It was a green field for us. We just really didn't know what, where, so we looked at everything that was available in the space, and we chose CA because they probably did have the best offering that would support the most technologies. We have everything from legacy, RPG iSeries type stuff, all the way up to applications in the cloud, and we needed something that would scale for all of those.

This tool had been purchased by another group in our company but it’s potential was not realized.

After doing our PoC we tried to figure out if there was any other solution which might fit. We tried and, from my perspective, because I was responsible for the whole project, there was no solution we might use in the same way or in a similar way. This product exactly fits our compliance and security very tightly, which is important.

There aren't any real competitors on the market. I think they simply found a niche and they started to develop it. We really tried, there are many options out there, but there are some features only specific to this product and there are features you might need, if you, for example, work for a big organization. And these features aren't in any other product.

There are many solutions for masking data, there are even very basic Python modules you can use for masking data but you need to take data from the source, you need to mask them, and you need to deliver the data to the destination. If you have a big organization like ours, and you have to copy one terabyte of data, it will take hours. With this solution, this terabyte is done in a couple of minutes.

Important evaluation criteria: to be honest it's got to be around what does the tool do? A lot of the tools on the market do the same thing, whether there are things that differentiate those tools, and what's really the organization's problem statement they're trying to fulfill. Once you've got the tool, that's great, but you need the people and process, and without that, it comes back to the relationship that you have with the CA guys, you've just got to shelfwear and a tool. We went through a proper RFP selection process where we kind of set our criteria and we kind of we invited a few of the kind of the vendors into come and demonstrate what they could do for us and picked the one that was best suited to us.

In addition to CA Test Data Manager, we evaluated IBM InfoSphere Optim. Those were the two products that were available to our company at the time when I proposed the idea of using it in this way.

We chose CA because they had the capability of doing relationship mapping between data variables.

We are a consulting company, so when we go to a client we do an evaluation. Often we have to tell them what about the different products we evaluated. So in this case CA TDM has competition: Informatica has a similar product called Informatica TDM; IBM has a similar product called IBM InfoSphere Optim. These are the main competitors of CA.

Apart from CA TDM, I've used IBM InfoSphere Optim, which was number-one TDM tool for quite some time, and I've used Delphix. Now, a couple of more tools have come into the market, like K2View. At one point in time, about two years back, CA TDM was only tool that could do synthetic data.

CA TDM and Optim have different ways of working. CA TDM vs Optim has the major advantage of synthetic data creation. No tool was able to do that. Only in the last two years has IBM Optim come up with synthetic data capabilities, but what they are doing is creating a superset. If you have sample data, it will create a superset of that data. That is not the case with CA, as well as other tools.

There are multiple sites that also create synthetic data, but the major challenge comes into the play once you need to put that data back into the database.

IBM Optim is one competitor as is Informatica. IBM has come up with the synthetic data feature in the last years although I don't recall the name of the tool they acquired. Informatica vs IBM Optim does not provide synthetic data yet.

Normal TDM features, like masking, are provided by both IBM and Informatica. People usually go for Informatica because it is easier for them to adopt the tool. Informatica is a very popular tool on the market for basic TDM-related activities and it's not as costly as TDM.

We looked at IBM Optim and Informatica TDM.

SevOne.

We evaluated other options when we first brought it in. We looked at a couple of the others. The reason that we ended up choosing Test Data Manager was that it was stronger, at the time at least, in its AS/400 abilities, which is what all of our legacy systems are built on. It was much more advanced than anything else that we were seeing on the market.

We evaluated Delphix and IBM, as well as CA Test Data Manager. One of the reasons we chose CA, aside from the fact that we are CA partners, is due to support for PCI and PHI in terms of faster test data generation. The biggest differentiation was in generating test cases from the data. CA implemented this for test matching and then integrated it with Agile Requirements Designer. That tipped the scales in favor of CA TDM.

When choosing a vendor, we look for continuous innovation and continued support. Continuous innovation can release features into the market ahead of other vendors. So that's something we always look for.

No, we didn’t evaluate other options. We had researched this tool and then chose it for our requirements.

There were also other vendors on our shortlist and, as I’ve mentioned, scalability was one of the main reasons because we are growing faster than ever. The data is growing by TBs and TBs, so I think it was one of the big reasons and secondly, I think if we also look at the market, the rating for TDM is very good. I think it was a unilateral decision that TDM should be one of the final products that we should go for.

We reviewed different products, like Informatica TDM or IBM Optim. Finally, we decided on the CA TDM solution. This looks like a very Agile product that continues to be enhanced.

Inside the TDM, there are data makers, or different kind of sub-applications. Now they are moving to a single web application interface on TDM.

We did look at SiSoft in Costa Rica, but I do not even know the names of the others, because I was not directly involved with those. I know that we selected SiSoft as an option because of their experience.

We chose CA because of their experience.

We didn't have a solution in place before we selected this software. Automation testing was new and as soon as the automation tests started being developed, the need for data came very quickly. I think being able to locate help and people that know how to do implementation and setup when you get stuck brought us to this solution. At some point, you need to decide to either build or buy.