Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We are simply service providers; I don't think our relationship with Informatica is that strong. We have a financial client that has a very good relationship with Informatica. They were recently using PowerCenter and IDQ, but a couple of years ago, they purchased DIH. Recently they have been doing some POC using Informatica, Enterprise Data Catalog. They have a great relationship with Informatica. 

We don't use Informatica Data Integration Hub extensively. I enjoy using it to create multiple publishing models.

The solution is good but recently, we have stopped using this product because we were not using it extensively. If you are using Data Integration Hub, it should be as a centralized repository, where it can communicate with many systems. For our current client, we are only using it for two source systems, which are not driving big revenue. For this reason, we stopped using Data Integration Hub and started publishing the news directly.

At present, I am not sure how many sources it can communicate with (how many multiple connectors are available). Nowadays, they're coming up with many connectors. It can communicate with all of the Cloud connectors and Cloud databases. If they could leverage social media connectors, I think that would be great a great asset. If they added this feature, it would be much more scalable.

I have been using this solution for almost two years. 

We encountered a few bugs in the coding page, but we faced bigger issues with Informatica PowerCenter. The data was not loading correctly for certain multi-regional datasets; when we analyzed the data, we tracked it to the same code page from the starting point to the end. Other than that, we never faced any difficult situations.  

We never had to use their technical support. We resolved any issues ourselves and thankfully, we never experienced any problems that we could not handle. 

The initial setup was not very straightforward. Not complex, but not very simple either.

Deployment took roughly one week — 40 hours max from start to finish.

We have a team of 30 to 40 people who handle all maintenance-related issues. 

Informatica products are always increasing in price. Nowadays, many of their customers are leaving and seeking other data integration tools. That's the only drawback with Informatica. Performance and flexibility-wise, they're very user-friendly, but comparatively, their prices are a little bit too high.

Presently, everything is moving to the cloud, and moreover, many people are moving to Snowflake Data Warehouse, as it provides more scalability. I feel the usage of DIH is very limited compared to Snowflake because Snowflake holds and stores highly compressed data and allows you to use different cloud-based tools, including AWS services, DCP, and other services. Snowflake also comes with Matillion, which is a very good ETL tool.

The use of DIH is very limited. Anything that we do with DIH, can be done with Snowflake, regardless of the subscription you may have. There are plenty of use cases — you can use it to build tables and consume it from the downstream. For these reasons, I believe that DIH is currently not doing as well as Snowflake in the market.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. Performance-wise, it could be better. The performance-related Issues could be due to low infrastructure, but for whatever reason, sometimes the performance is slow.

We primarily use the solution for tasks such as masking. It's used to mask the customer data.

We are using end-to-end features of Informatica. Everything comes under the product. We really like that the solution is part of a bigger use case that can all be under one umbrella system.

There are new features that are being built to help more closely link all of the solutions we use, and we like that they are always thinking about how each product interplays with the other.

We've used the solution for quite some time, so in our organization, the product is pretty mature.

There are lots of use cases surrounding the use of the product.

The integration could be a bit better. The process is something new. 

They need to include more documentation and support around the build.

It's my understanding that they are currently fixing quite a bit and building in updated capabilities in the upcoming version. We'll have to see what that looks like.

The general design of the resolution could simply be tweaked a bit.

I've been working with the solution for five or six years at this point. It's been quite a while.

We've worked on both the Windows and Linux platforms and have not had any issues with stability. It's been very good in both cases, and we have not faced any errors. There are no bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash.

We have 100 user licenses and we are using them in real-time. We work with an Indian bank that often requires more users. We can implement MDM to accommodate their needs at any given time.

I've worked with support from Oracle and a few other vendors, so I can compare it to those experiences. When I compare with other vendors, Informatica support is better, feedback-wise. Their documentation is great. They are very responsive to their customer base and very quick to respond to inquiries. We're very satisfied with their level of service.

I don't really have experience with other solutions. I only really know MDM.

The initial set up's complexity or simplicity depends on the requirements of the organization. Some have simpler implementation cases. Others are more complex. I would say for the simple to medium cases, the installation and deployment is very straightforward. 

When it comes to bigger builds, we need to be a bit careful in order to configure a few more settings to make it work properly. In general, the solution has simple to medium level complexity during the set up process.

The time for development usually takes a few days. It does depend on who is setting everything up. If you are well informed on the solution, the deployment process itself may only be a few hours. For a downtime point of view, you don't have too much time between products. Depending on when you do it, you can have 0% downtime as well, however, it would need to be strategically planned.

The solution has a couple of pricing models. You can go via can go a number of records, number of CPU, and various other items. I don't know what current model we follow. 

My experience on pricing is maybe four to five years old. I don't know what the current model is based on in our organization.

Although we're on version 10.3, we're working to move over to 10.4 soon. We're about to upgrade.

If you look at the Gartner quadrant, MDM is the top product. There are a few platforms available, however, I don't have good experience with other products in order to compare and to recommend. From my personal point of view, definitely I would recommend MDM.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We're still testing a few capabilities that the solution provides, however, we aren't using them yet. We do plan to implement them in the future. Since we aren't extensively using the core features, I'm not giving them a higher score. We need to see how things progress.

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.

Our primary use case for the solution has been in some of our smaller pilot projects.

One of the main valuable features is the user interface which is very easy to use if we have any problems to solve. We don't need to install any client machines to do this, we can access from any machine. 

For the past six and a half years I also worked with PowerCenter, so I used to see the big icons and it's very easy for me to do. But with moving to Cloud there have been some challenges but it's getting better. We are able to connect to a lot of structured data, there are a lot of provisions. 

The user interface could be more user friendly with a simplified mapping task. In general, improvements could be made in mapping. When we create mapping from uploaded data, I'd like to see integrational mapping. I possibly need some extra time to grasp it all but a general improvement in icons and the virtual interface would be good for us. We are working as developers and we're working with the solution on a daily basis so any improvement would be good in this area. 

As far as my knowledge base goes, I feel pretty good with the stability of the product. 

I think technical support is awesome. Initially it feels challenging connecting with IACS, but I am able to get assistance and then apply it immediately. I feel like we're always getting good support from Informatica, even when there are technical challenges, it's one of the best things about the solution. 

I would rate this product a six out of 10. 

The solution was part of building our data warehouses, where we needed a tool for bulk data migration that didn't require mappings when migrating from a source to a target.

The product's most valuable feature is the replication tasks. It allows the creation of identical tasks that can be applied across multiple tables, ranging from 100 to even 1,000 tables. 

The product interface could be improved to be more intuitive. It requires navigating through several steps to access mappings and pre-created metrics. Enhancing it to provide a more streamlined structure or dashboard would allow quicker access to maps and other essential features.

We used Informatica Cloud Data Integration for six months. 

The product was stable. I rate the stability a ten. 

We had 30 Informatica Cloud Data Integration users in our organization. I rate the scalability an eight. 

The solution didn't require much setup, and since it was browser-based, it was fairly easy to use. I rate the process a ten out of ten.

The product was pretty easy to use. The connections to other platforms worked fine. 

I recommend it to others and rate it a seven. 

I use the solution in my company for data ingestion and the ETL process. Though in our company, we started to use the product for data cataloging, we still use it for ETL and data integration.

Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is a product that was recommended to our company after we got in touch with various product vendors, and all of them suggested that Informatica is the best in the market, especially as per Gartner's report. A lot of reports were available for the product around five or six years ago, which was before our company decided to use Informatica Enterprise Data Lake. Informatica Enterprise Data Lake is probably the right fit for our infrastructure.

Governance, data dictionary, and data cataloging are not available in Informatica Enterprise Data Lake. A lot of businesses are facing issues related to understanding the area revolving around insights of data.

At Informatica Enterprise Data Lake's level, in our company, we have a lot of redundant data in a lot of our core systems. The basic thing that our company wants is for the product to develop a reporting layer and access data from the document layer so that we can avoid duplication in projects, databases, and data.

There is a lot of maintenance to be done owing to the instability users may face every time because of the huge processing capacity as the company has around more than 50 nodes, which causes a lot of maintenance issues because of which a lot of people don't benefit from the platform as it functions in a slow manner.

Informatica Enterprise Data Lake's setup process was complex since it doesn't support a lot of real-time systems. Every time, we have to find different tools we can use in our company with the solution since it doesn't support many real-time systems. Even if our company invests in some tools, Informatica Enterprise Data Lake creates too many small files with some issues, which we cannot read because we invested in HBase and Kudu, but performance-wise, the process is slow.

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Lake for four to five years.

The area revolving around the stability of the product depends on how we have set up the clusters in our company. In our company, if we consider high availability tools for every service, we distribute services according to multiple racks and nodes, meaning we self-structure them to fix the issues.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. If you want to expand the tool, it's not a big task, but there is a need to procure the hardware and space in Cloudera, where our has stored Informatica Enterprise Data Lake. The process of using the tool's scalability option is well documented.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.
Considering so many dashboards built into the product, more than 100 users of the solution. The tool's reporting layer is also used in our company.

I have experience with the solution's technical support. The solution provided by the support team for the product is fine, but there is some time delay when it comes to certain issues. The support takes time to review the logs and get a solution, meaning the support is able to resolve the issues even though it takes time.

I rate the technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

My company uses Informatica EDC for cataloging along with Informatica Analyst.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The product's deployment phase was carried out with the help of some professional services, but it was not with the help of a third-party professional service. My company could manage migrations and upgrades with our own in-house support team.

The licenses attached to the solution are highly priced. Informatica has licensing models for every product and for every feature, like the web service feature, which is something my company doesn't like. When our company buys a product, it should come with all these features. I would give the product a low rating in the area of pricing.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.

I would like to have the solution in one product and technical support needs to be better. 

The product is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Informatica Axon is easy to deploy and takes six months to install. We would need five people for the solution's deployment. 

Informatica Axon is expensive. 

I wouldn't recommend the tool to small companies due to price and integration. I would rate the tool a seven out of ten.