For example, my organization in Brazil uses the Informatica platform to integrate some systems with its data warehouse. In parallel, IBM developed their own solution, which we developed in parallel with their technology and implementation velocity. IBM is confusing to configure and slow to implement. With Informatica, it is easy to configure and fast to implement. There is no wasted time with the particularities involved for each solution. 

I give the solution a ten out of ten for scalability.

The technical support is very good. Not only in terms of the support team, because all Informatica documentation is very simple to understand. The components, the problems, and the directives to implement are all easy to understand. The support team as well as the documentation are great. The level of support is unbelievable.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward and I give it a ten out of ten for ease.

The price is very high and has become a big concern for our customers who require the solution in order for their business to function smoothly. The cost to migrate to Informatica Cloud Data Integration from on-prem is too high for a lot of our customers that have already put a significant amount of equity into the on-prem version.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

As a partner, I'm very comfortable with the level of implementation and the technology involved independently of the price but for our customers whose primary concern is cost, the price of the solution is very high.

The comfort and simplicity of the products are unbelievable. The ability to implement, operate, and develop is very easy. We reduce the time and know-how required for developers to implement Informatica Cloud Data Integration because of the easy deployment. 

The most valuable features are data quality, data integrate transformations, match-merge, and a few MDM solutions we build into data quality transformation. 

One area that could use improvement is the speed of the web interfaces. At present, they are very slow. I think it is essential that we are original and robust on-premises.  

I have worked with Informatica Data Quality for the past four and a half years.

You have excellent stability in the market in comparison to other data solutions.

We find that scalability is not an issue and have installed it on fourteen servers.

I have a lot of issues with their customer support and not getting the required technical information, which we actually need unless you can do a call with their senior technicians. Most of the cases that you raise are assigned to a junior technician. 

Positive

The initial setup is simple for a person who knows the company. If you already have one of their products you will find yourself comfortable doing the deployment. If you do not have experience with the company it is medium in relationship to complexity. 

I would continue to encourage the upgrades that are taking place every other one in order to release the new and relevant features. I would rate Informatica Data Quality an eight out of ten.

The company I work for has a huge supplier database with a billion records, so Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is a data integration tool used for migrating the legacy data to Informatica MDM (master data management), then moving to the cloud. It's GCP and PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry).

I've also used Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for moving data to SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is used for multiple technology in legacy mainframes, Oracle, some PeopleSoft, some Java-based applications, some in-house, QAD to MDM, or to SAP S/4HANA, or SAP Ariba, so it has various use cases, from legacy to cloud, legacy to MDM, and MDM to S/4HANA, etc.

The feature I found most valuable in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is the mapping. You just drag, and it maps the data. Mapping is very easy, and it's no code.

When you migrate data or when the data interaction happens at the source and destination, the challenge is that you'll get different formats. The validation has to be done in the middleware, and the transformation should happen. In Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, it's very easy to do data validation and transformation compared to any other tool.

Synchronicity is an area for improvement in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services. For example, when you want real-time or immediate response from the solution when multiple technologies are involved, the integration with Informatica Intelligent Cloud isn't seamless, whether it's the MQ, JMS, or BES service, so the connectivity should be improved a bit.

The data governance is good, but what's lacking is a demo. For example, if there's a new feature in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, the documentation for that new feature is limited, so if Informatica could give a more complete documentation and more demos, that would be better for the users.

Right now, there isn't any issue with any of the features of the solution. It's the new feature awareness or user training, and improved connectivity that I'd like to see in the next version of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.

I've been using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for four years.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services has good stability.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is easy to scale.

We contacted the Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services technical support team for some configurations which we needed that weren't available in the product, so we had to create a ticket. We talked to the product team biweekly and asked if they can get it done.

When the incident is high-priority because of the impact, the support has an SLA of twenty-four hours, especially if it's about configurations that aren't available in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services. Otherwise, if the issue is about a feature already in production that we are already using and we need technical support, there's a four-hour SLA. That's the agreement we have with Informatica.

I would rate the Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services technical support team as four out of five.

We've used the CIG (Cloud Integration Gateway), and we switched to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services because CIG only works in an SAP environment. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, on the other hand, integrates with various environments, even non-SAP environments.

Compared to other solutions, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is also good with data governance, scalability, and it's no code.

The initial setup for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services was straightforward. The first time the solution was set up, the deployment took three weeks. My company had a center for excellence team that worked with the Informatica product team. The team from Informatica served as a guide throughout the deployment process.

The next deployments only took one to two hours of work. Once you get the approval for the SOWs and the contract, you'll have access to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services then you can use it. It's usually a one-hour job.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating my experience with setting up Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services as four.

The first time we implemented Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, we did it with the guidance of the Informatica product team, but during the next deployments, for example, when adding a new service, we did it ourselves.

In terms of the licensing for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, we had the option of paying based on the number of users and paying based on the volume of data, and we went with the data volume licensing option.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services isn't as expensive as CIG. The pricing for it is okay, so I'm rating it a four out of five in terms of pricing.

We did use the email verification and address validation services which weren't part of the contract, so we had to pay additional fees for those services.

I'm using data integration and app integration tools from Informatica, in particular, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services and Informatica Data Quality.

I'm working with the latest update of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.

The solution doesn't require any maintenance after it's deployed.

In my company, across all departments, between five hundred to six hundred people use Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.

On a scale of one to five, in terms of performance, I'd give Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services a four when it's used in a complex environment. If it's just at the source and destination without multiple technologies, then it's fine. If you have to build an entire architecture, or when you compare from end-to-end, and multiple systems will be involved, then the performance of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services needs improvement because connectivity issues in a complex system affect the performance.

The advice I would give to anyone looking into implementing Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is to get a POC done for the complex use cases for your organization. If the data hasn't been used for years and you have to move that to another source, be it the cloud or any other new technologies, take the data and do a POC for profiling, cleansing, and transformation for the different sets of data. For example, chunk the data, get the categories, then see how it is. Once that's done, look further and check if it's real-time, or it's a batch. If it's real-time, check how much time it's taking, and if it's aligned with your use case.

If you're using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for so many applications, do an end-to-end as a POC and check the time to see if it gives the time performance index, how the performance is, and how is it landing at the destination.

My rating for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is eight out of ten.

My company is a customer of Informatica.

We use MDM to get more data quality. We are partners with Informatica and I'm a senior technical lead and practice architect.

The fuzzy matching capability is a great feature as is the network hierarchy which is the new concept code. 

I think the UI could be improved. We're also currently facing issues with real-time integration and if Informatica had their own it would be helpful. They need to look into the user mechanism and the security access mechanism in the data governance process. One of the major features is access control and access data management and they need to work on that because I have observed some data glitches.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The solution is stable.  

The solution is scalable. There is room for improvement in terms of scalability with the MDM SaaS. With limited data it's fine, but with a large volume the scalability is questionable, the threshold of data transaction is different. We are a service-based company, so there are limited users within the company. From the customer side, there are multiple users. 

We sometimes have technical issues and the customer support responds in a timely manner and is quite good.

The initial setup is easy. Deployment takes around 15 minutes and we have 22 internal users in our company. 

We pay an annual license. Mobile players are unable to afford the product. Different MDMs have different pricing approaches but there needs to be room for mobile players.

We went with Informatica because we have functional and non-functional requirements with respect to the market data management of our customers and Informatica is a suitable product for their needs.

This is a good solution although it's expensive and even though we are integrated with Oracle DB2, we're unable to integrate with multiple things. The market is changing and there are many more options so we have to think about the integrations of multiple databases. 

There are some additions or improvements that could be made so I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are currently working on a project with the Oracle Fusion system, so we have multiple use cases and often need to pool data in different source systems. In the project, we have multiple sources and target systems. Based on the requirements, clients, and what they propose, we need to make decisions or check the technical feasibility of whether it is possible to complete the integration.

Product-wise, compared to other on-premise tools, Informatica Cloud Data Integration can be deployed on-premises and cloud. So when we were working on-premises, there were a lot of challenges with the hardware. For example, there were memory space issues, but once we switched to cloud, there were no more issues. 

There are challenges when we use Cloud Application Integration (CAI). We want add-ons when we complete data integration and merge images. The current features are a bit complicated, and we need to write big scripts and test.

We have been using this solution for more than six years. We are using a cloud version and the most recent version, 10.4. We have also used versions 8.6, 9 and 10, and we have observed that there isn't that much of a difference between versions, just additional features added. We do not have private or public cloud for Informatica Cloud Data Integration, just cloud.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. We have more than 20 people using this solution.

We hardly raise an SR for this solution. But, whenever we require technical support, we do not get a satisfactory response. This is because their knowledge base may not be developed.

We used this same tool but on-premises in the past. We have also worked with AWS Snowflake, an ELT tool similar to Informatica Cloud Data Integration but with a different architectural approach. If we had to rank them, Informatica Cloud Data Integration would be the best, followed by Snowflake, then AWS.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration has some advantages over the others. It has a more UI-based tool, and the scripting is good. AWS also has an ETL tool called Glue, but it does not have everything we need to write in a script. We still need to write a script if we want to perform a small task. AWS is also challenging to teach. Informatica Cloud Data Integration and Snowflake are easier to use.

The initial setup is easier for cloud compared to on-premises. Deployment does not take much time and takes about 20 to 30 minutes.

The pricing of Informatica Cloud Data Integration and other solutions are almost the same but with slight differences. It differs from project to project, their use case, source and target. Unfortunately, I do not have information on precise licensing costs.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, it is a great solution, but users should understand their source and target system. For example, we also deal with Oracle Fusion, and it's a bit challenging to push data because Oracle has multiple models, financial supply chain and HR. Hence, it is difficult for a developer. Therefore, it is difficult to push data.

They should decide whether they are comfortable using Informatica Cloud Data Integration as their middleware tool or whether they want to use Oracle or OCI. OCI is a different middleware tool owned by Oracle.

Regarding additional features in the next release, Informatica Cloud Data Integration doesn't have image merging transformation or capability. We can do it without the solution, but it is a lengthy process. So, it would be helpful if they added the transformation to play with images and deal with invoices and financial data. We sometimes need to add 200 out of 800 invoices, and it's a bit challenging without the additional features.

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.