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 and have worked with two tools from Informatica, both on on-premises and cloud models. I have experience with Informatica Axon, and I have used the cloud services under Informatica CDGC.

The use case of the tool is basically in the banking sector. It is used to optimize certain areas of a project. In Europe, we have a GDPR implementation. In the Middle East, there is the Central Bank of the UAE and UAE data protection law. Implementing data protection laws and ensuring that all the policies are enforced for financial security is my use case. I have to make sure the bank or financial institution meets the requirements of the Central Bank of the UAE. Data quality is another use case where my company handles corporate and retail customer data, and protecting their information is known as PII. The tool ensures that the system holds the PII data properly.

For data lineage, we look for things at a transformation level and how the data is transforming and managing the ETL mapping. Every tool gives this information about how the data goes, but our company is interested in knowing how the data is transforming and the transformation logic between the two data sources.

There are some tool limitations. Some connectors do not scan the metadata properly. If I want to scan the metadata from the data lineage or the Python code, such areas can get tedious in the tool. To manage such areas, one needs to have a lot of coding knowledge, and you need to know how to apply the code, and only then can you get it fixed. There is no user-friendly enterprise.

There are certain shortcomings even if we opt for subscription-based technical support.

I have been using Informatica Axon for four years. I work as a consultant.

It is a stable solution. Once it is implemented, we will handle everything for the business. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a highly scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The tool is meant for enterprise-sized businesses.

I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

I have experience with Informatica Data Governance.

If one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the product's initial setup phase an eight out of ten.

The solution is deployed on the cloud, specifically if you have cloud-based virtual machines. If there are compliance issues, and you need to hold the metadata only on-premises models, you can do that, too.

The solution can be deployed in a few days.

It is an expensive solution. I would say it is the most expensive solution in the market.

For the features of the software, the price is justifiable.

Speaking about how the tool enhances data governance tasks, I would say that we have three types of users, consisting of the consumer, who are normally a business user, then we have a developer and finally the admin. Our company onboards the user, and then the user can collaborate, comment, ask questions, give ratings to their assets, publish the data to the marketplace and go for downloads.

One needs to resolve the problem that stems from the fact that different people can have different understandings of the concepts associated with the tool. A database administrator may see an area as a table, but for a business, it may be a person. The tool gives you a common understanding of the business concept. The tool also provides lineage data and how the business data is performing. It provides an interface between organizational policies, the different processes governed by a certain policy, and the different systems governed by which policy. The tool gives you a 360-degree holistic view of the data.

The cloud version of Informatica Axon utilized the AI for the classification purposes, data domain and automatic data tagging. In my company, we use the tool's AI capabilities.

I will recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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.

We use the solution for data cataloging and lineage.

The valuable feature is metadata management. If you want to trace sensitive data, you can auto-classify them. You can search for sensitive information through EDC. Using Discovery, you can identify if there is any type of data set.

EDC is only used for cataloging and meetings. Currently, not many different databases are integrated with it. The ETL logic should be visible within the tool. If EDC is integrated with Axon, you will see the data lineage and catalog because of EDC. If EDC is removed, you cannot see any lineage or catalog.

We need EDC on the application level. Currently, it is only at a system level. It can be shown as an application layer between policies or regulations. This kind of feature can be enabled.

The integration with other data management tools can be enhanced. For instance, there is no integration with tools like Collibra or Hubview.

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for seven years.

The solution is stable.

EDC needs many ports to run. Therefore, to improve performance, you need to increase the number of cores.

The initial setup is easy and takes two weeks to complete. One person is enough to deploy it.

EDC gives you a better understanding of architecture and the system used. You cannot use EDC completely unless you have access.

The product is expensive.

EDC is a standalone application, so it doesn’t really make much sense. It doesn’t give you a lot of features that way; it’s primarily for cataloging and classification. Nobody would buy EDC as a standalone application. When people are buying EDC, it’s always with Axon.

I recommend buying the solution altogether with Axon.

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

Informatica Axon is typically used for data governance, where we establish policies and business glossaries.

Users can benefit from Axon's business lineage. Axon has something called Overlay, which can be used to extend the technical lineage. You can also extend it to stakeholders, all the compliance policies, and all the overlaying business rules. All of these can be seen in the same lineage.

I want to get a deeper understanding of the logic that is being used in the ETL. Informatica Axon does not provide complete transparency about the level of detailing you need and the logic used in ETL. I cannot use Google Fusion for ETL because I don't have a connector within Informatica Axon. I am stuck if I don't have a connector with an ETL tool.

One of the biggest disadvantages of Informatica is that it's very expensive. Many clients don't want to go with Informatica Axon because of its cost structure. You have to buy every component separately. If a customer wants governance, they obviously would need cataloging and lineage also.

Other tools like Collibra have cataloging, lineage, and governance in the same package. You don't need to buy them separately. With Informatica, you have to buy Axon for governance and EDC for cataloging and lineage. So, it becomes difficult for customers to pay for every component.

I have been using Informatica Axon for seven years.

We haven’t faced any stability issues with Informatica Axon.

Scalability is not really a factor in data governance because the volume and storage of metadata is not more than a couple of gigabytes.

The solution provides good technical support.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is easy, but you typically need Informatica support to run some of the preliminary tests. I've heard that the solution will be available on the cloud. Once it is available as software as a service (SaaS), you don't need to install it; you only need to configure it.

Typically, it takes around two days for the solution's installation and integration with the entire Active Directory and EDC. Then, it may take another day for testing. One engineer is enough to do all this work.

Only using Axon will not give you all the benefits, but you will see benefits when Axon, EDC, and IDQ are all plugged in together. It is difficult to get benefits from Axon as a standalone solution.

The solution's pricing model is easy, but it is very expensive.

Informatica Axon has a Marketplace that comes at an additional cost. Other tools like Collibra have built-in collaboration features, and you don't need to buy them separately. Collaboration features like collaborating on data sets, tagging them, and making a request are available in the Informatica Axon Marketplace.

It's not difficult to maintain the tool as long as someone has been trained in administration because Axon has many components. You need to understand how to change the logo of your screen size and how to change the dashboard wizard.

You also need to understand the product's configurations with other tools, personalize your dashboard, customize it, and add roles. There is a learning curve there. You need to train a person to be an administrator, and once they are trained, they can do the role better.

There is an NLP enabled with the solution, but it is not really that great. There is still room for growth in Informatica Axon's AI space.

Although expensive, Informatica Axon is very easy to learn, and you don't need to customize it much. Once you have the tool, you start uploading things. The solution is very easy to use because it has proper documentation and user guides.

If you want to set up business rules, Informatica Axon will give you a readymade template and ask you to start filling it out. You will be told about the mandatory and non-mandatory fields, and as long as you understand what the fields are required for, it's very easy to start filling out. Someone new to governance can get the hang of it and easily start filling in the details. You can have Axon implemented very quickly.

I am more involved with governance, cataloging lineage, EDC, and IDQ. I am getting a little bit into master data management and data security.

Overall, I 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. 

The solution helps with cataloging and obtaining the data lineage. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog also helps in identifying vital datasets, including the critical data elements and cataloging them. In our company, we have to manage the life cycle of the critical data elements and maintain the business glossary.

The definitions of the critical data elements, their linkage, lineage, as well as the relationships are managed using the solution. Informatica has been in the industry for decades, so they are one of the top SMB partners. 

At our company, along with the solution, we also use Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services REST API for app and system integrations in the packaging industry. Of our total portfolio, we integrated applications for about 20%, but we did not have any cloud presence; only a setup application was in the cloud. But for all the on-prem projects, the key components of the customer's product were integrated and governed by using Informatica. 

Data lineage is a valuable feature when, at our company, we design the physical elements and the logical components and need to identify the relation between them. 

The duplicate identification feature for two tickets, synonymous fields, or attributes is another vital aspect of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The categorization of whether data is critical or not in the business glossary is another vital feature of the tool.  

The product is difficult for an untrained professional to operate. Specialized skills need to be acquired by learning the tool and executing it for data operations. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog needs to be more user friendly, the UI is extremely complex.

For instance, if I have to view the tool, the first deterrent is that it gets highly technical. Thus, a limited number of professionals can understand the tool processes. Unless you are a data professional, it's very difficult to use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog. The tool operates with Power BI sometimes.  

I have been using Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog for eight years. 

At our company, we haven't faced any downtime or business issues with the solution. The solution allows a limited number of users, so it's easier for the vendor to manage stability. 

I believe the solution is scalable and integrates satisfactorily. Our company was successful with scalability because, for the majority of our applications, where the key data was being hosted, we could integrate the apps quite easily with the cloud.

If Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is being used, scaling the data up or down shouldn't be a problem. The solution's cloud integrations make scalability easier, unlike the on-prem version, which requires implementing complex security protocols. 

I would rate the customer support a nine out of ten. The product's support team has been highly responsive while solving the issues faced by our organization. 

Positive

At our company, during the product deployment, we had to asses our applications and APIs that would be connected, whether they were available out of the box or not. But the capabilities of customer connections are available with similar tools.

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog offers custom connectivity. Therefore, the deployment process has been troublesome for our organization except for the mainframe. But as we kept using the tool we realized the integrations could be smoothly completed. At our company, we implement the product if customers are convinced to integrate the tool and make it their central, single source of data management for integrators and technicians. 

The deployment of the solution took more than a year in our organization, which included upgrades, contract renewals, and demonstrations similar to IDMC, provided by the same vendor. For deploying the on-prem version of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, a team of five engineers was needed in our company to manage the whole deployment and support process.

A couple of business analysts are needed to gather the users' requirements. Our organization has about ten members who provide on-call support on Informatica for its customers, comprising developers, business analysts, and testers. 

In our organization, we were able to derive about 70% of the critical data lineage. 

It's a costly solution. I would rate the pricing of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog as six out of ten. 

The automated data lineage feature utilization depends upon the integration, which is why, in our organization, we had all our key applications integrated that derived automated lineages. But there were unknown applications as well, which, due to the lack of integrations, needed to be manually plugged in.

The mainframe integration with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is highly complex. At our organization, due to the aforementioned complexity, we had to import all the data of the mainframe into Informatica. If you are able to integrate the tool with your core applications and systems, then the data lineage duration is pretty simple and this structure is the same for competitor tools as well. 

In our company, we might explore in the near future how Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog can assist with AI capabilities. I would overall rate the solution as eight out of ten. To anyone looking to use Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, I would say if they are willing to understand the company data, then the professional should gather sufficient technical knowledge about the product or take assistance from an Informatica expert because it's not a straightforward tool. 

We use the tool to implement customer, product, and entity masters. We also use TDM to generate synthetic data, but not in real-time scenarios.

It's a multi-domain master data management system. The solution is easier to use compared to the other solutions. The security is good. The governance model is good. All the elements that I expect are available in the product.

The user interface can be a bit more functionality-aligned.

I have been using the solution for the last 15 years.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The product is scalable.

The support team does not provide much support.

Negative

The initial setup was okay. I rate the ease of setup a five out of ten. The tool can be deployed in a minimum of eight to ten months. The implementation requires at least a team of five members. Maintenance depends on the customer's requirements. If the customer's requirements keep changing, we need a team to maintain the tool. Otherwise, one or two Informatica developers are sufficient to maintain the product.

The price is comparable.

All the tools have similar capabilities. There is nothing superior in Informatica. I'm a software integrator. I work for an IT company. I'm not the consumer. I will recommend the product to others, but it depends on the customers’ needs.

If an organization needs a good customer master, product master, or partner master, Informatica MDM will be a good choice. The solution has been in the industry for quite a long time. It has all the elements I look for in a master data management system except for customer support. All other things are fine.

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

Informatica MDM is used for our customers' master data management journey. The solution meets our client's requirements for their customer-supplier or any other entities.

The solution's most valuable features are its data quality, match-merge engine, and CLAIRE AI engine, which helps with AI automation.

Compared to other tools in the market, Informatica MDM is costly.

I have been using Informatica MDM for 13 years.

Informatica MDM is highly stable compared to any other tool in the market.

Informatica MDM is a highly scalable solution. Our clients for Informatica MDM are mostly medium and enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten for scalability.

Technical support refuses to support us if we customize the tool. We customize the product based on the customer's needs, and we expect Informatica to provide support during that time as well.

Positive

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup an eight out of ten for on-premises and nine out of ten for the cloud version. Setting up the tool in the cloud via IDMC doesn't take much time.

The solution can be deployed within a few hours.

Our customers have seen a return on investment with the solution.

Informatica MDM is an expensive solution. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing nine and a half out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to other users because of its reliability and stability. Compared to other product vendors, Informatica MDM always has additional features. Informatica MDM has a CLAIRE AI engine, which helps with AI automation.

Overall, I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.