We are delighted that, less than two years after we launched the commercial version of the Essential platform, we have been recognised on this year’s Gartner EA tools Magic Quadrant in the Niche Players quadrant. Our position on the quadrant reflects our focus on enabling Enterprise Architects to deliver value and, whilst our meta model supports the broader organisational requirements of initiatives such as GRC, IT Service Management and so on, we set our focus primarily on EAs – we are architects after all and, for now, we purposely don’t want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.
We have drawn on our over 20 years’ experience as an EA consultancy, and the feedback from our Essential Clients and Open Source community, to enable us to provide the tools that make good EAs really successful in helping their organisations meet their strategic goals. This is our focus, and we’re delighted that this has been recognised in our position on the quadrant and the comments made about Essential, which has been noted as being a tool that EAs can quickly get great benefit from.
The good news is that Essential is a supremely flexible EA tool, with users able to extend the meta model and create their own dashboards and views quickly and easily – and without needing armies of tool vendor consultants! This means that we do have users who have extended Essential themselves to support some wider initiatives such as data risk management, vendor risk, supplier viability and so on, so if you do want to move beyond the views provided out of the box it’s fairly straightforward to do.
We also recognise that there are different maturity levels across both organisations and teams, and we are committed to providing self-help options, alongside more traditional consulting options, that enable organisations to get the most from Essential to meet their specific needs – we recognise one size does not fit all and cater for that. We have created innovative implementation options that can support all organisations, large and small, mature and in need of support, from our Essential Playbook that provides different routes through an EA initiative depending on needs, to our Essential Launchpad that enables ‘quick start’ methods in support of the plays, though to our free 6 month review to ensure commercial clients are on track.
And all at a very reasonable and transparent price.
Do feel free to speak to Gartner to find out their views on us.