A massively good product for NOT (micro)service environments.
Updated April 23, 2021
A massively good product for NOT (micro)service environments.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Informatica MDM
Overall Satisfaction with Informatica MDM
In our organization, it's mainly used for keeping a single point of truth for user data--that is, customer details and such. The "first" storage of this data can be anywhere, as in, most applications that store user data have their own database. Informatica MDM functions as a spider in this web of data, fetching, combining, and cleaning all this data before pumping it into its "single point of truth" database.
- It has exceptional functionality for customizing and combining data, like filtering and unifying. This is important if multiple sources can contain data from single customers.
- It has a very advanced flow editor where you can add logic and rules in a clean flow-like environment.
- It can connect to almost any datasource, with unlimited scheduling options.
- 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.
- It was very easy and fast to implement the GDPR user governance requirements since all we had to do was collect all user data from all user data collecting applications through Informatica MDM.
- The point above turned into a real nightmare when nobody involved in MDM (which is the majority of developers) understood the MDM environment. They can't easily "see" the point to point connections, without first consulting the experts. This leads to a lot of problems when the interface of one (user-related) backend changes, while not updating this in MDM. When you have more than 60 connections in MDM, all hidden in the "MDM basement of your company", this becomes a real nightmare. Processes that would have been very fast to change (just implement a new API version, relaying the old API version to backup storage) were suddenly a nightmare to implement.
No other products were evaluated, except BizTalk, which lead to even more problems than Informatica MDM. Eventually, no other product was used. Instead, a completely different architecture is being implemented, where every application domain is connected to an MDM Oracle database through a microservice architecture. This makes an expensive product like MDM more or less obsolete. It does mean that in some cases it became very difficult to design the right interfaces since we lost the "flow design editor" in MDM
Do you think Informatica MDM delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Informatica MDM's feature set?
Yes
Did Informatica MDM live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Informatica MDM go as expected?
No
Would you buy Informatica MDM again?
No