Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) Reviews

We have used it to elaborate on a project for Golden Record, for IDQ data quality, and create business cases for the control parties.

The product could be improved in the area of architecture and technology. All the parts are old.

I would like to migrate it to a new technology. It's better to have a new method for every IT system. Integrate with API, Kafka, and JMS, as API has in Jira code or Jira.

I have used Informatica MDM for ten years. I have used Version 8.6 and 9.1 of this solution.

I think that it's a good solution, but it's an old solution. It is stable because we have the experience to deploy this solution.

I think it's based on ODBC drivers, and they are not good for scalability.

We have not contacted customer service.

The initial setup was complex. It must have taken around eight or nine months to deploy all Informatica systems. The deployment processes for on-premise and cloud are different. For on-premise, we must deploy the data models, and then we must deploy the rules. We must also deploy a .Go file extension and an exposition of the vendor code, among other things.

It's different if we have an on-premise solution. The stability is for the on-premise infrastructure. It builds the IT of enterprises of clients because Informatica is at 'Legacy' level.

So, there are plans for licensing. There are subscription-based and usage-based licenses. Also, there are licenses for exceptional analytics, etc. In short, there are different models of licensing for every enterprise.

I think there is a new Jira-driven event, Jira-driven data, for the flows and extensions. So in this power center technology, I think that it's complex to navigate through the solution without new technology. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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 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.

Informatica MDM's most valuable feature is the interconnection between multiple Master Data domains.

Informatica MDM could be improved by adding drag and drop options, business data insights, and visualization reporting.

I've been using Informatica MDM for six months.

Informatica MDM is scalable.

Informatica's technical support is good, except for response delays because of time zone differences.

Neutral

The initial setup is simple.

Informatica MDM's price could be lower.

We evaluated TIBCO, IBM, and Microsoft.

I would rate Informatica MDM eight out of ten.

I use the solution for enterprise-wide data discovery and traceability, providing business context to data and collaboration between different stakeholders of data.

My organization, being a service provider, uses the product to develop domain PoCs, customer PoCs, develop data management and governance use cases, etc. The major issue with enterprises are the ability to quickly develop an MVP and showcase it to business and other data users for greater buy-in. This is important as these are new technologies - and hence, users might not easily adopt.

Our organization is a service provider as compared to an end-user. We have helped multiple organizations onboard onto data management using these technologies. 

It has improved different areas for different enterprises, including the improvement in overall business outcome and business experience, imbibing a data-driven culture, having easy availability of the right and relevant data, allowing for better compliance to regulations, and providing greater data quality and privacy management.

It has also improved overall time to service data requests such as DSAR requests.

The metadata management of Informatica is great. When an organization uses developer for data integration, IDQ for Data Quality, EDC for Data Catalog, Axon for Business Glossary, DPM for data privacy management etc., Informatica tools integrate metadata from all these tools seamlessly. The advantage is getting a complete view of your enterprise data through business and data lineage - as it not only provides you with pure data lineage but also associates related data quality measures, data protection levels, etc.

Additional metadata harvesters from different major tools can be an added advantage. Informatica provides some smart connectors for harvesting metadata from some of the industry tools. That said, this can be improved a lot more.

Overall, the toolsets are really good.

Installation and configuration can be another area where Informatica can improvise a bit. It is not easy to set up and configure the tool. A proper step by step guide to ensure this process goes smooth can be a huge advantage for end customers.

I've used the solution for more than six years.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent.

Technical support is good.

Positive

Most of our customers were using excel and email-based communication for data access. These new-age solutions improve efficiency ten times or more.

The initial setup was not very straightforward. This is an area of improvement.

We, being a service provider, have implemented and configured the setup on our own.

ROI depends on the buy-in from businesses and overall adoption rates. There is a huge amount of change management and change strategy that needs to be in place to ensure users are adopting the new tools/technology.

Informatica has good pricing options and a good professional services team who can help with setup/configuration.

There are other competing good products such as Collibra, Azure Purview, Erwin, IBM CP4D, and more. All have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you are an Informatica shop, there is no need to think twice to opt for an Informatica-based Data Management product suit.

The solution is used for real-time validation of the addresses entered by end-users in the MDM solution and validation of the addresses which are received via the inbound interfaces. 

Apart from validation, this service is used to enrich the address data, for example, entered addresses include country, city, and street name. The service returns additional characteristics, for example, postal code (if it can be derived from the other attributes), which are then written back in the requesting system. It's used for Master Data Management in our case.

The overall quality of the addresses associated with other master data entities (Customer, Supplier, physical locations, etc.) has improved significantly. Addresses have now standardized format per country of origin - this means that addresses located in one country have a bit different template than in others. This is a consequence of the fact that Informatica uses various country postal authorities to provide the content used by the Address Verification service. As explained earlier, we use the results of AV service to enrich the address information in some cases. 

Due to improved quality of addresses, the user satisfaction of our MDM solution has increased. Also, the connected systems receive more complete data from MDM. Address Verification service helps in ensuring proper data governance of the master data which is used in many critical processes across the whole enterprise.

The product is easy to set up thanks to pretty good documentation. 

It supports several ways of using it (real-time, batch mode) and has testing capabilities. 

The pricing model is clear. 

The service returns good results which vary depending on the country of the address origin. In case there are multiple matching addresses, this service returns all of them which allows our end of the process or the end-user to select the best matching record. The speed of returning the validated addresses is really great.

The product is really good in its current form; it's hard to imagine what can be improved. It's easy to integrate via the exposed APIs, hence, also in this aspect, I don't see much that can be changed.

The only thing that I can imagine that might be improved is how the available transactions verify addresses used. These transactions have a valid end date and must be used within the agreed timeframe. Sometimes it's difficult to predict how many transactions will be required. In the worst case, some of them might be lost if not used on time.

I've used the solution for more than one year.

There is no single issue with the stability since we started using it (more than 1 year ago).

The scalability is very high.

We previously used Google APIs, however, that was for another client. Hence, there was no real switch as such.

The product is very easy to set up and offers good documentation.

We handled the implementation in-house.

I'd advise users to try to predict the expected usage of the service. The unused transactions may be lost if not used on time.

We looked at both Google and Experian.

We are customers of Informatica PIM and I'm a senior architect. 

Informatica comes with a predefined data model which is the way in which you enrich your products. It acts not only as master data but also as a product enrichment tool. The product provides flexibility; you can go for an undefined number of attributes that define a product. You can plug it in with any e-commerce website. That's its value to us and why we need it. 

Database access is highly restricted with PIM. If you're using the cloud version, you probably won't have database access or a view of it. If you're wanting a customized application, you can develop the out-of-the-box PIM solution with a little bit of customization here and there without even needing a database. That's a very big drawback. As a developer or as an architect, you need to have a data model. I know some people use it without database access and the issue is that they don't know what that data model is built on other than just seeing it through UI tabs. The one thing I'd really like to see is for the solution to be made scalable. 

The solution is stable, in terms of bugs they're very good. They keep evolving their toolset. I have encountered many bugs in Multidomain MDM, but to date not in P360.

Scalability depends on your use case. If you're using it as an integrator, then it is definitely scalable. That said, it would require an altogether separate MDM solution. If you don't have MDM, then there are likely to be some limitations. We're in the process of installing now but in my previous company, we created the core set of attributes through MDM. From there it went worldwide through an e-commerce website. We have 50 to 60 people internally using it as a tool. If you're exposing your data through an e-commerce website, then it's accessible to all, although just for reading and not for updates.

If you're working with Informatica, you need to interact with them on the out-of-the-box features. They are very efficient and quick in their response times. 

I've trained in Stibo which is a little bit better than PIM and I've used Oracle PDH and CDH. Those were basically a package MDM solution. If you're using SAP, I would suggest Oracle products. But there's been a very big evolution over the past decade when it comes to enterprise MDM tools. Most people working in companies are disbursed in different locations and using multiple toolsets, they can't be restricted to one technology. That's the reason that Informatica, Stibo, Riversand, and other technologies are very useful and very powerful. When comparing PDH to PIM or CDS to Multidomain, managing the Informatica toolset is easier in terms of effort required in comparison to managing Oracle MDM or Oracle CDH or PDH because they have their own set of limitations. The good thing is that they can be very easily coupled with an ERP solution. Here, you have to build real-time or multiple interfaces. 

The setup is relatively easy I would say. But if you need additional attributes, it gives you a repository manager feature where you can use XML, add your own attributes and then configure it. To my mind, the setup is simple to moderately complex.

Licensing costs are a little pricey. For my previous client, as a support contract partner, we were making less money than Informatica was charging them. 

Informatica 360 PIM was bought from Heiler and is a very good tool if you already have MDM in place and you simply want to use it as an enrichment tool. With Informatica, you perhaps need to go somewhere into the roots of Multidomain. P360, Multidomain, and C360 are all different things. Managing a thousand plus attributes into that data model is going to be very complex. If they could come up with a standard data model that Oracle offered customers like PCH or PDH, similar to what P360 has, that would be my preference. Also, my recommendation is to always utilize your team as an integrator rather than being a master data manager.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

It is generally used for the data integration between multiple ERPs. We have ERPs, and then we have third-party exchanges that sell products. The third parties are partnered up with some of the customers, so they create deeds, and we pull in orders and quote requests.

We're trying to get to the latest version. We're two revisions behind right now. It is a local install. 

It is on-prem, and we're trying to get to all-cloud. We do use the cloud for configuration, but we deploy it to the agents locally. We're using the cloud instance of Informatica to deploy to, and we're currently on Azure.

In the latest version, I like the outlay of the business roles creation. I like seeing that visualization as you're building it, as opposed to going through metatables or XML mappings. We liked that piece, and it makes it more intuitive for the business. 

Its GUI interface definitely helps visualize what we're trying to accomplish. There is always a disconnect between IT and the business, and it helps in creating the feeds that follow the business process flows with some of the types involved with the business.

It is so broad in what it can do. Their services have expanded beyond what they originally built it out to be. The best thing I like about it is that each time they add a new service to the platform, it easily integrates with the core, which is really nice.

The biggest pain point for us is the documentation. Typically, you have to go through knowledge forums and knowledge groups to find out about the syntax issues for interfacing with new products. Typically, you've got to deal with someone who has been through the pain before. Their documents are not really up to date with current innovations happening in the industry. As big as they are, you can't really expect it, but that's our pain point.

We've been using this solution for about four years.

We love it. It is very stable. It is probably the best thing we've seen in a while.

It can out scale our ERP. So, scalability is not an issue for us. However, it can overload our system, but that is not related to the scalability of MDM. It is related to the scalability of the system it feeds.

We have five business roles that are using it, and there are two admins who are supporting it. Basically, it is supporting an environment of about 5 billion in revenue. That's a lot for that amount of revenue. It is a lot of people.

We're trying to extend or expand more modules. We have MDM, and we're going into Supplier 360 and Product 360. We found that it is the most robust platform to integrate with our e-commerce platform. Basically, we have four different e-commerce realms, and we're going to consolidate them. So, Informatica helps with the supplier stuff coming in, harmonizing the data, propagating it out to the sites. In the future, the four sites are going to be combined and consolidated into one site, and then we'll be dealing with four different ERPs, and Informatica will be very key in that as well.

Their technical support is excellent. Whenever we had issues, they were pretty quick to respond. There was never an issue in finding them. The longest we had to wait for getting a resolution was a couple of hours.

I walked into this, so I don't know what they had before.

I wasn't involved with its setup.

It is expensive. That's probably the biggest drawback. The business has heartache paying the license, but that's mainly because they don't realize what value it brings. The key thing about the MDM solution is that it is in the backend, and no one sees what it is actually doing. You don't know it is a problem until it is not there.

I would advise making sure that you have a very well-defined design before you decide you need an MDM. In our case, after MDM was in place and we turned it on, we realized that there are other processes that we needed to refactor for the purpose of MDM, which extended the rollout. This was not an MDM issue. It was a process issue in the business. That's why you need to make sure that the design is well defined. It helps to have their partners involved as well. We're dealing with Informatica consulting today to help design a Supplier 360 portal. 

It is hard to find people who are well versed in Informatica. It is hard to pluck one out of the place. You've got to go and poach for them. They're not out there open and looking for jobs.

I would rate Informatica MDM an eight out of 10.