Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We use Informatica Axon primarily to manage product attributes with different roles and responsibilities across various business units. This involves complex approval processes and workflows tailored to each business unit. We have four to five business units. 

Additionally, we perform data quality checks to make sure everything goes through proper authorization and adherence to compliance guidelines. 

Different teams, including our compliance group and business unit-specific groups, so there are some parallel workflows and nested workflows within Informatica Axon. The platform also enables report generation, email alerts, and other functionalities.

We have a small vendor team with expertise in Informatica, but the majority of the involvement (80%) is directly from the client, with only 20% vendor participation.

Informatica Axon has significantly improved our manual processes.

For example, if you needed to onboard a product or a particular customer, we were initially using just an Excel sheet. The exchange of Excel sheets happened via SharePoint or through emails, and then it needed approval. There are different stakeholders across regions, and we are a multi-channel company.

For example, we have teams in Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, and the US, across different regions, as well as Canada and Asia Pacific. Each business unit has different roles and responsibilities. When managing a certain set of attributes, you have to properly follow the governance process. All the governance processes were in email, SharePoint, or document before we implemented Axon.

But now, we can create forms and define that governance process, including rules and responsibilities. Many things are automated, showing how the workflow cycle goes, where it goes, and who's working on what. From a data transparency standpoint, we know what is what, where it is coming from, and what the next action is. Some quality rules we implemented automatically control who is accessing the information.

The governance process was fully manual before, but Axon helped us configure those processes, giving us more visibility, transparency, and control over the data. We don't fully use it for every business unit yet, so we are going phase by phase. So far, we have implemented it for three business units, each with different rules, regulations, and compliance requirements. We were able to accommodate all these principles.

Everyone who uses the tool likes it so far, which is a success. As we move other business units, we'll be utilizing more of its capabilities. This major win reduced the time required for manual tasks, follow-ups, and errors. It has made the process quicker and less error-prone, which is a visible benefit from the tool.

Data Integrity Challenges:

We use various Informatica products, including those for integrations and data warehousing. So, maintaining data integrity within Informatica Axon itself is not a significant challenge.

The primary challenge lies in getting everyone on board with the governance process. We have not yet fully migrated all of our organization's internal processes and interactions to Axon. We are going module by module, which sometimes requires compromising on data elements shared across different streams that haven't yet been incorporated into the governance process because governance and quality come hand in hand.

This is a gap in our internal processes and not a shortcoming of the tool itself. Governance and quality are intertwined, and while Axon assists with governance, we need to establish data quality measures beforehand. We lack some data quality elements and are actively working on improving this by cleaning up, deduplicating, and standardizing data across the organization.

The most valuable features of Informatica Axon are the reports and statistics. It provides very good insights into pending tasks, completed tasks, and areas requiring follow-up or approval. There are various checkpoints. In one report, we can see the overall status of the system. 

Additionally, Informatica Axon has many out-of-the-box features when we want to configure stuff for workflows, surpassing those of other tools we evaluated, like Collibra. But Informatica is a very established tool that offers a lot of pre-configurations when we govern the workflows. So, these out-of-the-box features are much more robust, and reporting is much more robust compared to other tools.

Data Lineage Feature:

Data lineage is there. But not everyone is into it. We have a lot of legacy applications, and consolidation of the data into our master data management is also a parallel project going on. Right now, Informatica Axon has a fantastic lineage feature, but we do not fully use that capability in our team because there are a lot of prerequisites that we need to set before we can utilize the lineage.

There are very small components where we can see some lineage. For example, if you have product dimensions or dimension-related attributes, we can see how the data lineage is going through. But for other activities, our data is distributed across different platforms and involves about 43 to 50 legacy systems. First, we are in the process of consolidating them into one hub and then do some cleanup. That would be the biggest feature for us to start with this data lineage. Right now, we don't use that capability extensively.

The user interface could be more intuitive. Currently, it's not very user-friendly, and users need to be thoroughly trained to use the tool effectively.

Additionally, more integration features, like third-party plugins for address search and other functionalities, would be helpful for users across different geographies. While some integrations exist in other Informatica products, they are not available in Axon.

Search enhancements would also be beneficial.

I have been using Informatica Axon for a couple of years.

I would rate the stability a six out of ten because there are no critical issues stopping their jobs. It's almost stable for whatever we have done. Some issues come up, and we fix them, but overall, I'll rate it six out of ten.

In our current use cases, we don't see any big challenges with Informatica Axon's performance. But when the volumes increase or we gradually onboard more users, we want to check the performance. 

For the past couple of years, we have onboard one by one and haven't faced any performance problems. But, there are some clients and case studies where they faced performance problems when multiple processes were running simultaneously. This is something we keep in mind as we onboard other business units.

I would rate the scalability six out of ten for now because we need to explore more. Other business units should also come and see how scalable it is, but for now, it's six out of ten.

There are multiple units. We have around 50 to 60 business units, and currently, only three of them are using it. It is used everyday in our organisation. 

The customer service and support were with us. It's more about fitting our data structure to Axon rather than the product's capability. 

We had to do a lot of design work and make adjustments to incorporate everything. Informatica really helped with the initial setup, but it also depends on the contract. 

We only had normal support without an Informatica consultant onboarded due to budget issues. Everything was done through tickets and our own efforts. Maybe that's another reason we struggled.

Support helped around seven out of ten. But it's beyond their contract. Support can only do certain things. For services, you need to hire an Informatica consultant. Our team wasn't ready to hire one due to budget issues. So that's the reason we faced challenges. But as far as support is concerned, they were decent.

Neutral

We didn't use another solution. Everything was manual. Informatica Axon is the one we chose. There were some other bidding processes, but I was not involved in the selection process.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a two out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy. 

Initially, we didn't have the expertise for the tool from the client's end. We had to depend on Informatica for that. There were some initial infrastructure issues. When we got the proposal and started implementing it, there were new findings that we had to fit according to our environment. 

Maybe it's because we weren't well-prepared for expectations. For example, if you want to set up and get started in a week or two, it took us two months for the initial setup and to migrate the data. We faced a lot of technical challenges.

Things didn't fit in properly, so we needed to make adjustments. But, again, it's our personal experience with our client. It might not be a common issue for others, but the initial setup was difficult, and we struggled a lot, so I would rate it as two out of ten.

But after that, it's all good. Once we set it up and started configuring things, everything was more in control, and we didn't face any problems. But the first-time setup was definitely a challenge.

It took us two months to deploy the solution. The most time-consuming part was the data structure and migration.

For us, we took two resources for the deployment process because only two were available at the time. But it depends on each project. We had two resources fully dedicated to this work.

One of them was a normal Informatica expert developer, and the other was a business analyst who was also a data modeler.

I would estimate a minimum guarantee of about 60% return on investment. We are yet to explore a lot of features, like data lineage and migration of business units. But if we migrate everything into it, we can expect a 50% to 60% return on investment, for sure.

For licensing, all I know is the number of users matters. It's not about the volume of data; it's more about the number of users. If more users are added, there's an additional cost. 

We only use out-of-the-box features and haven't asked for any customization, so we haven't incurred additional costs. However, when we migrate all 53 business units, there might be additional costs. As of now, we don't have any extra costs.

I would recommend using it because every tool and technology has its pros and cons. If it fits with your organization, especially if you already have the Informatica suite of products in your architecture, Informatica Axon will fit in very easily. Even if you are on a different stack, it might still work. 

One advantage of Informatica is that they have been in this industry for a long time. They have a strong background in handling data, which is a positive aspect of Informatica Axon. I would definitely recommend it if it meets your standards.

Overall, I would rate it a six out of ten; we have yet to utilize all the features. From the organization's standpoint, it has only helped certain business units so far. Additionally, the user intuitiveness is less, and there are some performance issues here and there. I'm not confident enough to give it a nine out of ten because we haven't fully explored the product yet. It meets expectations but does not exceed them, which is why I rate it a six.

Informatica Data Quality offers functionalities such as profiling and address standardization. It identifies discrepancies in data through profiling, providing statistical insights similar to other data quality tools. What sets IDQ apart is its integration with PowerCenter, Informatica's flagship data integration tool. IDQ includes a developer tool with a wide range of transformations like Cost, Standardizer, and Cleanser, which are essential for data quality management. It operates as a batch-based tool, distinguishing itself in the market. While IDQ focuses on these aspects, it doesn't directly relate to tools like TDM or MDM, which are separate solutions.

Whenever I open and close Informatica Data Quality, I get consistent results. However, since I moved away from Informatica in the last two to three years, I have also evaluated other products. There is an ETL tool by SAP, specifically Business Objects Data Services, which has some pros and cons. It can integrate more files.

We use parts and standardization for most of our testing. We purchase the US Postal Service address database, which is updated periodically. Many useful tools, such as Google Maps, can detect and mark new businesses or changes in business locations. Informatica captures and updates this information. Some periodic maintenance is involved, but setting it up is not overly complicated.

Informatica Data Quality has its data warehouse, primarily using Oracle and some SQL databases. You need a database to host the data. The cleansed version of the data is stored in the data warehouse. It integrates with PowerCenter and other Informatica tools. The integration details can be complex, but a regional setup is involved in this process.

Profiling smaller datasets, such as 10,000-50,000 records, worked fine. However, unexpected issues could arise with larger datasets, such as thousands of records or more, especially with tables containing many columns. Handling tables with fifty or more columns can be challenging, even in Excel. A mismatch in data types could cause the entire system to crash.

Continual enhancements are being made to address these issues, which can be unique to specific industries like finance and healthcare.

I have worked with Informatica Data Quality up to version 10.4, around 2020, about two or three years ago. During that time, there was a code bug at the driver level when connecting to hardware. When attempting to profile data, the system would crash. We had to collaborate with engineers from Informatica to fix the bug, which was eventually resolved in the 10.5.1 release.

Informatica Data Quality has its client tool. You can build your code on your laptop and then upload it to the database metadata. However, for some parts of the development, you might need to log into the server to complete the tasks.

Informatica Data Quality can build dashboards and integrate with reporting tools like Tableau and Power BI. It also supports integration with tools like Microsoft, Cognos Business Intelligence, and SAP Crystal Reports. This flexibility is a crucial feature of Informatica. As for SaaS, Informatica does offer SaaS options. Additionally, it can interface with statistical software like SAS, allowing users to build code in SAS and then import it into Informatica. This simplifies the process and eliminates the need for manual coding.

If you remove the PowerCenter tools, the next closest competitor would be IBM's InfoSphere DataStage. Additionally, there are free, not free, and less expensive community editions of various tools. For instance, Talend offers an open-source ETL tool, while Pentaho has a miniature business version of ETL. Microsoft itself provides ETL tools like SSIS and reporting tools. Data quality is not necessarily tied to any vendor—data is data, and various tools can manage anything that flows in.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I use the solution for financial institutions, where we push our data into the warehouses and analytics platforms. We query the Kafka messaging services and see whatever message we get. We used to take the API responses and load them into different target systems, some cloud-based and some on-prem. For some security reasons, we used to push the data to the on-prem and then the cloud versions.

In Informatica, we can export the metadata in XML format, and then we can see what all are available. Metadata querying is right now not there in Informatica Cloud Data Integration. Informatica Cloud Data Integration needs to make metadata querying available in the tool, and Informatica needs to put more reports to get the lineage details and then the source system, if at all there is a need for us to identify them. It is an area where we face big challenges. I started using Informatica Cloud Data Integration recently.

I have been using Informatica Cloud Data Integration for two years.

The solution's technical support is pretty good, especially since the turnaround time is good. When we raise tickets with the tech support team, we get support within the shortest span. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have used IBM Cloud Paks and Informatica Cloud Data Integration. Sometimes, we have to go with our client's perspective, especially if they have pre-existing licenses and get any discounts. My company has suggested IBM Cloud Paks, but with the existing things that our clients work on in Informatica, sometimes they prefer the same vendor. We did PoCs for both IBM Cloud Informatica Cloud Data Integration to help clients figure out the overall run time cost and then the number of credits that they are after, based on which they have opted for Informatica.

I have previously worked with IBM Cloud Paks and Snowflake, and both of them were client-specific tools for which we had to choose. If some tool was already in place, then it has already been paid for as a part of the procurement process, so we should continue with it. If it is a new proposal, then we have to go for it and list out to our customers all the things that we have in our pocket, and where we can take care of all the accesses, billing per hour for users, number of hours, and all such related details. After that, we suggest to our customers to take a call depending upon the amount of budget that needs to be allocated for the technical stuff.

For the last few months, I have been working only on Informatica Cloud Data Integration. Some people are interested in the Azure Databricks for their pipelines. Some of the partners who are providing tools to customers are also interested in Azure Databricks.

Instead of Informatica, I recommend IBM products to others, especially if someone already has other products from IBM's family or has purchased some information catalog. My company suggests that such customers go with IBM Cloud Paks since it allows you to lift and shift some of the existing jobs or processes to the IBM Cloud Catalog. If somebody wants to go for a cross-platform, then there was a time when my company used to suggest they go for Azure Databricks. It all depends on the existing infrastructure and a user's broader plan. Based on it, we used to suggest tools to customers. My company also used to look at what our customers were using and what their target was.

When it comes to the impact of the mapping and transformation features on data integration processes, Informatica has an existing license system where we directly map it to the existing cloud and then run it over the cloud. Any new development activities that we are doing are done directly on the cloud. Informatica has provided this migration tool for lift and shift purposes. With the tool, almost 80 to 90 percent of things are directly convertible from on-prem to cloud services, but through reports, we figured out that 10 percent can't be done, so we have to redo such areas in the cloud.

Speaking about the ease of use and learning curve of Informatica, I would say that my total experience is close to thirteen years with ETL tools. I have worked on multiple ETL tools on different clouds. I don't see much difference between IBM Cloud Paks and Informatica Cloud Data Integration. For me, these are more or less similar tools, with just a change in cosmetics.

Speaking about Informatica Cloud Data Integration's performance and scalability and how it meets our company's project needs, I would say that we have to buy CPU units. Initially, we had some 10,000 CPU units, and with that, we knew how many credits there were. Most of our systems are in production, so only with the peak loads, our threshold is not going beyond 60 to 70 percent of utilization.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is associated with a bigger integration part where we have around 200 mappings and it works well. I don't see many issues in the tool except in the area of metadata querying. If I want to figure out a particular column of the table that is impacting the number of mappings, previously, we used to go for query, or we used to query in XML format. Currently, we have to call the APIs, but the information that we are after is not that precise.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration can be integrated with Salesforce. We can also have some other API integrations. If you have any specific systems, then considering whatever ERPs or legacy systems we have used with the tool, we don't see many issues.

I would recommend the tool to others. I would recommend the product to mid-sized companies. At the end of the day, everything is about the number of CPUs or the units that are needed to run it. Everything depends on the number of mappings of the growth prospect of the ETL pipelines that one is going to build. If it is mid-level and companies are above the mid-level zone, Informatica and IBM Cloud Paks are preferable to the other tools.

I rate the tool a seven and a half to eight out of ten.

The main purpose of this tool is for file transfers related to our Python server.

The data integration and synchronization features in IICS improve the data handling processes.

I haven't had the chance to explore all the features in-depth since we've only been using them for a couple of months.  

I appreciate that it's a cloud-based solution. With a good internet connection, it works smoothly.

It also offers multiple features. 

There's definitely room for improvement in terms of user-friendliness.

One example is that you can't search for jobs directly by file name. You can only search by job name. So, if you want to find a job that works with a specific file, you have to go through each job individually to find the right one.

So, I'd like to see a faster search, one where I can search directly by file name.

Moreover, the support team could improve by adding things like file transfer status updates. Also, if someone modifies a job and then leaves the company, that shouldn't disrupt the job for active users. It would be better if the job continued to run smoothly regardless of who modified it.

I have been using it for seven to eight months. 

It is a pretty stable product. 

Scaling is easy. It's not overly complex. In our team, we have around 10 to 12 people using it. Additionally, there's a separate IT team dedicated to IICS with over 50 people. Other private projects likely use IICS as well.

We sometimes face challenges when implementing new features. In those cases, we contacted support, and they've been very helpful.

wWe're happy with the support team.

It is a cloud service. We use AWS and Azure Cloud. I'm not fully sure about the installation details, but I know we use AWS and potentially other cloud features as well.

If you have experience with similar tools or a general understanding of IT concepts, it's easier to grasp. Learning the features takes time, but with an IT background, you should be able to figure out the basics. 

We all encounter challenges sometimes and need to learn new things. Overall, it's not overly difficult or overly simple. It's manageable if you have the right mindset.

It's definitely a good tool, especially if you're using cloud services and an S3 bucket. It has many features to simplify your work and make your life easy. It's not overly difficult to learn, but proper training is essential to understand and make the most of all the features.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog was used by our company as proof of concept for projects related to comprehensive data governance. 

The solution has multiple valuable features for metadata collection from multiple data sources or technologies. The solution manages data and acts as a central hub for setting up data governance processes. 

The automated scanning of metadata from data sources is one of the most vital features of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The solution comprises attribute features and AI capabilities for automatic relationship discovery between different datasets.

Another powerful feature of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is data lineage. The whole path of data transformation from one location to another using certain technologies is represented in Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The solution integrates seamlessly with other products from the vendor and allows the creation of comprehensive data governance processes.

The aforementioned integrations facilitate the coverage of semantic layers in addition to the technical data. There is another business glossary product from Informatica that easily integrates with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog to consume data harvested by Data Catalog, which makes a powerful combination. 

The user interface of the product needs to be improved. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog captures huge amounts of data and along with this data, the interface becomes comprehensible only for users with advanced technical knowledge. Even for advanced users, it becomes challenging to move around vast amounts of data collected by the solution. 

Some competitors of Informatica are trying to implement some brilliant ideas, but they lack the coverage provided by Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The data lineage feature can also be further improved.

While using the solution, the data is being transmitted outside the client's network to the Informatica cloud, which can be a security concern; the vendor can solve this by enabling the product as part of a public cloud like Azure, AWS, or Google. The aforementioned scenario can be a concern for institutions like banks where there are legal restrictions and data needs to be fully under control. 

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for a year. It was used in two different projects in our company, each of them concluded in six months. 

I would rate the stability of the product as seven out of ten. 

The customer support is satisfying, but the turnaround or response time is quite long as the vendor needs to support a huge number of customers daily. At our company, we have noticed that there are experts in the support team who can provide effective solutions. 

The tool's initial setup is complex. I had experience with the on-prem deployment of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, but I believe the cloud version is easier to set up. The solution's deployment takes around three to six months.

About four to five professionals are required, including technical administrators and data governance experts, for the on-prem deployment of the solution; for cloud deployment, three professionals might be enough. 

It's a very expensive solution. 

Informatica covers the widest area of technologies in comparison to other vendors and they also have a network of partners who develop add-ons for extending functionalities or data source technologies which could be integrated with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The solution provider has a wide partner ecosystem to provide features on APIs and special custom formats that could be imported or integrated into varying processes. 

The solution's features can be extended and the vendor provides useful documentation and training on it. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is a reliable platform due to its extensibility and cooperation with other partners. I would overall rate the product an eight out of ten. I would definitely recommend others to use the solution, given that there isn't a requirement for in-depth analysis. 

The critical data lineage feature acts as a link between every aspect of data governance, including an explanation of the data journey and its history which reflects the business growth. The powerful AI capabilities of the solution allow you to automate the management of massive amounts of data, especially the aspect of associating technical metadata with business terms.

When dealing with millions of data attributes its not possible to manage data manually, therefore Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is needed to automate 60 to 80 percent of data association between business terms and harvested technical terms.

If the Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog deployment is carried out efficiently, it can greatly impact your organization and enable business capabilities to further improve business processes. 

What I like best about Informatica MDM is its structured, table-based approach. Unlike Reltio, where data is only visible through the UI and cloud-based, the solution allows access to normalized tables. This means I can directly query and see data in each table. For instance, I can easily get all customer details from the customer table. However, for more complex queries, like seeing all customer interactions with the organization, some SQL knowledge is needed to join different tables and retrieve the details.

The tool could be improved in terms of ease of use, particularly for those without technical expertise. Understanding and extracting data from the table-based structure requires some SQL knowledge and technical skills. Additionally, while Informatica MDM has moved towards a cloud-based MDM with a UI similar to Reltio, I haven't used it, so I can't comment on its effectiveness.

I have been working with the product for six months. 

I haven't had any issues with the tool's stability. 

I'm not entirely sure about scalability, but I've heard that adding custom features can be complicated. We have to go through several steps. First, we need to determine if we're adding a column to an existing Informatica MDM table or creating a new one. Then, we have to contact Informatica with our customization request. They do the customization. After that, we have to check if it's working correctly.

In our organization, we use Informatica MDM in a specific way. It's primarily based on tables; users don't directly log into it. The process works like this: data flows into the MDM tables as an inbound process. Once the master data merge has been completed, the output data flows out as an outbound process.

The tool's support team is good. The product is quite technical, and so is the support team. When we have questions, we reach out to them, and they provide answers. Their response time is also good—we don't have to wait long for replies.

Positive

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. If you don't have the budget for Reltio, then you can go for Informatica MDM. 

We use the product to store data. We have established a structured system where we store all relevant information, including donor details, images, and series, ensuring easy accessibility for users.

The product's most valuable feature is the ability to select the data flow and lineage.

Informatica Axon's response times and certain aspects of the admin panel could be enhanced for better usability.

We have been using Informatica Axon for more than one year.

I rate the platform's stability as seven out of ten.

We have around 400 Informatica Axon users in our organization. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

The technical support services at the moment are impeccable. The support team has answers for everything. They have maintained this level of quality as we progress. There aren't many issues currently, although we're awaiting the migration to the cloud.

Positive

The implementation process could be simplified.

The platform has a premium cost. I rate the pricing as seven out of ten.

The product needs to be adequately supported in the current setup. I advise others to conduct a proof of concept (POC) and assess how it progresses. The learning curve can be steep, but with sufficient time investment, they can also impart knowledge to the users, which is crucial for effective change management.

I recommend it to others and rate it an eight out of ten.

On one of my projects, we used Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for ingestion purposes. Secondly, we used it as a regular ETL for performing heavy transformations.

In our current scenario, we are moving our on-premise artifacts, which are on PowerCenter, to the cloud. It was surprisingly quick to get everything working, which has been beneficial for our operations.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services offers a wide variety of services, including Cloud Data Integration, which is akin to a replica of PowerCenter on the cloud. I particularly like the mass ingestion service.

The cloud version of Informatica, although easier and more advanced than PowerCenter, still requires a deep dive to fix bugs. It could be improved by making the process as intuitive and easy to follow as PowerCenter.

I have delivered two projects using it, so from my experience, the tool is very good.

There are some bugs and glitches, which for a beginner, can take time to resolve. This may be because I have spent less time on the tool compared to others.

Scalability doesn't impact Informatica technically, but it does take a lot of money when we keep adding users.

Informatica technical support is excellent. I would rate it a nine. They are top-notch.

Positive

The initial setup is easy and not complex.

Pricing is a bit high, similar to a premium version or a high-end product, and requires a budget ready to manage it.

During POCs, we explored other ETLs like Firetran for ingestion purposes, but Informatica's capabilities are robust.

For a robust use case, especially for large enterprises, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is a good tool with good support. However, make sure to have a budget ready.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.