Being recognised as a Visionary by Gartner is a proud moment for the team.
The recognition that our price point and our tool capabilities makes us the disruptive offering in the enterprise architecture tools market reflects what we set as our objective when we decided to offer a commercial version of our open source product.
As practising EAs we’ve seen pretty much all the other EA tools and we recognised and shared the frustrations that we, and our clients, felt about EA tools generally:
- They were expensive – we understood that paying six or seven figures for an EA tool meant that only the biggest companies could afford them
- They didn’t deliver value – we knew that even with these expensive solutions, the return on investment was minimal to non-existent
- They weren’t focused on EA management – instead they were bloated, with lots of nice ideas but not much of real use to an EA – we knew that management weren’t interested in boxes and lines (leave that to the drawing tools and the designers) – they wanted insight, see our previous blog here
With Essential we wanted a meta model that supported EAs out of the box, but allowed them to extend where they wanted to. It had to have depth as enterprises are complex, the simplistic models other tools have don’t really allow analysis beyond the simple questions. We wanted to allow organisations to get speed to value, so we built lots of out of the box views that were developed and used in our EA consulting work, and included the ability to allow users create their own quickly if needed. And finally, it had to be affordable, so we set a price that most organisations, regardless of size, can afford (~$16,000), for unlimited users and data, so no surprises when it comes to price.
We’ve delivered what we aimed for and are now looking to move Essential to the next level. We’re enhancing the data capture, and our Everyone’s Essential data capture tool allows non-EAs to capture and maintain data with no training, enabling EAs to focus on insights rather than data maintenance. We’re bringing out lots of new views to help CXOs and management engage in EA, and we’re widening our partner base with partners in place across the world.
To our commercial clients and to our open source community across the world, a big thank you for your support, ideas and input and let’s make 2021 another great year.