Astera Centerprise vs Informatica MDM

• Astera's customer service and help team are quick to respond and have always found solutions to my questions or problems. They also follow up after completing a support request to make sure everything was working correctly. If it's not something the current version allows, as far as functionality, they develop a solution for the next version because they assume if one company has that need that others will as well.
• I've never lost touch with our sales representative. She checks in at least twice a year, if not more, to make sure that we are happy with their product and to see if we need anything. I've rarely needed anything, but when I did she made sure to have the correct person contact me regarding what I asked for and she followed up to make sure the request was resolved.
• EDI is a very complex language and making any changes can cause errors in other areas that you aren't aware of. Astera Centerprise creates an environment that is much easier to understand than looking at a raw data file. The functionality allows us to make changes to each transaction within a file in under a minute with no errors created. Making these changes before we had Astera Centerprise took a week for one file. We can now get to more files to create clean data for the state and have reached 97% acceptance.
• Centerprise's functionality can be applied at any level. It can be a broad change to an entire segment, or it can be a single digit that is changed. You can program the system to look for specific items within a file and change only the records that need to be changed. It can sequence items, it can remove items and it can add items when specifically programmed to. And if you run into a wall creating the program, Astera's help desk will help you get past it. And the program language used is easy to understand as well. If you understand functions in Microsoft Excel or SQL statements, you will be able to use this product.

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• Fuzzy matching in built features are excellent.
• Data workflow creation process is smooth.
• Creating child parent relation using UI is excellent.

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• We had some issues in getting the software running with their licensing model on our Citrix Desktop. They were very helpful in working with us on this issue.
• With any product that creates SQL code in the background, I am skeptical of how optimized that will be for our specific environment. We have not yet had problems related to this, but customers may want to monitor closely.
• They do not yet seem to have a large customer base and robust user community.

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• As far as I can see it exclusively uses the concept of "point to point" connectivity for fetching data. What this means is that Informatica MDM must have "knowledge" of all other systems, and keeps a direct connection to these systems. This is bad practice in environments that would benefit more from a microservice architecture. In those cases, it's especially bad, because not only does this break the SOA architecture, but it also "promotes" the idea of "point to point" connections among developers. The "point to point" mentality is the single most important danger to any SOA environment.
• It's very hard to use! The learning curve is really steep. Also, it's really boring by design: having to open a large application, learning all of its intricate details, maintaining all connections and scheduled data load moments means you need developers that are seriously devoted to this application. This means those developers are kept from working in the field they know best and caused them to become developers in the first place, which is Oracle/Database developing. This makes it hard to find employees willing to perform this function.

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• We have seen that the use of this package saved us 2 hours per conversion but now since the templates are already developed it is saving us more. This reduces our lead time for conversions, and increases our efficiencies as a conversion team.
• We have four licenses and in one conversion this year it allowed us to do a conversion that would not have been done. This conversion generated more than enough money to cover the cost of these four licenses for the entire year. The customer is ecstatic about the information that we were able to pull out of their reports and most of all the upper management of our company had their socks shocked off of them. Since the supplier of the software for this customer would not provide data to us for a conversion our upper management was going to cancel the sale to this customer, unless the customer was going to build our system from scratch. We were able to provide nearly a complete accounting and payroll conversion to this customer all from the data on their reports thanks to centerprise.

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• Easy pulling many project data across other data management solutions through the entire infrastructure.
• Useful and powerful software for data mining and its capability for real-time data analytics production is effective.
• Informatica MDM tools are reliable like its reporting features and the data security offered is amazing.

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