Everybody was evaluating other options. I got in trouble because I picked erwin after I had looked at 20 other things out there. Based on price and the size of our company, and the fact that we were brand-new to this whole endeavor, I didn't want to spend a fortune on something like Informatica, and have a master data management system.

Another big difference between Informatica and erwin is interfacing. Informatica is the top-of-the-line, upper-quadrant for MDM solutions, whereas erwin was more about just managing data and not necessarily manipulating it, moving it, interfacing with it, etc. That was the big difference. But erwin allowed us to get our footprint into it and really learn it. It was just the right solution at the right time.

When we were looking for a data catalog solution, we evaluated two or three other solutions. We evaluated data catalogs from both Alation and Collibra. We chose Erwin because we liked the overall solution that Erwin offered as compared to the other solutions.

One of the great features that Erwin provided was the mind map feature, which I did not see in any of the other tools that we used. A mind map gives a visual representation of how the data flows from tables to the metrics. Another great feature was being able to pull the metric definitions automatically from our reporting system. These were the two great positives for us, which I did not see in the other solutions when we did the proof of concept.

There are other vendor tools that do not have all of the capabilities, or they're trying to have the capabilities that Data Intelligence Suite has, but they are more complex to use or do not have the fast performance that the Data Intelligence Suite has.

There are many tools available for business term, management, codeset management, and data lineage, as well as metadata and mapping capabilities. 

Collibra was on the market prior to the Data Intelligence Suite, but since erwin's acquisition of the Data Intelligence Suite, erwin has brought their software along faster and incorporated more useful capabilities than some of the other vendor products. And some of the other products are limited because they have per-server costs, where erwin Data Intelligence Suite has not had that kind of cost. It can connect to the systems where the metadata resides and is able to ingest that metadata without additional costs.

The user-friendliness of the erwin tool made it much easier for users to adopt and desire to adopt because it was easier to ramp up and utilize and understand, compared to other tools that we looked at. Another difference was the completeness of the erwin tool versus having to work with tools that have some of the capabilities but not all of the capabilities. It was that "one stop-shopping" versus having to go to multiple tools.

The erwin interface was a good balance between technical and visual information compared to some other products that we looked at. The one that we switched to is a "glorified social" solution. It's about socializing the metadata and ways for people to search and create articles. They can also link and rate the veracity of a particular data source and write comments. 

Whereas with erwin, you can actually do things, like create your own lineage and mind maps. That is a really good feature because it is very helpful in seeing which column's tables are related. Also, you can flag them with "sensitive data" and other indicators. You can also customize your own features for the mind map. That was another very robust feature.

We did a couple of demos with data catalog-type tools, but they didn't have the complete package that we were looking for.

We evaluated Informatica but after we completed a cost-benefit analysis, we opted to not move forward with it.

We did evaluate other options. Even though erwin DI got a few extra points from the evaluation to coordinate with the erwin DM tool, we looked at other tools: Alteryx Connect, Collibra, DATUM, and Alation.

We did a whole pile of comparisons:

• Some of them were a bit more technical. 
• Some of them were integration points.
• Customization.
• The ability to schedule data harvests, because the less you have to do manually, the better.
• The ability to build your data lineages, then the simplicity of being able to look at those sorts of things to do searches. 

There were a different things along those lines that showed up in the comparison.

Erwin DI checked all the boxes for us. There are some things that they will grow into over time, but they had all of the basics for us.

Collibra scored a little higher on being able to integrate with SAP Financials. In fact, other products scored a bit higher with the SAP integration altogether, because with erwin DI, you need to buy a connection to do some of that.

For the connection with some of our scheduler tools, Alation was able to integrate with our UC4 scheduler. Right now, the EDGE tools don't.

For the most part, the functionalities were exactly the same, e.g., being able to do bulk uploads with high performance, Alteryx, Collibra, and erwin Data Intelligence Suite tied on a lot of things. However, erwin's pricing was cheaper than its competitors.

We evaluated four products and chose erwin. None of the competitors had this out-of-the-box automation feature. This was the biggest thing for me because we were looking for a tool which would allow us to do big scale automation. When I was searching for this tool, my responsibility was to find a tool that could be used in our development process and core automation product. We built the whole development lifecycle and everything. In our platform, we are doing some development around automation capabilities. Usually people have a manual process and they automate some parts of it, we went the other way. We were searching for automation capabilities and built our entire process around its capabilities to use them as much as we could. The key differentiator straight from the very beginning was the automation capability.

Other competitors were showing us that they had an API and we could use that to automate somewhere else. Automating somewhere else means to me that I need to create some other platform, server, etc., then maintain it with some other resources to just make it run. This was really not enough for us. In addition, erwin already had some written automation templates on the PoC level which showed us that they had something that worked. 

At the PoC level, erwin was able to convince the customer (us) that this is the automation, this is how it runs, and you can use it almost straightaway.

There are a number of competitors including Informatica, IBM, Collibra, and Alation; multiple organizations that offer similar features. But Erwin has an edge on metadata harvesting.

We tried Talend and a few other solutions. The primary benefit erwin offered was automation. It helps us reduce manual work. 

We are a public company who is obligated to open our purchasing to a wide range of providers. For example, we were in touch with Collibra, Informatica, and a few others.

erwin DG was less complex at first sight and cheaper than other solutions. It also fulfilled what we wanted 100 percent and was the right fit for the maturity of our governance process. It was not too big or small; it was in-between.