erwin Evolve by Quest Room for Improvement

ScottLawson - PeerSpot reviewer
Director IT Architecture at QAD

We tried their collaborative web modeling and we used it with a few people but we tend to not use that piece. We tend to collaborate with the people and then my team of architects draws up the diagram using the modeling tool. We then iterate through those. I would like to use it, but it was a little clunky when they first rolled it out.

Overall, it's more about the company having room for improvement. What they need to do is to consolidate more of their products. For example, I was just looking and I couldn't figure out what erwin DT is. It's on the website but it would help if they could put information together and make it more clear as to what products they have and how they work with other things.

I hear them talking in the support forums and, when I talk to the representative, they say they're going to do a bunch of stuff but it seems the progress is slow. The changes they need to make are to take their old, legacy product, which we use, and focus a lot on it so they can transform it into a modern cloud tool so that we have fewer little pieces to deal with.

They could also fix their security model. It's very confusing to get new people onto the tool and to make sure that your content isn't being exposed to the wrong people.

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it_user1276623 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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.

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MG
Senior Business Process Management Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

There is room for improvement in the modeling. They are working on it, but we need a web-modeling tool.

They have improved the search engine a little bit but it can always be improved more. The more data you put inside it, the more you want to use it. 

At some point, it would also be helpful to have a better audit trail.

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March 2024
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DF
Global Enterprise Architect and Catalogue of Business Solutions Manager at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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Jose Mejia - PeerSpot reviewer
ETL Developer at INGENIERIA 21 SAS

erwin Evolve by Quest could have additional features to manage the architecture of enterprises and businesses.

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JM
IT Director at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like it to be easier to make changes in development/testing and then deploy them into production more easily; especially when you have multiple web servers. It would be nice to make a change and then have it propagate to the production servers in a more automated fashion.

I wouldn't mind seeing some improvements in the way Communicator for Word formats the text when data from the model is merged with a word template.

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it_user570936 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Governance, Sr. Mgr at Lytx Inc.


  1. Support post Relational modeling styles – this might be solved for at a simple level with the ability to design and save ‘template’ entities with a pre-designed generic attribute set, including characteristics like PK, datatypes, nullability. Could be a grey’ed out menu option that is add on functionality. All these styles have both a logical and physical aspect. Ensembles might be solved with Subject areas. Seems that they are gaining use and showing up in conferences.

    1. Data Vault Modeling

    2. Ensemble Modeling

    3. Anchor Modeling

  2. Add some ability to do conditional Visualization on the models and in reports (some ideas) – maybe as a specialized Theme or Diagram or Display

    1. Automatic entity colorization for rev eng volumetrics – Red large, Yellow Mid, Green small tables. Either custom banding or simple math by ERwin.

    2. Managed conditional display If … ‘pick a characteristic’ = ‘x’ then … like (If Schema Owner = ‘API’ then Theme = ‘API’)

    3. KPIs on Workgroup Repository more graphic – rather than just data reports. Counts of models, latest updates, license use, Portal use, Harvest errors. etc

  3. Assist model management with Lineage mapping impact notification when source models available for impact assessment in Workgroup.

    1. Either a notification on opening a model ‘Source model used in lineage mapping has changed – Would you like to see the changes – (then open Complete compare to assist importing changes)

    2. Ability to flag for cascade updates from Source to Target models – like we can do with Erwin template models (again with notification – ‘Source model used in lineage mapping has changes – would you like to apply the changes?’

  4. On upgrade– if the older models in the Workgroup Repository need to be upgraded, allow for a cascade update to newest version through the libraries. I just went through this with the latest Portal upgrade. Harvest processes were erroring out with a weird message and all I had to do was open and resave some of the older models. But it wasn’t intuitive and since the Workgroup repository includes older models, and the library is getting bigger – being able to just refresh old models to the new version of Erwin would be a great help.

  5. Ability to schedule Reverse Engineer compares (using RE templates) to audit Production models

    1. Report on what models need changing

  6. Add ability to launch erwin (get model) from Portal. This would help the teams doing reviews. Sometimes they have to get into the library tree bar to see where the model is to get the correct one from Workgroup.

  7. Make Schema/Owner an option to show in Explorer bar for individual data models. Add ability to add to name like you can in the graphic view.

  8. Provide APIs that would allow for metadata harvesting to build trend histories and research data marts.

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Asish Sahu - PeerSpot reviewer
SPM at Infosys

Evolve is primarily focused on the entity's licenses diagrams, but it would be nice if erwin could integrate case development, so that it shows the ER diagram plus certain inputs on the use cases and how the data is used. That deviates somewhat from the overall scope, so maybe they could call it a different product. 

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it_user570531 - PeerSpot reviewer
President & CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

- Erwin could use better support for some NoSQL databases, JSON and other non-relational data structures. Based on a discussion I had with a member of Erwin's technical team at a recent tradeshow, it appears that some of the most requested connectors will be part of a forthcoming upgrade in early 2017. We and our customers await that release with interest.

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PR
Independent Consultant at a tech consulting company with 1-10 employees

As we were trying to evaluate erwin Evolve, it was so rich in functionality that we'd get lost in the details. We didn't know where to start. After, we did get started, then we would break away and take on our daily activities. However, when we went back to go look at the solution, we couldn't remember, "How did I get here? What did I do?" Unfortunately, because it took us so long and we were having so much trouble, we couldn't do a complete evaluation to make it into our budget cycle.

It could have had a more streamlined navigation. It seemed that when you went to the explorer panel, there were just so many different ways of doing the work that I could not remember, "How did I do this? How did I get to that point in that model to get back to it?" If I wanted to build a new one, where do I start? It just seemed like there was such a smorgasbord of ways of doing it that it was just overwhelming.

If there is a change to the data model, then it's not automatically reflected in erwin Evolve. You have to go back and reattach it. That could be an issue in a database which has frequent changes. If erwin could find a way to simplify the navigation of getting into the meat of what you want to do, that would help a lot.

We use erwin Data Modeler most of the time. You could have a combo right there, where you see your process and the data right there. I thought that was pretty cool, but navigating to get to that point is what I found too cumbersome.

The integration capability is limited in that if you subsequently make a change in erwin Data Modeler to a table or data element, then it's not automatically reflected in erwin Evolve. This means that you would have to put in a task for erwin Data Modeler that every time they updated the data model to see if it is attached to erwin Evolve. It looked like a manual check to see, "Do I have to reattach that data model to that process because I've made a change?"

They could make it simpler for people to get into the tool and learn the tool, because it just seemed like the learning curve would be very steep.

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SS
Works at AIT Resource Group

Business process modelling. 

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RC
Chief Consultant at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

To a certain extent it's too easy to customize. If it had fewer features to model all kinds of architecture, it would be less complicated. Today's world values agile architecture, which focuses on a few different viewpoints or views of architecture work, like the business capability for example. If a portal can focus on this and have an easy user interface for the end-user, that would be better.

In the future, I would like to see integration with Archimate from The Open Group so that they can build business capability maps easily.

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FR
Director of the Division Consulting Business Process and Director of Enterprise Architecture at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

They need to develop Evolve's user experience. For example, MEGA has a useful client view that helps with impact analysis. MEGA provides information about the processes, services, infrastructure, and portfolio of applications in one central view. It lets you see the periphery and relationships among components. This view is impressive, and Evolve doesn't have it.

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it_user918228 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architecture Portfolio Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The solution needs to focus on allowing for more integrations.

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it_user552810 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Would like to see canonical modeling supported for web services.

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it_user1007448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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SD
Solution Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

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

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RC
Chief Consultant at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

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.

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Buyer's Guide
Enterprise Architecture Management
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about erwin by Quest , IDERA, SAP and others in Enterprise Architecture Management. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.