Well, what a year 2024 has been!
As I’m sure we can all recollect, 2023 was a particularly challenging year, and the start of 2024 continued in this theme, with global conflicts, inflation and the economic downturn making markets sluggish.
However, an improvement was predicted for 2024, and we certainly noticed a marked uptick in EA Tool interest in the second half of this year. According to JP Morgan’s “Outlook 2025” report next year is looking better again, with the global economy growing and inflation having cooled, and despite the ongoing geopolitical risks embodied by the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.
As well as improvement in market conditions, one of the key trends in 2024 was the interest in AI with, it seemed, everyone keen to jump on the AI bandwagon and suggest how they could incorporate it in their industry and products.
So, how did 2024 look for EAS…
Essential Innovation
We released a bucket load of new functionality in 2024 to address requests raised by our clients and also some key focus areas that we have, namely to make onboarding and value realisation even easier, to add to our strategic planning and roadmapping capabilities and to improve our diagramming tools.
There are more details in our Essential 2024 Tool Review here, a summary of what we released in 2024 is below:
- Easy onboarding and Value Realisation
- Improved the EA Assistant for onboarding
- Drag and Drop visual modelling
- AI for data augmentation
- Easier configuration and customisation
- Strategic Planning and Roadmapping
- Improved collaboration around ideation with the Business Model and Proposal editor
- Made the link between Ideation and Roadmap Planning to easier to manage
These improvements allow organisations to identify and manage trends in the business scenario analyser, create proposals to address trends and move these through a funnel of assessment and approvals to implementing strategic plans – an exceptionally powerful tool.
- Diagramming
- Released the BPMN modeller
- Released Sketch to support Solution Architecture
- HERM (Higher Education Reference Models)
Collaborated with CAUDIT to make their Business, Application and Information/Data Reference Models freely available in Essential
Spotlight on AI
We exhibited at both the Gartner It Symposiums in the US and the EU this year, and we noticed a key theme; nearly all the vendors across all the sectors focused on their AI capabilities/ambitions, although we are cautious to some of the claims!
At EAS we are extremely well positioned to take advantage of AI, with a number of our engineers and architects having a background in AI, and the ontology-based knowledge graph that Essential is based on being designed to take advantage of AI from the outset. We have, however, taken a cautious approach, focusing primarily on data management for now. We think moving too quickly towards using AI to support decisions needs careful thought, hallucinations due to data gaps will 1) ruin the credibility of the EA tool and 2) potentially lead to the wrong decisions. If anyone promises you some great AI features ask them to explain why the AI won’t hallucinate. We explain our position in more detail, with an interesting case study by HBR, here.
Growth
We have expanded our team primarily across the development, marketing and consultancy functions to support our continued growth. We have managed to retain our unique business model, allowing a small core team to support a growing client base, through a product architected for minimal support, the outsourcing of non-core functions such as Finance, and HR and the expansion of our partner network.
Despite a quiet start to the year, we have continued to grow our client base and our partner network globally, and we now have a massively diverse client base across the globe, industry sectors and client size. Our price point allows us to really be a choice for all types of clients from our US based, top 10 globally recognised apparel brand client to our small state government agency in Australia to a globally-recognised NGO based in the EU. Our price point ($20,000) continues to be a draw, but it is our top-notch features that make clients sign-up and stay!
What’s in store for 2025
We are excited about our plans for 2025. These include delivery of key functionality, such as a dedicated PowerBI connector, more drawing capabilities, a new much simpler approach to integration and making View Building easier. These will close the door on any gaps that exist between us and our competitors in the EA Tools marketplace, making Essential the Go To Tool for EA decision making support.
John Mayall, Director, said “2024 has been a year of two halves, with the early part of the year being slow in terms of client growth, but the second half showing a marked uptick. It looks likely this will continue into next year and we’re excited about what 2025 will bring for us. I’d like to thank our dedicated team for all their hard-work this year and our clients for their continued support.”