Informatica Axon Reviews

Some of my clients use it as a front end tool for the data quality governing process.

The solution allows the complete governance process, starting from the data quality, those definitions, and it can get the data quality in the EDC.

I would like to see more API integration to have the capability to build a report using other third party reporting tools allowing things to be streamlined.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is a stable solution, we do not see any kind of issues. When we do find issues we have to go to Informatica to get help, I would say it is not completely matured.

The technical support is very good, they have resolved any issue we have had.

The installation is simple.

You can purchase licenses for this solution at different intervals. For example, annually or every three years. They recently changed their terms for licensing and now it is more flexible.

When choosing this solution you need to identify a path by asking yourself a few questions. Where are we going to start? What are the sources? What are the business pain points in terms of the data governance process?  Are you looking for metrics in terms of streamlining the whole process? Are we looking mainly in the bigger lineage? Are we looking to build reference data? We need to identify those areas and prioritize what is more important. Start small and then eventually add more sources, do not commit too much at the beginning you will not be able to be successful. Start thinking in terms of what are the business pain points currently. What would be the first result that you feel would make the business happier and then adjust accordingly, you can build on it further later.

I rate Informatica Axon a nine out of ten.

We use Axon for controlled and governed data sharing as well as for the policies and principles from a data governance perspective. Our use case was for an airport company and we used Axon in tandem with Datacat Log EDC. We customize data search and data sharing. We have a partnership with Informatica. 

The management of the policy is very useful. The ability to customize data search and data sharing is useful. The solution has all the necessary features. 

The GUI needs to be a little more user-friendly and appealing. Salesforce, for example, although in a different category, is very user-friendly and I think if they were to include some of the Salesforce principles, it would be helpful. Informatica needs to do a better job in terms of educating users. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is stable and dependable as long as we keep an eye on the servers. 

The solution is scalable. 

The support process needs to be more agile. 

The initial setup took a few days. It wasn't very complex but there were some initial challenges because we were trying to setup the Informatica Data catalog, EDC, at the same time. The deployment was reasonable but not very smooth. We have around 300 users.

Licensing costs are generally on the higher side.

Collibra was a solution we evaluated but Informatica was the final choice.

I rate this solution seven out of 10.

We primarily use it as an enterprise-level firewall. 

I have to incorporate my particular data, schema into Axon. I can do it in two to three ways. Either I have to do a bulk upload feature in Axon, and I have to create an Excel sheet and I have to incorporate all the columns, all the attributes, all the asset columns, and their definitions, and everything into the Excel sheet and then I have to upload it. That is a manual process, and an SME has to be required to accomplish that feature.

The feature of auto-onboarding of the assets, enterprise assets via EDC is good. EDC will scan the data within the technical metadata, and then you can associate that technical metadata, and then Axon can consume that technical metadata and associate the business metadata to that technical metadata. Following some Axon systems, we have to create some systems to associate that technical metadata, as there has to be some logical hierarchy that has to be followed. It allows for some flexibility. You can have related features like policies, business glossaries, or maybe some regulatory compliance feature policies, et cetera, as well as governance.

If you have a DQ rule, data quality rule, on any particular subject area or any particular column, then one cannot create directly a rule in Axon. It has to ingest the technical tool we create in IDQ then into the Axon.

Informatica Axon itself is not a very complete tool. It's highly dependent on Enterprise Data Catalog and IDQ. Blending data catalog and IDQ makes it complete. When I say blending, I mean in the sense they have internal plugins, internal listeners. Axon has internal listeners for reading EDC, as well as IDQ components. EDC is Enterprise Data Catalog, which's a metadata catalog from Informatica.

I would like to have broader connectivity. Axon currently is limited. It cannot connect to any other application. It does not have any connectors for other applications. I want more applications to have connectivity to Axon. Axon should create more plugins for connecting to other applications, which are currently dominating the market.

The solution still is a bit manual in its functionality. We want t to be more automation-driven.

The solution needs to be more resilient.

I've been working with the solution for the last three years.

Currently, what happens in a week or two, the server goes for a toss because Axon still uses PostgreSQL as its database. They have all the services and they, basically, fetch all the backend tables. All the tables are in the PostgreSQL database. That is also a kind of constraint for Axon as PostgreSQL nowadays is a solution that no one uses. That's why the server always goes for a toss and we have to restart the server. They have to make it more resilient. The resilience is missing. 

For example, in EDC they have multiple nodes. When one node goes down, you can still use the backup node. You have to just configure it. In Axon, this does not work like that. They have to make it more vigilant instead of having to restart the cycle and again restart all the services, pre-configured services to get it up and running. That thing is a bit scary sometimes as, over in product staging and dev, it works, however, for production, if it goes down and we need our scanning and some processes running, then it's pretty tough.

Technical support, nowadays, is a bit of a let-down. They will reply once you raise a ticket. They normally categorize their ticket as a P1, P2, or P3. A P1 ticket is for production for the first failure and the P2 and P3 are for normal failures. They reply promptly, however, the response is not very good. Earlier, GCS, Global customer support used to make sense and be helpful. However, nowadays, their quality of service is really going down. The person that comes to attend the ticket is often not very equipped, or not technically not very capable.

Therefore, you need to have a regular follow-up. Normally what they do is not solve the problem. They will ask you, source this, the source that, and then send some kind of justification instead of trying to solve the issue. Sometimes the client is not technically equipped to answer their ticket. They want to see some logs which get embedded. They ask businesses for those logs. Then, the business has to log into Unix, find a particular folder, and access that backlog. These become a challenge for our business as there are not that many Unix-friendly people. In any case, it lengthens the process and draws out the resolution.. 

When I started, I was using version 6.3 and now it's 7.2.

The solution is on-prem in the sense that it's a web browser. It's browser-based so that you can use it on your desktop for unblocking your firewall. It's an enterprise firewall, you can deploy it. Since it's browser-based, it does not matter where the server is. The server can be on-prem and it can be deployed on an iPaaS service or other infrastructure at your service.

Informatica has created the Axon brand in such a way that it's kind of an interesting strategy for them. Once you have Axon you cannot buy it as a standalone product. You will always have to buy IDQ and EDC. That's a sales strategy. However, they really need to improve on their customer support. I really would advise Informatica to work on support. They really need to catch up on this, and they really need to add more qualified engineers to their customer support team to meet the client's expectations.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I would like to have the solution in one product and technical support needs to be better. 

The product is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Informatica Axon is easy to deploy and takes six months to install. We would need five people for the solution's deployment. 

Informatica Axon is expensive. 

I wouldn't recommend the tool to small companies due to price and integration. I would rate the tool a seven out of ten. 

The solution is typically a bridge between business and IT. You use Axion as a tool for governance within the organization. The business people could use this tool to understand what information is being entered by IT. For example, if I'm an IT guy and if I'm using something called a column name or a table name which could be pretty technical out there, I just say, for example, BT_DT. I understand what BT_DT is, which, in this case, is birth date. That's the table name. However, the business side wouldn't really understand this. Therefore, I could actually tag BT_DT as birth date in Axon and I could relate it to this particular column and then the business side can use it from there. 

Apart from that, you could define your data governance policies, your workflows, who's going to approve the data, who's going to use the data, and who should be consuming it. It can assure that data shouldn't get out of certain boundaries. 

What I like about Axon is that typically, with all tools, you will find that there are certain limitations when it comes to the user level. However, with Axon, the limitations are not there. You could have certain people getting into Axon and things like reading, writing, or editing the policies. However, apart from those people, everyone else in the organization can still view it, so it's not restricted. There are certain people who could just edit the tool or administer the tool. That said, everyone in the organization can view what is actually happening and what they could benefit from it. That's how collaborative data governance comes into the picture with Axon. 

It has got nice integrated quality dashboards as well. 

It has the BPMN enabled or BPMN compliant workflows embedded inside it, which is great.

The solution is stable.

It doesn't need too much memory. It's being used by the business as well as the IT guys in tandem. There is something called a Marketplace that is also available. Now, when you publish something, it's is available for all the consumers out there to use within the organization. 

If I wanted to improve something, it would be the way we import or the way we design the policies. Right now, although they offer some templates, I would want more templates available to be imported.

I've been using the solution for two years or so.

The solution is very stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

When you talk about scalability, this is not a very, very heavy tool. It is a tool that is typically going to fetch all the data and everything from the governance perspective. It's not actually a memory-hogging application as such.

In my previous company, there were about 100 uses on the solution.

With Informatica technical support has never been a problem. They are fantastic. If you reach out to them and raise a case, they get onto it very quickly.

We previously used an in-house solution. We did not use a different third-party solution.

The installation is okay if you follow the steps that they have provided in the guide. If a new user does that, that should be fine, however, you need a dedicated person to do that. You cannot just click through. There are various components to it. You need a specialist to do that. That said, the guides are pretty comprehensive. If you follow those, that should be fine.

In our environment, the setup was done within a day's time or a few hours - maybe four to five hours.

You need knowledge of the underlying components, such as Linux, or your big data environment, et cetera. That's where specialists can be brought in. It's recommended you take advantage of them if you can.

The license is a yearly one that can be renewed for a consecutive year. You can actually go with a three-year license as well, which will give you a better discount.

While our deployment is on-premise, you can deploy it on any cloud of your choice.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations.

Informatica Axon is based on the needs of business people. A business analyst or salesperson would be able to make the most of its features. It is important to have three tools for a successful data governance project. These are Informatica Axon, a data catalog, and data quality. They need to be integrated, whether it is an on-premise or cloud project. The purpose of Informatica Axon is to help us manage our technical metadata and business metadata. Technical metadata is information about our source systems, such as what type of system they are, for example, Oracle, SQL, Snowflake, Cloud; and what data is being extracted from them such as table columns or source systems. Business metadata is information about our data, such as its meaning or purpose. When it comes to business metadata, we can mention that starting from the roles, responsibilities, policies, processes, and whatever the complete organization follows. We can bring all these business metadata, and we can map or tag each technical metadata and business metadata using glossaries. Informatica Axon could be a one-stop shop where we can understand the data. If we want to understand the data, we need to know where it comes from, whether this data can be trusted, whether the data quality is good, and whether this data has access to everyone or whether we are restricting the user privileges. These are the things we'll be considering when using Informatica Axon.

The best thing about Informatica Axon is that it integrates with the Electronic Data Capture and the Axon system. We have policies and processes in place to ensure that everything runs smoothly. However, it's important to work closely with the business person to ensure that all their needs are met. We need to coordinate with the business team as well because the inputs have to be communicated from both the end IT and the business team as well.

The AC integration between EDC and Informatica Axon has room for improvement for the on-premises version, but that has been taken care of with the cloud.

The stability and the integration of the solution have room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is not stable.

We can only achieve scalability on the cloud. However, if we want scalability on-premises, this can be a tricky process that takes time because we need to increase the number of code, and CPU.

The tech support team is very good. They have a brilliant team knowledgeable on whatever solution we need help with. The technical support team always tries to find a solution or workaround themselves before asking for help from others. If the solution is on the cloud, the support is quicker, but on-premises, it may get delayed because the technical support team needs to apply the emergency bug fix.

The initial setup on-premises is straightforward. Setup for EDC is a little difficult when compared to versions 10.4 and 10.5. The major architecture change in the enterprise data catalog made it easy to set up.

We only have to run the installer and follow the instructions. There is no deployment process. Whether we will have the solution in dev, UAT, and SAP. There will be only two types, non-prod, and prod. There is no manual setup. We need to do whatever we are doing in non-prod and prod as well. There is no migration with the EDC tool or data quality.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

There are three types of users, super admin, admin, and web users. The number of total users depends upon the license. Informatica Axon provides a license based on the number of users we have.

The best data governance tool on the market is Informatica Axon. Axon EDC, Axon Data Catalog, and the data quality are the very best combination for cloud for data governance.

The features that I have found most valuable are, first of all, that it comes as part of this whole bundle of Informatica tools. So if you've been implementing Informatica MDM across a business, you'd often find it comes with it. It's been thrown in as a sweetener. The adoption of it is often the challenge because as part of your MDM project, governance is seen as something beyond the MDM and is often restrictive. So this tool actually, for the first time, when you talk to data governance teams, gives a holistic view of what a data governance team can do with this tool.

Collecting a knowledge repository, creating a business glossary and visualizing the data lineage are quite fundamental as part of your data governance team's work. Once they see it in Axon, it becomes relatively easy for them to visualize what they have to do. Otherwise, it is often a challenge for them to grasp what their role is and what are they supposed to do. Informatica Axon provides that visualization which helps a lot.

In terms of what could be improved, they need to create a rules repository. Business rules for the attributes that you have, keeping them in that central repository, and governance of them is something which Axon is lacking a bit. The Informatica Data Quality tool actually caters to that, so that's probably why they have not built that up in the Axon, but it is definitely something that can be built in to this product, as well.

I have been using Informatica Axon for about four years.

Informatica Axon is stable.

Informatica Axon is scalable.

I have had experience with their technical support. It is definitely there, as in it's quite robust and is a mature tool. You do get enough technical support from Infomatica while implementing it.

The initial setup is purely straightforward.

In terms of price, Informatica products are all a bit pricier than the rest of the market. But if you want to go for products from that stable, I think you'll have to pay a price.

If you have an Informatica installation already, be it IDQ or Informatica MDM, then Axon is the right choice. It's a no-brainer to have Axon.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Informatica Axon an eight.