erwin Evolve Reviews

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.

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.

1. Reverse Engineering and Complete Compare – to document database design and test for changes over time across many different platforms (including Big Data platforms and cloud like SQL Azure)
2. Workgroup Repository collection of data models allows research across models without worry about platform incompatibilities and provides easy KPIs about corporate data assets
3. User Defined Properties – Command line links: allows flexibility to link different aspects of the data model to other tools to build better communication tools
4. Model templates (that are able to stay linked with the model) with filterable update capabilities
5. Ability to add images to the model – to help make them communicate better
6. ERwin Portal Links – allows easy 'Find' for information pages about the published ERwin Data Model
7. ERwin Portal scheduled model harvest – allows for a ‘hands-off’ maintenance capability for Administrator.

1. We are providing EU support with our custom development product - so I can now provide both a Logical unified view of the design as well as the more segmented Physical view as the databases are deployed to multiple servers for PII separation, failover Up-time, and performance.
2. Having the data element library itself available for all departments and teams, helps build promote understanding of shared corporate data assets
3. The Portal gives both the Development and Business teams common grounds for communication

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.

I've personally been using it for 23 years. 1 year at the current version - ERwin Workgroup & Portal 9.7

The portal uses TomCat which we inadvertently upgraded to a newer version than could be used when installing another tool on the server. This wasn't easy to diagnose - but the ERwin tech team helped us figure it out. :-)

No issues.

No issues.

Great. They made sure that the initial product demos to Lytx were supported by a really experienced ERwin team - who could answer questions from the high levels that our managers asked to the deep technical ones from the DBAs. They also listened to the company needs and short/long term goals and sold a solution rather than just a tool. I didn't have to fend off high pressure to buy more than what was needed.

Excellent – they always work very closely with us. Their ‘Live Chat’ team is one that I depend on for fast answers - but they provide access to their really experienced teams when a problem is obviously complex. They also have a rich Knowledgebase for self-service research.

No.

Complexity lies in connectivity and supporting tool setup - which isn’t always intuitive.

We worked with Myriad Solutions for the initial installation and more recently the upgrade. Their team is fabulous! They go the extra mile to find solutions and make suggestions as they get to know your environment's quirks.

Unless you are a one person shop – always go with the Workgroup edition and Concurrent licensing, that puts your models in a database for protection and allows the team members to share a license.

Yes – ER Studio, Embarcadero.

This product is a cross platform database designer, data inventory control & metadata library, and supports soft link integration. It can be used to document or design metadata any type of data set and most data modeling styles. Doing your database design first and testing requirements on paper can be used to scope deployments in the correct sequence to support Agile teams.

- Excellent graphical support for very large data models, enabling our team to plot detailed and colorful data models containing hundreds of entities and as large as 3 feet by up to 40 feet in length. Despite building and maintaining many very large data models, we do not have problems with the stability of the graphical representation or layout, something we still encounter with a surprising number of other data modeling tools (when we're asked to try to port our data models to other tools by a few of our customers who are already using other tools when we start working with them).

- Robust dictionary and model comparison capability ("Complete compare") allow for sophisticated model management and configuration options.

- Optional repository-based Model Manager allows for coordination and version control across multiple (possibly geographically distributed) stakeholders.

- Longstanding commitment to open metadata access, either through included pre-builtimport/export connectors (for most common metadata-aware modeling tools, ETL tools, XML, etc.) or through sophisticated API (for programmatic access). This has been very important to our large customers and our team over the years as it has enabled metadata movement and synchronization between tools as and when required.

- Erwin can reverse and forward engineer from/to most supported versions of most widely used RDBMS, making deployment straightforward in most cases.

- Erwin has enabled us to build and manage a portfolio of over 1,000 large data models across more than 60 lines of business, many of which are related and synchronized. It has similarly enable our customers to start using selected subsets of our data models and incrementally grow their deployments over time, while also taking advantage of subsequent data model upgrades delivered by us.

- Erwin has enabled us to easily assist our customers in deploying our large data models across many different deployment platforms, on premise and in the cloud.

- We have been able to assist our customers in exchanging and synchronizing metadata between other modeling tools, repositories, ETL tools, MDM tools, BI tools, business glossaries, etc. to enable them to integrate with existing metadata artifacts and greatly facilitate metadata reuse in other metadata-aware products.

- 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.

17 years (since 1999)

No.

No, the 9.64.02 release we are currently using is very stable.

- Prior to a major upgrade to the underlying graphics engine in about 2010, we occasionally experienced slow performance when moving large numbers of objects (e.g. several hundred entities at a time) in very large models, but we worked with the Erwin technical team and the issue was resolved and has not been a problem in over 5 years of working daily with very large data models since then.

- We and our customers regularly use the "Complete Compare" function to compare and manage multiple large related models with no problems.

- We also use Erwin's metadata API to programmatically synchronize enhancements across as many as 100 large data models at a time with no problems.

Historically the Erwin product has been primarily sold through channels so we've had little interaction with Erwin's sales team. We are however very happy with the level of customer service we receive from the Erwin reseller we have used and recommend to our customers, Sandhill Consultants.

As longtime users of the Erwin product, our team rarely needs to communicate with technical support. However, when we have needed to speak with them, we have always found them to be responsive and knowledgeable. Several core members of the Erwin technical team have been there longer than we've been using the product (17 years), which I believe contributes to the high quality of support.

We previously used a data modeling product called Silverrun. We switched because most of our customers were using Erwin and because Erwin did a better job of staying current with most popular RDBMS for reverse and forward engineering.

Installation is straightforward.

We implemented Erwin ourselves and found it an easy process.

This review reflects my experience with and opinion regarding the Erwin product after many years of using it and several other popular data modeling tools. I received no financial incentive or other consideration for this review.

Complete Compare AND Bulk Edit.

The Bulk Edit allows us to bring in definitions from IBM's Business Glossary.

Would like to see canonical modeling supported for web services.

20+ year

None

None

None

Outstanding

Outstanding

I've used several other Modeling tool (Embarcadero an System Architect).

Straightforward

In-house