One of our users/advocates this week pointed us at the FAQ of one of the commercial EA Tools where they state that free and open source EA Tools are only useful for rudimentary EA requirements, whereas commercial tools, like theirs, are much more advanced. It struck us that this is either a poorly informed organisation, unaware of the competition, or lazy writing by someone who does not understand much about open source. We normally ignore the competitors and let them worry about us, but in this case, we do feel it is important to respond to something that is clearly misleading.
They state that only commercial tools can provide business outcomes and decision-making insights through a central shared repository, an integrated set of views covering strategy, business, applications, information and technology, to provide the insights necessary to optimise, rationalise and transform.
There is, however, nothing in that statement that can’t be delivered by Essential Open Source – a free EA tool. Far from supporting only ‘rudimentary’ EA requirements, Essential Open Source is, in fact, a very sophisticated EA Tool that is focused on providing decision support and “what if” analysis to EAs and CxOs. In addition, Essential has a world leading, ontology-based meta model and has been designed to be exceptionally flexible – the meta model can be extended in minutes and new views can be created in hours by users.
The only areas where Essential Open Source falls short is that it is not Cloud based, it has to be hosted on site, and it has basic user permissions. Enter Essential Cloud, the low-cost Essential Cloud solution that is, as the name suggests, cloud based and includes full user security permissions across both data entry and the viewer. Oh, and did I mention it covers unlimited users.
I’m inclined to think the traditional EA Tool vendors, with their high costs and inflexible models, are trying to muddy the waters with this kind of article. Have a look at what Essential has to offer and make your own decision.
Essential Key Points:
- Over 120 out of the box views – have a look at the Technology Product Selector, the Application Rationalisation Analysis and the IT Asset Dashboard as just a few examples where the traditional commercial tools can’t compete
- A free launchpad to get you started, with a simple data capture mechanism, to allow the population of 20 key foundational views across business, application and technology
- Open Source or Cloud – Docker coming soon
- Low Cost
- Flexible
- Built by architects for architects
