MEGA HOPEX Reviews

We picked it as we wanted something that included all of the shapes represented in the software architecture solutions of our company. We created near 2,000 products that we have in the company. We used this product to represent the software architecture of our solutions and the mapping within the processes of the company.

We tried to map a set of fields and we have and combined it with the processes of the company.

The main feature that we like the most is the ability to have a unique repository where all the architects can interact and play together with the shapes of different architecture solutions. They have a unified repository where users can share the developments they're working on. 

Its availability is very good. 

We've had some internal changes in the company. It allows us to start with an initiative that will accumulate new architecture solutions. At this moment, the initiative works with specifically with HOPEX and we are able to adapt it to our new company direction.

I can't speak to which features are missing. I don't have any information on that and don't really have any input.

The solution is quite expensive.

We've been using the solution since before the pandemic. We started using it around 2019.

We use Sparx Systems as well as MEGA HOPEX. Our organization bought both solutions.

I found that the solution is very expensive for what it does. We are integrated with both HOPEX and Sparx solutions, however, Sparx Systems we work with on a set of licenses that we had previously, in 2018. We find it a bit less expensive.

Since we use both HOPEX and Sparx, it's easy to compare the two. 

For example, if you compare the price of MEGA HOPEX with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Sparx is cheaper. Our company is looking at pricing and it's an important factor we are taking into account. However, Sparx can be a bit slow. If you are trying to design software architecture, sometimes we run into issues and need to refresh. HOPEX also occasionally needs to be refreshed as well, actually.

We find Sparx to be more useable as well.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. If the architecture was a bit better, I might rate it higher.

We implement MEGA HOPEX primarily for better visualization of enterprise architecture artifacts and generating reports for clients to maintain governance and work on enterprise development. MEGA HOPEX is used for IT portfolio management, strategy mapping, project portfolio analysis, and business capability assessments.

Personally, I focus more on implementing MEGA HOPEX rather than the functional side, but I've worked with clients who use it to plan future capabilities and compare them with current ones.

The main feature I find crucial in MEGA HOPEX is the catalog view, which provides a comprehensive visualization of all artifacts in one repository. Another valuable aspect is the availability of out-of-the-box outcomes, such as strategy maps and BPA models, eliminating the need for additional configuration.

MEGA HOPEX allows users to focus on specific business areas, like risk management or data governance, providing a high-level overview while enabling deep dives into specific areas of interest. For risk management, MEGA HOPEX allows users to assess impacts, create recovery plans, and track action plans.

In my experience, I've encountered difficulties with consuming custom packages in MEGA HOPEX, which leads to redundant work when deploying them to production. This is an area where improvement is needed. While version six offers better UI and UX, resolving this issue should be a priority. I believe it's important to fully explore MEGA HOPEX's capabilities before suggesting new ones.

I've been using MEGA HOPEX as a technical consultant for about a year now.

As for stability, MEGA HOPEX itself is generally stable, but occasional errors may occur due to client-side changes. Despite these instances, I'd rate the solution's stability at 9 out of 10.

The scalability of MEGA HOPEX, in my opinion, falls around 8 out of 10. Before implementing MEGA for our customers, we conduct multiple sessions to understand their specific needs and focus areas. 

I find the process relatively straightforward. The documentation is clear, and following the steps usually leads to a successful installation. I'd rate the difficulty level around 7 to 8.The deployment time varies depending on customer instructions and IT team responsiveness, but it's generally manageable within one hour. The deployment process involves downloading instructions, configuring the application server, installing MEGA, setting up the database, and launching the application. Some customers prefer using DNS names instead of IP addresses, requiring additional steps for certificate creation and DNS configuration.

I would highly recommend MEGA HOPEX to others. It's a powerful tool with excellent technical support and a wide range of features to meet diverse business needs. Overall, I rate it as 9 out of 10 and believe it's a valuable solution for enterprise architecture and IT portfolio management.

The first use case pertains to the certificate price domain. Secondly, we use it for enterprise reporting. Governance is one of the key areas.

The solution lacks additional models compared to other tools.

I have been using MEGA HOPEX for four years.

Setting up MEGA HOPEX requires a substantial budget allocation to ensure its functionality and effectiveness.

We are currently in the process of evaluating whether we should collaborate with MEGA or opt for another product. We are planning to utilize this tool for external purposes.

We are in the phase of avoiding redundancy and exploring its potential use cases. Primarily, we use it for business and application portfolio management, which is crucial for our operations. We're assessing our assets. We have another tool for asset management and are considering replacing it with MEGA.

We focus on transitioning towards a product-centric approach. Thus, all our business operations are aligned accordingly.

We can handle MEGA HOPEX. It's one of the best tools available. Another advantage is its accessibility; with MEGA HOPEX, We can use it anywhere. You can use BIN, PCE, Centograft, and more. MEGA HOPEX has its own proprietary standards that users must adhere to.

An additional model offers a constructive and guided approach to implementation. When dealing with an open-world scenario, convincing people can be challenging. Having a predefined model helps stakeholders understand the standards being followed. Alphabet or MEGA both fall under SysTrack. One of the best features of Abacus is the ability to select multiple models, which is essential when dealing with different business needs. It's important to recognize that one solution does not fit all requirements, so understanding how your specific requirements fit into the models is crucial.

I recommend MEGA HOPEX if the business context is straightforward and clear. Its stability depends on the audience you're interacting with and their technical or ER tool proficiency. If your audience isn’t tech-savvy, explaining MEGA HOPEX can be challenging.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We are using MEGA HOPEX for process modeling, such as modeling IT tasks.

 We have a private server and the client also has their own server. 

The most valuable feature of MEGA HOPEX is the publication method for static websites. You can generate the whole database into a static website. Additionally, in the new tabular entry, you don't have to put objects or links, you can go and fill a tab and the MEGA HOPEX will generate an object for you in a simple way.

I have been using MEGA HOPEX for approximately four years.

MEGA HOPEX is stable.

The scalability of MEGA HOPEX is good.

We have three users using this solution in my company.

The support from MEGA HOPEX is good, they are quick to respond.

MEGA HOPEX's initial setup could be easier. The newer version is better but they still need to improve the process. The deployment took approximately four to eight hours.

I rate the setup of MEGA HOPEX a four out of five.

The price of the MEGA HOPEX license could improve, it is expensive. The license key for business process analysis and IT architecture is approximately €10,000. This price is fixed, it's not a subscription or cloud-based version. It is a one-time price.

My advice to others is they should check the other solution because the price will be the most important for every company and the price of MEGA HOPEX is high. This is a disadvantage compared to other solutions. However, the solution works very well.

I rate MEGA HOPEX a nine out of ten.

The main module we use is ITPM. The ability to have standardized reports around obsolescence and lifecycle management is probably the most valuable.

We are trying to move to a more standardized approach regarding how we do lifecycle management and having the ability to generate the obsolescence report which says what applications are impacted by obsolete technologies on a rolling horizon is valuable so that we can actually do our business planning and manage technical data in a more organized manner then the way that we have been doing it today.

It shows you for all of the applications that are depending upon obsolete technology, what is the technology that is going obsolete and what is the application that is impacted. Essentially, it's a list view.

We are not using the entire platform, although we are licensed for a couple modules. The main one that we are using is ITPM. The other thing that I think we find useful outside of the obsolescence report is also having a more organized view of our applications and their technology dependencies. Matching it up with roadmaps related to technologies in a singular view. We had an application technology view that also becomes quite useful.

I think it has a lot to offer, but we have been focusing in on ITPM. I think we ourselves need to do a little bit more exploration of how we can benefit from some of the other modules.

Something that might be helpful is to have a little bit more of a curriculum-based engagement of MEGA where we are actually educated more on the bigger picture, not just the tool, but really what is the big picture that MEGA is trying to solve. What are the different pieces and how they fit together? I think that will help expose the power of MEGA to us to see how we can actually use it better. Kind of the Art of the Possible type of positioning.

From the capabilities perspective, the user experience is not the best. It needs to be a lot more easy to use, more intuitive.

It could also drive adoption. We are a pretty large organization with a lot of application and it's not all architects that are using this tool. There are people that are in peripheral organizations that we rely on to provide information and the user interface really needs to be simple and clean and be able to move from task to task very efficiently. The feedback we have gotten so far has not been that. It's been, it's hard to navigate. It's not intuitive. It takes time to do multiple updates in a sitting.

What that means today is that people export data out of MEGA, manage an Excel spreadsheet and then do vault uploads and it kind of defeats the purpose of having a tool like this.

18 months. We are getting to the first real use of it with our business planning for next year and kind of starting now.

We have had challenges with scale. We had to refactor the way that we organize the data due to that scaling issue. Originally, we had brought in every application landscape as an individual application and if the reports were timing out and we were not able to get a performance response. In fact, our users were complaining as well. We have refactored so that applications are really more of our business service construct that are grouping multiple landscapes which are becoming software installations. It's working a little bit better, but we still have struggles with some reports that are large or go out to large data sets that the system sent tends to time out. In fact, we had to put automated timers to terminate tasks that are taking too long just because it becomes ineffective. These jobs are in the background that cause other problems. Performance and scale has been an issue.

If you have an interactive application, people don't expect it to be taking hours. People expect responses within minutes. When they're sitting there for 10, 15, 20 minutes and there is nothing back, something is obviously not done right whether the architecture behind the scenes is not done right or the way it fans out to compute is not done right, something is not right. We've had performance issues and continue to struggle with it. Another example is when we do these reports, as I mentioned, obsolescence, really have to do with volume.

You have to do it on a portfolio by portfolio basis. You need to go to the top level and say, "Run this obsolescence report for everything in my environment." Then we have to say, "Do it for a subset of the data set just because of performance."

My team actually runs the platform, I don't really deal with technical support themselves, but I do get feedback. Yes, they have used technical support. It's kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes we have gotten good results, but other times it hasn't been what we would hope for.

Generally we do engage them as well as professional services. In fact, we've probably been engaging professional services a lot more than we need to. That's a different issue.

We got an introduction to MEGA from a smaller group within our company. The conversation with the person that was already using it was essentially focused on how much customization were they doing.

At the time they told me it had unlimited customization and that is kind of what drove me to say we are going to adopt MEGA for the Enterprise, but truth be told, since we have adopted it, we are actually doing a lot more customization than I would have hoped for. The out-of-the-box capabilities don't really align with the broader vision. Hence, we are spending a lot of time with pro services.

When they did the assessment I think they looked at Alfabet and a couple of others.

Be very clear on what you need because MEGA has a lot to offer and if you are really going to be able to take advantage of MEGA's portfolio, then you should consider it. Be ready for the journey we went through which took 18 months to get to where we are at.

We are using the solution in one bank in Colombia. We are going to start implementation in two financial entities in Ecuador.

The support experience in Latin America is great. For us, it's very important to have local connections and use cases. MEGA has had a lot of partners in Latin America. It's the differentiation with the other companies. Many others use services outside of Latin America - in Europe or the USA. However, we like the local connection, which was the main selling point for us.

We need better traceability available. We want to have traceability between the business and the technology.

The initial setup can be quite complex at first.

The resolution needs to offer more potential for collaboration. Right now, it is much more geared towards one person working on the solution.

We have one year of experience using that tool.

We are managing the implementation via corporate and governance. We are going to scale all of the entities in the group. We are a financial group that has a presence in different countries in Latin America with different entities and we decided to manage this implementation in an incremental model starting from some specific companies. The plan is, in 2022, to integrate all the other entities in the group.

So far, we have less than 20 people using the product, however, we are going to increase the number of personnel.

Technical support is great. they are local and readily available. We like that they are so close, and we don't have to deal with support from the USA or Europe, which is much further away.

In the beginning, there was some complexity. We don't understand the benefit and the use of the tool. We defined a robot for business capabilities to be covered across all of the companies in the group. We are solving for the original lack of knowledge with a training process in the consulting services we have on offer.

We implement the solution with a partner and they have less than three people that help us. To use the tool, we need the technical staff to use the solution. 

We leveraged the expertise of local partners while initially implementing the solution. 

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

We have a standard fee for the use of the solution via their SaaS model and we have some consulting costs that depend on the scope of its implementation in each entity.

We have an agreement, a commercial agreement with MEGA, to support all the entities that are going to implement the solution.

We are a financial and insurance services industry company. We are focused on banks and insurance.

For new users, it's important that they understand the business architectural definitions and have knowledge of processes to gain the most value out of the solution. If the team that is evaluating the solution doesn't have such knowledge, there might be issues.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Transparency in developing a global enterprise inventory of the firm's application and technology assets.

The aspect of the tool that appeals to us at this time is the HOPEX IT portfolio management capability. What that portfolio management capability allows us to do is manage a document and manage our global application and technology portfolio.

The product itself has good reporting. Because we're an enterprise we have several different enterprise reporting tools, we use a data mart which is associated in order to use different enterprise reporting tools like QlikView, Cognos, Excel and BusinessObjects.

We found the IT portfolio management capability to be very comprehensive and well thought through, the front end is elegant at this point, it's easy to use, it's moderately intuitive, and it meets our needs. I would argue that it's probably the preeminent IT portfolio management solution on the market.

If you think about, it's about having transparency, a current, complete and accurate view of your entire application ecosystem. There are a number of benefits associated with that. Whether those benefits be for strategic planning, asset management, business planning, technology lifecycle management, or operational support. Having a complete and accurate inventory of a firm's applications is actually necessitated by regulation which we're subject to. It's also simply good business practice.

The IT portfolio management (ITPM) tool allows us to collect and manage the application inventory on an ongoing basis - the data is complete and accurate on an ongoing basis. We always have a current stake snapshot of the enterprise application and technology ecosystem.

Regarding compliance - there are various regulatory drivers that necessitate that the company understands what their application assets are, what their technology assets are, manage the resolution of problems and defects against those assets. In our case, the specific driver is the FFIEC, it's applicable to banks.

We've asked the vendor for a number of enhancements to mature the tool. One of those specifically, is a service based interface. Both for feeding data into the tool, and retrieving data from the tool, so that other vendor solutions can interact with the tool as a service based model.

The other is to improve the overall operational resiliency. We would ask the vendor to add, and they have actually built it into the tool already, but really allow us to have probe points, so we can measure the various aspects of the automated operational monitoring tool, so we can detect any type of performance degradation, or outage, so it can take automated corrective action. What we want to do is move forward the platform for the self healing model, where the platform doesn't need human intervention for an underlying infrastructure issue.

The ability for us to detect specific infrastructure issues with the tool are not as mature as we would like it. What we want is a more granular ability to probe where there might be an infrastructure issue affecting the tool, either from a performance or variability perspective.

In recent releases, it has been stable. Beforehand it had some teething pains.

It supports the number of users that we require. Obviously, the project has matured over the past several years to where it is scalable and stable. It doesn't have defects that impede us from using the tool effectively.

Anyone looking to adopt an enterprise architecture or IT portfolio management solution like HOPEX should consider what aspects of the tool will help them achieve their objectives. Different aspects of the tool address different objectives. In the case that we just discussed, the HOPEX IT portfolio management capability, there's other capabilities as well, which we're currently using. Really determine what aspect of the tool that they would want to implement to really attain the objectives that they're looking to pursue, from either an architecture perspective or an IT portfolio management perspective.

I'll share some interesting observations with you. If any enterprise manages their IT portfolio in Excel, the data becomes dated literally after it's collected. Right after it's collected I give you the configuration of your room on an Excel spreadsheet. You may change your room, subsequent to my having persisted that configuration on an Excel spreadsheet. You may move a chair around, you may move a desk around. What ITPM allows us to do, is maintain that configuration in a current state. That is invaluable. Every time an enterprise has any kind of portfolio analysis, having a current view has tremendous value. It obviates having to collect that data again.

It impresses the regulators, because they want to know that you know what you have. The regulators want to know that you know what's in your room. Because of a tool like MEGA, we know that, and we can demonstrate that the data is current using the tool. That's very valuable - having that level of transparency. What it illustrates is that an enterprise is managing their IT assets.

The main benefit of Mega is the fact that you can link data from multiple enterprise architecture practices so that, for instance, business architecture artifacts can link to system architecture artifacts, and so you can get a more complete picture. Things aren't siloed. It's not like the process models are just off to the side by themselves. There are aspects of the processes that you can link to systems which can link to technologies, so that you can say these processes require these technologies and then those technologies can link to other parts of Mega so that you can get a more complete picture.

--- Applications might use different technologies. It might use Cobol, it might use Java, it might need Internet Explorer, it might need a certain JVM. You can make those links. If you want to start with capability, to give a capability to the business, you use a certain process, that process uses certain applications, those applications require certain technologies. If you change that technology, you have that link all the way back to the business capability. If you had the users that are using those processes or capabilities, you can know who is going to be impacted if we replace one technology with another.

Mega can be used to start conversations with the business. We can put a process map or capability map in front of a business user and start a conversation that way. Rather than starting from scratch and interviewing them about what they do and what systems they use, we have something to start with and can then continue from there. They can say, "Oh that's not what we do," or "You're missing this or that." Working with the business we can update the information to make it more meaningful to them.

It also helps if we're doing some sort of business analysis to scope the problem and say, "These are the things (processes, capabilities, applications, etc.) that are in scope, whereas these things are out of scope." Being a business architect, I work more on the process and capability side, than the system and application side.

It's very prescriptive right now as to a particular diagram, what objects you can put on that diagram, and sometimes if you're working with the business you might want to just sketch something out rather than have those limitations.. When you diagram, it's going to take the things that you put on the diagram and link them together. We would like to have the ability to do some sort of a sketching type diagram, where you don't necessarily have to make all those connections. Where you can just put objects on the diagram, maybe turn off something that requires connections to be made, and allows you to just talk to the business and let them guide a conversation and you can build a picture that means something to the business. This diagram could possibly change over time into a diagram with connections.

One of the issues that we've had - we know what we want to do but we don't necessarily know which diagram we can use to do it. Because Mega is so vast, and it has a lot of different diagram types, you might start to use a diagram but it won't let you add a particular object that you need. Just in the last couple of months, someone gave me a query I can use to say, "I want to make a diagram with these three objects on it, which diagrams let me do that?" But if I didn't have that query, it's kind of hunt and peck.

 I would say the other big issue is documentation. Mega needs better documentation. I have had the experience where I can see an object, and I'll look it up in the index to get more information about it, and it won't be there.

I would say Mega has been stable and scalable. Any issues that we've had have been more the platform it's on. We currently run Mega on Citrix, so we have more Citrix issues than Mega problems. It's not because of Mega, it's because of Citrix.

I was not involved when Mega was initially setup, however I am involved every year when we do the upgrade; we do an annual upgrade to another version.

I would say it's relatively straightforward. After doing it on an annual basis, you always run into a glitch at some point. Right now, we just upgraded and everyone is getting a message that their licenses are expiring because they didn't give us a new key. But Mega's aware, and they're getting us a new key. They're responsive. No major issues with it.