Semarchy xDM Reviews

One use case was mastering client data. I did the installs and a proof of concept for both Profisee and Semarchy side-by-side so that I could showcase the different features of each tool for the client, to guide them to a decision on which product to buy. That use case would have been mastering personal data in the support of a non-profit.

For this client, they were most excited about Semarchy over Profisee and Informatica. Informatica was kind of out of the running because it was too expensive for this client. We eliminated them early. However, between Profisee and Semarchy, the end-user was more excited about Semarchy, even though Profisee won the end battle. The reason that they liked Semarchy was that the interface was so easy and it was very non-technical. They were all early childhood education end users. They wanted something really simple and unintimidating, and Semarchy offers that.

Semarchy offers very good ease of use. The ease of installation and maintenance are also great.

I love their interface. I love the fact that all their features can be implemented out of one client interface. That is wonderful, as one of the things about Informatica is that you've got to go to the administrator tool to do all the backend stuff. That's fine, however, then you've got to do all your data quality stuff through your analyst tool. That's a lot of bouncing around. I love the fact that in Semarchy, you can install it very quickly. You can get it up and running, and you can do a quick proof of concept really fast. 

They're the cheapest of all three of the products that I helped the client evaluate. You get a big bang for the buck with Semarchy.

I love the fact that their APIs were really easy to build straight from that single interface. I love that. 

Their training, their online training is fantastic.

Their tech support is the best out of all three of the solutions I've looked at - including Informatica and Profisee.

Their documentation is excellent.

They need to make the workflow more enhanced or dynamic in its functionality. That was the tiebreaker between Profisee and Semarchy - the client had a SQL server development environment and they could do a lot of stuff using the SQL server SDK to do complicated dynamic workflows. With Profisee, it wasn't impossible, however, it was a little bit more complicated to do. Semarchy is working on making it possible. I almost don't want to even say that that would be room for improvement, as I know that they're working. They may have already solved it. 

They could put a little bit more energy into out-of-the-box reporting. That was one of the things that I saw in Profisee that wasn't even really marketed that much. I wasn't even looking to their reporting features until I implemented it. At that point, I was like, "Oh my gosh, look at all this out-of-the-box data quality reporting that's going on! I don't have to necessarily go out and build all these reports from scratch." I was pleasantly surprised to see that in Profisee. I don't know that Semarchy has put the energy into that. They may have, but it certainly not to the extent that the other solution did.

I've been using the solution for about a year and a half.

The solution is very stable. I would give it a highly favorable rating.

I don't know about scalability. We didn't put that to any kind of test. In my experience, I never put it through any kind of test to see if it could handle millions and millions of rows. 

However, part of that is dependent on how well you have your database, your operating system, and all those other infrastructure pieces tuned. To me, it seems like the tool would handle scaling okay. That said, it's not like I have tried to do any kind of stress testing on it. 

As far as the scalability capability in terms of being able to handle multi-domains, business use cases, and everything, it's very scalable and extensible. You start off with your data model and that's pretty much unlimited. You build the data model and you go from there. There aren't any constraints on that. I would give it a high score on that. I feel that it's very scalable.

The technical support is excellent for this product. We're very satisfied with the level of service they provide. It's even better than Informatica's or Profisee's.

I also use solutions such a Profisee and Informatica.

I'm always dabbling with solutions, as I've got VMs and I'm always practicing with the installs and trying to keep up with the new features that they're incorporating into their offering. I stay in touch with each solution's technical team.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It's very straightforward. I'd give it a grade of ten out of ten. 

While it's really easy in the cloud, it's a little bit more complicated on the on-prem deployment, however, even that was really easy. In fact, when I did my evaluation for the client, I gave Semarchy an A++ on the standing up the tool.

In terms of deployment, Profisee is very tightly coupled with the SQL server. Therefore, one of the things that was good with Semarchy is that they weren't so tightly coupled with the database. They'll run easily on SQL server or Oracle or Postgre. That is a positive feature for Semarchy.

I'm just going to say that since they have the lowest price point and the quickest time to get something up and running, they're always going to show a return on investment. I can't give exact figures as the use case was for a non-profit and they didn't choose Semarchy in the end. I can't say, "yeah, they developed this ROI on the purchase," as they didn't purchase it. 

The pricing of the solution is excellent. It costs less than Informatica and Profisee.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using.

While I typically use the on-premises version, I took their partner training workshop a few months ago and that was in the cloud on AWS.

It is one cool little tool. I was able to take a handful of records as a use case and easily ingested them into the tool, and the customers just loved it. I was able to show how you can easily cleanse those records, standardize those records, match them, and build the golden record very quickly.

I'd advise users to pick a small use case, take it end to end, and build it out that way as a proof of concept. Have fun with it, however, be sure to start out small. Pick the low hanging fruit. I hate saying that, as it sounds so cliche and overused. That said, it really works. You can really have fun with Semarchy, due to the fact that you can build something very quickly. I loved it.

What we would do is, we would have a use case that was like a story about a handful of customers that we wanted to master. We would start off with our little animated presentation, then we would get everybody on a Zoom call and we would walk them through. We'd say "Okay, now we're going to ingest the records. Now, look, see, we can see how X is in here five different times. Let's look at her addresses. Now, let's pick the key fields that we want to use as our match criteria. Etc." 

If you make it fun with the client and bring the client on board, it really gives you the best chance for success. Building those relationships with the data stores, with the different product owners and everything is so important. Otherwise, the client is going to be intimidated and scared, and they'll end up spending a lot of money and it'll sit on the shelf.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. To take it to a 10, they would have to, for example, put in dynamic workflows and then improve their reporting to make it a little bit more out-of-the-box. Other than that, it's excellent.