Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

Primary use case is generally for product items and demonstration. 

I like that Informatica MDM doesn't require a separate IDQ. In the IBM InfoSphere, we need exclusive data quality to identify the issues in the source system. But if you use Informatica MDM, that's not the case. The MDM itself identifies the issues and we can use the data quality tools and the score card. It's good compared to other tools. Troubleshooting is very easy and I believe performance is better than any other tool. It solves any complex queries you can connect, any complex route, any complex mappings, you can do it all with Informatica MDM.

I'd like the ability to directly connect from MDM to any of the analytical tools. It's a feature that would be very helpful for analytical reporting. When you connect to the cloud, there are multi-cloud technologies that will have some problem and when you connect from on-prem to cloud, there are more data latency issues than with other tools. The product is more expensive than other similar solutions. 

I have six years of experience with Informatica. 

It is a stable product compared to other MDM products. Other solutions like Oracle CLM and CDH are similar tools but they're not great when compared to Informatica MDM. Of course, it is very stable compared to any other MDM products.

The solution is scalable but when you do the design, you have to know what the data load will be and the number of concurrent users. Based on that you have to design the infrastructure and measure capacity. 

I've implemented this solution in three or four different projects.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

Some of my clients use it as a front end tool for the data quality governing process.

The solution allows the complete governance process, starting from the data quality, those definitions, and it can get the data quality in the EDC.

I would like to see more API integration to have the capability to build a report using other third party reporting tools allowing things to be streamlined.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is a stable solution, we do not see any kind of issues. When we do find issues we have to go to Informatica to get help, I would say it is not completely matured.

The technical support is very good, they have resolved any issue we have had.

The installation is simple.

You can purchase licenses for this solution at different intervals. For example, annually or every three years. They recently changed their terms for licensing and now it is more flexible.

When choosing this solution you need to identify a path by asking yourself a few questions. Where are we going to start? What are the sources? What are the business pain points in terms of the data governance process?  Are you looking for metrics in terms of streamlining the whole process? Are we looking mainly in the bigger lineage? Are we looking to build reference data? We need to identify those areas and prioritize what is more important. Start small and then eventually add more sources, do not commit too much at the beginning you will not be able to be successful. Start thinking in terms of what are the business pain points currently. What would be the first result that you feel would make the business happier and then adjust accordingly, you can build on it further later.

I rate Informatica Axon a nine out of ten.

I like the number of options that are presented with Informatica, fuzzy matching, and your screen. I feel the screen or the configuration is pretty easy and pretty straightforward. To learn or to ramp up is also pretty straightforward.

They have too many diversified products. If you don't know Informatica, it's very confusing and feels very idiotic. If you want data quality, they have one tool. For management, they have another tool. If you say MBM, they have a tool, and they have another tool to get something up. From a split tools perspective, it's confusing for a new user and somebody who doesn't understand Informatica. 

They say they provide support, but it's not easy for somebody reading and didn't use Informatica before. The price could also be better.

I've been using Informatica MDM for 12 years. 

It's pretty stable.

Scalability depends on what you choose and how we will do it. If you don't know things, things get complicated.

It starts pretty well, but it takes time. I would give technical support only a six or seven out of 10. I won't say it's like "wow" kind of stuff.

I have been using it for a long time, so it's pretty straightforward for us. I don't know if it was complex earlier. What we're doing is technically complex, and there's always room for improvement. 

We implemented it. You need two or three people to install it, then it's easy, and one person can maintain it.

It's pretty high for us. It's more on the higher side, like low to middle high.

I would tell new users that even though you feel it's pricey, there are a lot of options that come by default. They have to understand that they have to choose somebody who understands the product very well.

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

Our primary use case of this product is for data management relating to customers and contact information. It's a global resource, we ensure the quality of our customer information and primary attributes. I'm a principal data architect and we are customers of Informatica. 

The solution has improved our organization by providing data quality.

The evaluation service is a valuable feature of this product. 

Because we are moving everything to cloud and our platform is in Azure, it has an infrastructure as a service. I'd like to see a platform as a service, to avoid having to take care of the payments as an upgrade for the platform. I'd like to have email as a service, it would allow us more flexibility. But we already know that Informatica have a cloud integration service but it's not mature enough to do what's required. The service model can also be improved. 

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is not as stable as we'd like. We need to do a lot of work on the operational side because it crashes frequently, at least once a week.

Scalability is not a problem. You can't count the number of users because it's a platform that has an operational model in which we move the data. We have the data and we clean the data, but users don't have direct contact.

The technical support is very good. 

Initial setup is not complex, it takes about a week to install. We have very good consultants that carried out the deployment for us so although licensing is tricky, the development and the installation is okay.

I believe licensing is around $700,000 annually and we pay around $300,000 for support. The licensing is tricky because sometimes we need to pay for additional connectors and those are hidden costs for us.

We evaluated SAP Master Data Governance. We noticed that more people use Informatica and because it's the most widely used platform we went with it because we knew we'd be able to get access to consultants.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We would like to centralize all our product information systems. Currently, the product information is stored in various disparate systems, and we would like to bring it to a single place.

The staging and hierarchical features are the most valuable.

Its look and feel needs improvement. It has a lousy look and feel.

Informatica PIM is designed specifically for the retail industry. They need to make sure that it is also applicable to all the other industries and verticals.

I have been using Informatica PIM for almost two years.

It has 75% stability.

It has good scalability. Because of the cloud, we are able to expand it. Sometimes, we do run into issues, but it is mostly good.

We have around 250 to 300 users with IT, business, data governance, and DQ roles.

We haven't yet contacted them. 

We used an Oracle solution. We switched to Informatica PIM because of the licensing cost.

The initial setup was done by Informatica. We didn't face any issues.

We switched to Informatica PIM because it was cheaper than the Oracle solution. It is cheaper initially, but they will bundle it later. This is what happens in the industry.

I would suggest to watch out. Informatica PIM is designed specifically for the retail industry. To use it for manufacturing, you need to think twice and make sure that it satisfies your business requirements. When you are asking for a free demo from Informatica, make sure that you tell your use case and ask them to configure it in a way that suits your business use case. Otherwise, it is not going to solve your problem. 

I would rate Informatica PIM a six out of ten.

I am not quite sure that the product will be part of our use cases anymore. We started off with it because of the data lineage. In other words, we used it because we also used the older Informatica program and it had been serving a purpose for us as a data management tool. But now we are in the process of developing our own solution for at least part of that functionality.  

We currently plan to keep Informatica MDM, but not for the complete handling of the data analytics. We use MDM for data gathering in big data environments. We start with Informatica and do further analysis outside the product.  

I think the most valuable part of Informatica is the flexibility in extending the data model. I think that is the biggest benefit. The data quality component is also an important part of it.  

I have begun to lose track of what needs to be improved because we only use the product now for what it is best at and in those areas it does not need improvement.  

There are two main things and that make up the complete Informatica suite solution. One is the insight into the data lineage which was a huge promise made by the product, but one that it never delivered in practice. That was the big problem that we are trying to solve in another way. The second part of the solution, especially for MDM is its ability to use the data by integrating with other process engines.  

So the insight into the data or the data analysis part needs to be improved.  

I have been using Informatica MDM (Master Data Management) for about two years now.  

Informatica has been stable. It does not have downtime during processing.  

I would say that Informatica is scalable. Right now we have about 20 people using the product directly. The scalability would be in the volume and types of data it can scan and collect and it is good at performing these services.  

With technical support, there is a big gap between sales, presales, and support for the end-users. Like with the data analysis the process starts good but in the end, there is no delivery. There are too many promises and too little delivery. So the support could be also improved after the sales, or I would say that the post-sale support should be improved to be in alignment with the pre-sale support.  

Informatica is definitely not easy to install. In order to do the installation and to set up the whole program, I would say it is complex.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), if I were to rate Informatica MDM and I had a review site, I would mark it as a seven-and-a-half out of ten possible points. It has not delivered on all it has promised.  

Our primary use case is to build composite applications for our clients and to automate the business processes. We build new automation applications out of it

Our requirement is to orchestrate. We talk to different integration points in our client's systems and get the data from different APIs. Data gathered is enriched/cleansed and filtered with application of business rules . Output of application can be a communication sent out to clients customer via different channels or an update to their core data elements via API

There isn't any human touch involved. It's just an automated business process to build different applications and talking to various APIs using the client's ecosystems. Human workflow feature of this tool has not been explored.

We don't use all of the features like Human workflow. Moreover for build human workflow application would prefer products like Appian and Service. Would like to this tool to enable features like BAM and inbuilt BRE. Currently we are using custom integration to external rule engine built using JBOSS Guvnor.

We have been using Informatica for the past five to six years.

For the kind of application we have built and running on this tool, its been very stable and has given consistent performance. The nice feature of enabling logging and persistence level at individual process level gives the flexibility to optimise the performance of process by keeping those attributes at lowest level.

We have not used it with high availability setup. But there is plan to enable it behind LB and deploy it on Amazon cloud.

We very rarely contact their customer support. We generally only contact them for version upgrades and any major upgrades on the server version. Then we use them in our test environment. We'll use it and then we go to production. But we have only done that twice 

We haven't had many technical issues. We don't use all of the components of the tool that are more complex like Huma. Workflow which can be more error prone . We have a straightforward orchestration flow in which we haven't faced any issue.

Earlier we were using product named Intalio. We switched due to its increased license cost and frequent issues.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. They provide steps that were quite clearly defined. You only need to follow the steps in order to configure the server.

I already had experience working with different tools. It was quite easy to do this setup on my own, without consulting anybody.

Inhouse as I have good amount of experience in other BPM tools with more complex setup requirements.

Many other tools were evaluated before finalizing om Activevos. As we did not have requirement for human workflow, so tools.like Appian, Lombardi ans Oracle BPM were not considered and there pricing was also not in he budget. Tools like WSo2, Activiti were considered for evaluation.

Informatica actually does not sell this product. They acquired this product to support their own MDM productt and they want it to be used in conjunction with their MDM product. They have no intention to sell it as a standalone tool to any other company. But because we already have experience in BPM they were more convinced that we'll be able to use this without asking too many questions. So they were okay to give it as a standalone product to us. But they do not sell this product as a standalone product to anybody else.

I would rate it a seven out of ten due to lack of inbuilt BAM and BRE features.

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.