erwin Evolve by Quest Reviews

I mostly use it for enterprise architectural work, doing business process modeling and high-level strategic modeling with its capabilities. 

Others in our company are using it for IT infrastructure, such as aligning requirements to system solutions; that kind of architectural work. 

We don't use it much for the data architecture capability it has. That's actually where erwin started, it's their strength. They're one of the premier companies in that space. I'm not a database architect, but I'm aware that it's a great product in that space. We just haven't used it much for that.

We just upgraded to the 2018 version. We were using the 2015 version, the Casewise Suite and Evolve. So we're a bit behind.

It's helped us advance in our capabilities to perform model-based systems engineering, and also model-based enterprise architecture; in those two domains. By placing the data and the metadata into a model, which is what the tool does, you gain the abilities for linkages between different objects in the model, linkages that you cannot get on paper or with Visio or PowerPoint. That is a huge discriminator.

In addition, the solution’s web platform tells us which insights have been accessed the most. That provides us with clues as to what are the most important things to our stakeholders, so we can better adapt to their needs.

I use the automatic diagramming features a lot. When one of erwin's company reps showed that to me a couple of years ago, I was stunned. That saves hours of work in diagramming. That capability is something I have not seen in other suppliers' tools. That really helps too with when your data is up to date. The tool will then automatically generate the updated diagram based on the data, so you know it's always the most current version. You can't do that in things like Visio and PowerPoint. They're static snapshots of a diagram at some point in time. This is live and dynamic.

There are two valuable features. One is the ease of use with configuration management control. From what I understand, there are other solutions out there and they can be really problematic. It's just seamless with the Casewise tool.

The other feature is the Evolve product. I have not seen capabilities for web-sharing and interaction with the architecture from any other supplier. It's a great capability and I've been promoting that for a number of years. Currently, my colleagues don't yet use Evolve to experiment and suggest changes that can be published back into our live model. That's a cultural thing that we're trying to get people used to. We want them to move away from PowerPoint and Visio and work in the model. That's a great feature that will provide a lot of benefits. But it's a cultural problem that we're trying to overcome.

The collaborative web modeling capability has helped somewhat with the speed and quality of designs, but because of that cultural barrier, again, it hasn't reached its full potential. I've used it a lot to show things to executives and to provide a link to them so they can review the models. People see the value, but what I'm not getting, at the developer/peer-reviewer level, is people to really collaborate. But for sharing information with project managers and executives, we've had some successes there.

erwin EA provides superior, exemplar capabilities to scale across all stakeholders. The product is incredibly flexible. It comes with tons of capabilities, but you can also customize the tool if you need to. 

The fact that admin tasks are performed through a desktop application means it's very easy to use. That works quite well. It's very easy to administer.

We have been using EA Agile for about five years now.

It's been very stable.

I think it scales well. We've done some looking into the licensing and how many people can use it. It has good scalability features. It can support multiple users with different levels of access, from "full access," to "some access," to "read-only access," so it gets to a wide user community.

We have between 50 to 100 users. They include administrators, enterprise architects, systems architects, and we have project management, executives, and business stakeholders who are looking at the read-only portions of the data. We build the enterprise systems architectures and those stakeholders have the ability, with read-only, to look into the latest, up-to-date diagrams.

Our use is corporate-wide — and we're a big company with around 90,000 employees. We don't use it extensively throughout the corporation; it's used in a couple of domain areas. We are trying to expand the usage of it a bit.

For deployment of the solution and its maintenance, the people involved are not full-time on those tasks, but there are somewhere between two and four people who have a hand in the actual deployment of the system.

The support personnel are fantastic. Just the other day I was on the phone again with one of the support personnel who was giving me some advice on how to do something I was trying to accomplish. They have great support.

We used the erwin Data Modeler tool in the past, before we went to the EA tool. We went with EA to perform enterprise architecture and systems architecture work in a modeling solution. That's the driving reason to use these kinds of high-end tools.

This was done about 10 years ago, and I didn't lead that study. A friend of mine did. I do remember that they looked at Magic Tour, Rhapsody, and Systems Enterprise Architect.

erwin EA Agile is very easy to use. It has great web-sharing of architecture to many different stakeholders, so that you can socialize your architecture.

One of the things I was most interested in, in the 2018 version we just deployed, is the pan and zoom capability. I haven't tried it yet because we just got it running yesterday.

We have not used a lot of the solution's integration capabilities with other tools in our system, yet. What we have done is a lot of Excel import and export, and that works fantastically. I've done some experimentation with the Visio import and export, and that is helpful. What we haven't done yet is direct connections with other modeling tools or our other systems of record, but it's something we are looking into. With the Excel importing, the "up to date" part is the challenge. If we had a real-time integration, we could keep things up to date for whatever kinds of change points we had. With Excel, it is more that you have to export from one system then import it to another, so it's better for data that doesn't change that often.

In terms of the comprehensiveness of the data when importing from Excel, it's fine. You can get a lot of data from Excel and bring it in. As an example, well over a year ago we were going through a major merger. People were collecting information in Excel about all the interfaces between all the systems, theirs and ours, and how we were going to reconcile them. I was able to take that spreadsheet, that had 250 integrations in it, and rapidly, in less than a half an hour, bring them into the model and start showing diagrams that visualize that data. That was huge.

We do a lot of system interface analysis. We have about 40 systems that we rolled up and manage at the CIO level, in the office where I work. We do system analysis: system coordination, systems that are being retired, systems that are merging together, systems that are consuming other capabilities resulting in an older system being shut down. We organize, manage, and administer the funding that flows to those 40 different systems. We use the tool to model and analyze the decisions we make about those 40 systems. Those kinds of decisions are helped with the analysis we do and the modeling that we do.

We also have an associated group that works on the workflow process side. I helped them convert a lot of their old Visio work to erwin EA. That took a lot of man-hours.

We use it as a hosted solution. erwin hosts the servers that provide the product.

With Visio, you simply get a picture, a diagram. It doesn't have any intelligence behind it and you can't really do any collaboration. The collaboration that we do use with erwin EA is like a check-in/check-out-type of functionality where, if I'm working on a diagram, my colleague can only see the diagram but he can't change it. He's locked out while I'm working on it.

Because work is in a single, hosted location, everyone is hitting the same image. That's helped us a lot in being able to share work and exchange ideas and thoughts. We can make changes and still have it all in one central repository. That's helped us a lot because we're a geographically distributed group of people.

Before erwin, we would have had to send giant files back and forth. We had to send PDFs and printed copies of things. To work in Visio you really have to exchange files: You update a file, send it to a person, have them look at it, mark it up, scan it, and PDF it back to you. It was not very good.

For me, the most valuable features are the system analytics and system capabilities, the modeling, and being able to diagram-out system interfaces.

And in equal measure, on the process side, the workflow side gives us the ability to configure a group of workflow models and drill down into supporting documentation. And on that side of the business, they also use erwin Evolve a lot, the web deployment publishing capability. They're very heavily dependent on that. I like that as well, but I'm not nearly as dependent on it. Our audience just doesn't consume the output in that way very much. But I think it's a fantastic way to publish what you do in the tool.

Its flexibility and scalability to support all stakeholders in making informed decisions are powerful capabilities. I can send images in the PDF form, along with the relationships and the associations that are a very important part of what we do. It can show what is affected and what is impacted by a certain change in one area of the system architecture or enterprise architecture. I can very quickly draw those issues and topics to the fore.

Our client likes to see things on PowerPoint slides, so we often have to publish things out to an image, and put that in a PowerPoint. erwin EA has that functionality.

I've tried to socialize and evangelize the Evolve web deployment, so that our client would understand how easily they could interface with it. But given the defense-related and government-related environment that we're in, that isn't always something that they take advantage of.

Also, the fact that admin tasks are performed by desktop applications has been done fairly well in the solution. I'm able to turn people on and off within it. We've had people come and go from our environment. I'm able to configure them, set them up, get them using it, and get them on their feet fairly easily.

The solution's integration capabilities with other tools in our system has not been all that well done. We have people who use ARIS, who use System Architect and, of course, Visio. erwin has very limited ways to import and export from those kinds of tools. It's not a very easy thing to do. It hasn't blocked anything that we've tried to accomplish, but I can tell you that we are about to begin discussions with the larger defense-functional areas about coming to a common tool. A lot of people use the System Architect already. Deployment of that seems to be more widely accepted. They pay a lot of attention to industry reviews. erwin is in the lower-left quadrant, as being a niche player, although I don't think of erwin as a niche player. But it isn't easy to use erwin EA to interact with other tools, in my experience.

In addition, a little feature that would be helpful to me, although it is incredibly down-in-the-weeds, tool-specific, would be the ability to more easily copy the style of one object to another object of the same type. Right now, there's a way of doing that, but to me it's more complicated than it should be. And it's more complicated than other tools I have used. If I have a system object, I would like to be able to configure it in bold print and specify the size and colors, etc. And I would like to copy that same style to any other system objects so that they look the same. There is just not an easy way to do that in erwin. I brought it up with erwin early on but I don't know where they went with it. They showed me how to do it and the way it currently works but it just seemed so much more difficult than a simple couple of clicks: a "Copy Style" type of thing.

I've been using it for just about three years.

It's a very stable product in terms of its performance. There are little design elements that I should list for them as suggestions at some point. But once we got it stabilized and learned the tricks of the trade and how to use it properly, there were no problems with stability.

It has easily scaled to what we want. If you buy a license, you get full access. You can have as many users as you wish. I have no issues or concerns with scalability.

In terms of support, I couldn't be happier with Grace, erwin's support rep who provides us with fantastic support. We had great support from their field consultant, Brian Bush, as well. He was a superstar getting us all trained and he's been very helpful to me over the three years when I've needed some help on certain ideas.

When the surveys come out, I give Grace five stars. She's been very good, and so is Brian.

That's their standard tech support. It was nothing that we had to pay anything for. I got my questions answered when stuck or lost or there something that I didn't know how to get around. 

I give the support five out of five stars. They've been really helpful.

We used ProVision. We switched to erwin because The Department of Defense wanted us to switch to it. They wanted something with better support of The Department of Defense architecture framework. ProVision did not have that. Erwin has very capable and validated support of the DoDAF.

We had a consultant who did the setup for us. It was completely on their shoulders to get us up and configured. We simply have a desktop tool, a remote access link, that gets us to the server. We log on and we're off and running. It's been working very well. It wasn't complicated at all because I didn't have to get involved with the installation and the setup at the server-side. We pay a fee for that service so we don't have to have anyone on our side who knows all about the server setup.

Deployment, including training, took a week. We trained in about four days and then went back to our workstations and off we went.

The strategy was to have our groups, one in DC, one in West Virginia, and the one where I work in Columbus, Ohio be able to work collectively and collaboratively. That's what we are able to do. That was one of the big criteria.

The cost is something like $15,000, per license. But I haven't looked at those numbers in three years. It was over $100,000 to initially set everything up and get it all configured.

In addition to the standard fees there's the hosting cost. That's something like $1,000 a month.

We tried many options. We had a whole project of analysis of different tools and Erwin checked all the boxes. We looked at something called In2itive. That and System Architect were among top alternatives. We just found erwin to be the most suitable. It won out in several ways, but we thought that the web deployment — the Evolve capability — also looked really strong. We felt that worked well.

Every one of these solutions has an edge or a boundary to its capabilities. There are little things, quirks, that I would like to see erwin do differently. But every one of these tools has something that people either embrace or wish was easier to do. None of them is a dream to use. You have to know what you're doing and be able to get around the limitations.

Start with the basics and get a fundamental understanding of how the suite is configured. There is a modeling suite, an object analysis suite — the object window — and the analytical tools.

I love the web deployment, the Evolve capability. That is really nicely done. The ability to collaborate across geographically distributed installations seems to be working well for us. I wish it had more API-type interface exchanges with other tools that made it much easier to transfer things to and from something like System Architect, and not to have to go through a lot of man-hours to recreate what we needed to recreate. But otherwise, it has done the job for us and continues to do so.

We have five users, with three of them being power users. And for the maintenance and administration of the tool, it's me and another gentleman in West Virginia who mostly deal with things like that. We don't have any plans to extend usage beyond those people. If anything goes wacky on the server, we just get erwin people involved.

I give it a seven out of 10 because there are that I'd love to see it do more easily.

We use it for the registration of any IT solution. This solution is now linked to our CMDB (our technical asset management database). We also use it for its business capabilities support, e.g., business subjects or business data used by each application to understand what we are doing with solutions and trying to rationalize it as much as possible for our entire worldwide team.

erwin is for all users and the chief distributor of the web interface. From the admin side, we are using the back-end of erwin to try and do data modeling.

People use this solution for many IT functions. It can be an IT business partner looking for IT solutions in other countries, a project manager or architect looking to implement a solution, or IT leaders getting KPIs on a report.

We are using their SaaS version hosted by Azure. Therefore, we are using the latest version.

We use erwin Evolve to publish to the website. This allows us to enable publishing our website using parameterisation features. In a very fast, quick way, we can publish a table or chart onto a website.

This is the first time that we have a central repository in our company where we can see and look at all the legacy applications which are used to serve the world. We are able to consolidate all our new solutions/technologies and plan some standards in our company.

Its reports show our IT landscape and we can better understand how technology is communicating.

It's taking the place more and more of our daily usage, as a way to consume information since it's more concentrated. While I don't think it will become critical, it will become more useful on a daily basis in order to plan and follow IT transformation.

The most valuable feature for us is the visibility to open and enable notifications to the web interface for users that we want to prevent. Therefore, we are able to maintain their data as they are spread out across the world, and it's consolidated into one singular repository. This is necessary to enable people who are not in the same location to access IP data in a very simple way using the web interface. The second reason it is quite useful - anybody in the company can consult and access the data.

It is quite user-friendly.

We are also using erwin DT for integration to a wider ecosystem. It's a way to be able link erwin with the CMDB, which is technology with a layer to a server, etc. So, we automate and link with the assets or technical components of each server to solutions.

The web interface could be more user-friendly. 

When you are publishing in the IT landscape, there is no real way right now to have a template that can alter the automated CS. 

The way that we are using it for application management, we have several KPIs. We want to follow and monitor them regarding a number of solutions. We cannot calculate this today. We would like real-time calculations along with the KPIs in order to improve the user experience. We would like the tool to be able to display this, not only as signals, but as charts. 

One year.

This is not a critical solution. We have faced some challenges and issues with the tool, especially in the beginning. Many of these have been solved. It is now stable regarding the needs that we have.

One person is required for maintenance and deployment of this solution. We have a developer who does the development and enhancement of the product. As the enterprise architect, I do the design and deployment.

Anybody from the company has access to the information; it is free internally. There are 1,000 users from IT in our group. So, everyone is not accessing the tool on a daily basis. Approximately 60 percent of the staff is getting onto the tool on a weekly basis in order to dig into the information. 

There is the willingness to really support the customer. However, it can be improved to become more efficient. Overall, I am quite satisfied with it.

We previously used MEGA HOPEX. We switched for two main reasons:

1. The cost. 
2. The complexity of media texts which was making it really difficult to maintain and share with other architects. 

In the end, MEGA HOPEX was really powerful tool. However, if you're not spending your days on it, you can quickly lose how to do things on it. 

I did the initial setup. The deployment was very fast.

The initial setup is quite fast compared to other tools on the market. After a day or two day of training, it's quite easy to really get into the tool to manage and develop it.

Each time we want to get into more complex features. We need to dig in to understand them. Their user guides for this can be improved.

Our implementation strategy took a big longer. The way we did it, we ensured to involve all our key stakeholders who were contributing data during the design phase. So, they were able to influence the way we were designing the data modeling and so on.

To ensure that the stakeholders were aware and familiar with the tool's usage, we did a trial version. When looking at the trial version, we considered whether we could add some capabilities. For example, could we adapt the user interface to be more user-friendly? Also, adding integration of our solution to the CMDB.

On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are 50,000 euro. There are no additional costs because we are on a SaaS model.

We evaluated about 10 product besides erwin, such as MEGA HOPEX, Signavio, BiZZdesign, and LeanIX. 

We didn't have the perfect design on the paper before starting to implement it. We just started to implement it, then tried to use it. It is better to try and hope than wait and miss out.

Adoption is not connected to any tool with enterprise architecture. The capacity of people to feel the benefit of enterprise activities will be from going through education and a commitment on behalf of key people. 

I see a willingness in the company to add new features. Though, I don't feel they are pushing the solution hard enough.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

I've primarily used the solution for conceptual logical modeling.

The ability to share and collaborate on the solution is its most valuable feature.

The solution needs to focus on allowing for more integrations.

The solution is stable.

We've had no issues surrounding the scalability of the solution. We have about eight users on it right now. We don't plan to increase usage at this time.

Technical support is good.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

We had an integrator handle the initial setup.

We did not evaluate other products. We just like erwin, so we decided to go with it.

We are currently considering the public cloud deployment model using AWS.

It's a good product. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is as data modeling tool. 

Enterprise Architecture improved our organization by giving clarity over the data that is available.

I would like to see an improvement in the output of the solution.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good, but so far we haven't used the shared version. We use the single stand-alone version. We have only three users, and they are all data architects. We don't use any other staff for maintenance. We also don't plan to increase our usage soon.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup was really straightforward and the deployment was done within one day. 

My advice to others would be to have this solution on your shortlist if you are looking for a data modeling tool. I will rate it an eight out of ten. I would like to some additional features, like data lineage, included in the next release to make it a ten out of ten. 

Our primary use case is to develop industry models to support our consulting business.

This solution helped to jump start our EA (Enterprise architecture) and BPM practices.

The most valuable features for us are impact analysis, where I can easily visualize the impact of change.

I feel that the UML drawing capability needs to be improved. 

EA Agile only support ArchiMate and BPMN drawing. It does not support UML notation and can only import UML drawing prepared in other platform as graph object. It'll be much better if it can suppory natively all UML notation and standard.

Data modeling for data warehousing solutions, including forward engineering and reverse engineering for OLTP and dimensional models.

Creating and publishing DW models.

Forward and reverse engineering.

Business process modelling. 

• Overall model usability
• Model formatting and layout
• Logical model creation
• Physical model creation
• Forward-engineering/DDL creation
• Standards creation and reuse
• Model and database comparison tools
• Metadata interchange with other tools
• Support for a broad range of data sources from relational to big data to the Cloud.

The ERwin tool helped to reduce the rate of design and deployment errors and
increased the ease of validation. It also assists our customers in deploying our large data models/semantic models.

There might be improvement required to better support some of the MPP databases for non-relational data structures and NoSQL databases.

More than five years.

Did not encounter any issues.

No issues.

No issues.

Customer Service:

Very good.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

No.

The ERwin setup is very simple.

The implementation was done in-house.

ERwin setup is very simple and straight.