MEGA HOPEX Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is as an enterprise architecture tool. From a management perspective, we have specific use cases for modeling business processes.

The most valuable feature is the ability to view the entire architecture of an enterprise, company, or organization within the tool. We can load the architecture onto the tool and gain a holistic view.

We have been using MEGA HOPEX for 4 months.

The platform is stable.

We have less than ten MEGA HOPEX users in our organization.

We used other solutions before. We switched to MEGA HOPEX because it helps discover assets on the network, such as software applications or servers running those applications.

We didn't face any challenges during the setup process. We also procured configuration services, and the team assisting us has been actively helping us throughout the process.

A third-party consultancy handled the deployment as part of their cloud offering.

The pricing depends on the number of licenses purchased. Typically, the more licenses you buy, the lower the cost per license. However, exact pricing details may vary depending on customers' specific requirements.

MEGA has supported our IT portfolio management 100%. They have a portfolio management module where we load our application assets onto the tool.

It has a data domain where we load our data objects onto the tool but doesn't provide data governance capabilities such as cleansing or validating data. We ensure that the information we input is clean and accurate.

With these compliance management features, we've primarily focused on business architecture. We have yet to explore the GRC capabilities fully, as we only started in January. We'll begin exploring other capabilities once we document the business and application domains. Risk management is also an ongoing process, and we plan to utilize more robust features in the future.

To utilize MEGA effectively, you need to understand your architecture and be able to complete the templates. There are two ways to upload information: via templates or manual upload. You must know your way around the templates and understand what artifacts to upload onto the tool. Once you're comfortable with that, the process becomes easier.

I rate it a nine out of ten.

We use MEGA HOPEX to conduct a comprehensive executive business analysis, including data governance. These features are categorized into various profiles. We are effectively utilizing features within these profiles due to the complexity of our organization. The primary features used are data governance, information management, solution architecture, and overall enterprise architecture capabilities.

We can generate licensing reports for the directly to the desktop. It can run queries directly using the data we provide and make it a system for making decisions.

An organization needs to be at a certain maturity level and have a certain data capacity to be able to have its influence. Integrating any EA product takes two to three years. Earlier, it took up to five years to fully integrate a product into an organization. We're currently building compliance policies around MEGA HOPEX.

We're implementing fundamental features such as a centralized repository for applications and technologies and the ability to access reports from all the data. These are the foundational aspects of the system's operation.

When transitioning to this process, it's crucial also to understand your data. This understanding will likely yield significant benefits. The aspect may become irrelevant in a few months as you complete our data work and move on to other areas, such as optimizing workflow understanding. This dynamic nature is something to consider. MEGA HOPEX currently suits our environment best, offering features like executive engagement that we find valuable and can utilize whenever needed.

People should have more training about the product. It's a very versatile product. It can be complicated for an average user to use. People with several years of experience working with these tools know how to navigate it. However, it can be overwhelming for a new user.

The training materials and learning process need improvement. The product is quite robust. There is no fault related to internal functions and capabilities.

The solution needs a clearer licensing model and a transparent method to understand where the licenses are held. Licenses are initially assigned to to people, making tracing difficult. If you require 50 concurrent users across an organization of 1000, you need to pinpoint and maintain who uses them. It becomes very challenging without that internal capability.

I have been using MEGA HOPEX for more than 12 months. We have updated to V6 of the solution.

Everything else is very stable, capable, and scalable. The solution can be complex, depending on the user experience and training.

MEGA HOPEX is a cloud solution. It's scalability is correspondingly appropriate.

Customer support is fantastic. They are very helpful whenever we get on the line with the support team.

Positive

I have used several, each behaves differently. 

MEGA HOPEX holds and manages EA-level information and facilitates governance. It can directly incorporate the XMI/XML format into its structure.

MEGA HOPEX excels in EA management, dashboarding, and overall governance tasks. However, more hands-on work, such as project management or solution architecture support, might be too cumbersome and slow. In such cases, another solution may be more suitable.

The initial setup is straightforward.

MEGA HOPEX simplifies tasks once we reach a critical information threshold necessary to support our work.

The solution is expensive. Our organization is very small but has the complex needs that this solution fits.

MEGA HOPEX accomplishes nothing without a well-organized structure to support it. MEGA HOPEX becomes significant in the long term as an organization matures.

Overall, I rate the solution a highly, in the 8/10 range.

The solution can be used to model customer journeys and business processes.

I use the solution for my customers to model banking products. I also model and define business capability.

The biggest value of the product is that we can use it to work in different industries like government, education, and banking. The tool is very simple and intuitive to use. It is easy to manage different layers within the solution.

The product must improve integration with other tools.

I have been using the solution for almost seven years.

I rate the tool’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten.

I have worked with LeanIX. I switched to MEGA HOPEX because it has more features than other tools.

The initial setup was moderately easy.

I deploy the tool myself on-premise. I got help from the product’s technical support team to deploy it on the cloud.

MEGA HOPEX has produced a good ROI for our company.

The tool is relatively expensive. However, it is worth the money for the features it provides.

I recommend the solution 100%. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The ability to customize is valuable.

The interface must be improved. The tool is not user-friendly. We have to do a lot of workarounds to get a benefit out of it.

I have been using the solution for around five years.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable, but it has some limitations. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. We have ten users, including five dedicated users. The core team of five people uses the product daily. The others use it once a month.

We use different solutions for different domains, but we are planning to migrate. We use ARIS for business process modeling.

The initial setup is not difficult. It is easy to install and set up the workspace. The deployment took one week.

The implementation was done through a reseller. We need only one technical resource to install and run the tool. However, we need a team of five people to make the product useful.

The product has a high cost. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten. The solution costs us AED 450,000 yearly.

I'm a digital transformation advisor. I sell consulting services to my customers. One of my customers uses MEGA HOPEX. The product needs a lot of customization and workaround. I would recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

MEGA HOPEX is the tool of my customer, an energy and facilities company.

The tool is used for application modeling and application data exchange purposes. MEGA HOPEX is also used to classify applications by the business capability for anthology purposes. It's an application and data flow tool.

The reference model in MEGA HOPEX has benefited my customer working in nuclear plants.

What's most valuable in MEGA HOPEX is that it follows the reference model where each component is defined. When you put the component on the diagram, it shows you all semantic definitions, including the flags, data flow, interface, etc. 

I also like the diagram consistency in MEGA HOPEX.

An area for improvement in MEGA HOPEX is its vast learning curve. The tool is also heavy, so that's a pain point. MEGA HOPEX is also tricky to use if you don't train for many hours.

As a holistic tool, it's supposed to do everything, so everything's connected. For example, your application is connected to data, so your screen is full of information, which works when you have many people working on your information system using MEGA HOPEX. For example, my customer that works with nuclear plants is a big organization. However, the tool would be too complex for a functional organization or a small organization such as in the HR or Financial niche because not as many people work on the information system and the tool.

"HOPEX" in MEGA HOPEX stands for Holistic Platform of Excellence, so you can do everything and describe everything, but the tool is too complex for small business users.

I also found the modeling tool of ARIS better than the modeling tool of MEGA HOPEX.

I rate the tool six on a scale of one to ten because of its complexity.

I've been using MEGA HOPEX for one year.

MEGA HOPEX is a very stable tool, so it's a nine out of ten.

MEGA HOPEX is very scalable, so it's an eight out of ten.

I only used MEGA HOPEX. It's the only enterprise architecture tool I have experience with.

My customer has a special team dedicated to MEGA HOPEX implementation, so implementing it is no issue.

I've been told that MEGA HOPEX is very expensive, which is why small organizations dismiss the tool. It's complex and costly versus other simpler and cheaper solutions.

I'm a consultant and architect, so I'm using an architecture product called MEGA HOPEX.

MEGA HOPEX is deployed on-premises. The customer wanted to deploy it on the cloud but had to stick to an on-premise deployment because of sovereignty.

I'd recommend the tool for people with very critical use cases. Otherwise, you'll find more straightforward tools than MEGA HOPEX.

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 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.

Traceability across architecture domains - business architecture and data technology. All of them can connect the dots, and get an end-to-end view of the architecture landscape. That is one of the powerful strengths of the tool. The second strength is the ability to query and mine for information. There is also a valuable portion of the tool, where you can query, navigate through, break down, and find more information. These are at least three things that stand out.

With the amount of information that we can store, and the meta-model that is out there, we invest a lot of time in building the meta-model. Right now, it is vendor-specific. We moved away from industry standard. It makes it that much more harder for us to take this data and put it in some other tool. We've got a lot of investment in the meta-data that's out there.

Architecture modeling - since it's repository-based, it's a lot easier for people to query, create their diagrams, and check for modeling rules. That's another good feature that is available. It's easy for us to enforce standards. That's also a powerful feature which we are leveraging.

The process side love the tool. It helps them to build their current operating model and also to get to the target operating model. That has been helpful and successful. We're still struggling with challenges on the application and technology / data architecture side. That is one area where we would say there is room for improvement. Data architects certainly don't see the tool being their first choice

In terms of features that are available, data architecture, pretty much like the big data and other unstructured content coming in, or for that matter Cloud. Cloud has been around for some time. Definitely if the tool provides more out-of-the-box features, they'll be helpful. My team is responsible for promoting this tool within the enterprise, so we're actually acting as a vendor for our own consumers. We don't control the features of the product, therefore we have to rely on the vendor to provide all these features. All we can do is provide guidance. One thing certainly would help, if the industry is already going towards Cloud computing and big data, why is the product lagging behind in terms of those features? We lose out on time to market.

Let's say I want to create a visualization or I want to bring my own portal page. I have to rely on the vendor to do that. That takes away my time to market. I have all these parts that I want to present, but if it is more than 3 or 4 clicks, that's it, I lose the audience right away. If there is a way for us to accelerate and create a user profile-based user interface, like each role would have its own template. They only get to see the relevant details, and I don't have to rely on the vendor to configure and make that available to my customers. That would definitely help me.

We started off with the web interface and ran into that performance, stability-related issues, so we were directed towards Windows. We made the switch, but certainly in terms of session management or in terms of user transaction management and stability itself, like having a consistent experience, there is a desire or appetite for improvement.

Performance is not consistent, it could be a lot of factors. The user experience is some days better than others. We've been partnering with the vendor to find out, to get to the lower-level details as to what's going on and how they can improve the platform features. Certainly the presentation aspects, the usability of the tool does require people to be savvy with the product before they can derive the value. That's why in my experience I've seen a lot of the senior guys (I'm not talking about executives) such as portfolio architects, don't want to log into the tool. They think it's too hard for them to navigate. Personally, I don't find it hard. I find the tool very helpful, but I'm having difficulty selling that to my peers and to my superiors in my company.

When I joined they had rolled out MEGA 2009 (the previous version). In 2011 I started off with adoption. My primary role was to ensure that the tool was adopted. We recently upgraded to HOPEX, so pretty much we had to start all over again.

We are kind of right now looking into the other vendors. It's going to be a tough choice for us, considering that half of our user community like the tool and they've gotten used to it. For us to bring on a different tool would be a little more challenging. It's not like the other tools right now are standing up. Each tool has its strengths, but when we look at it overall, we are still going to struggle with any tool that we pick.

Rating: 5-7 (out of 10). Primarily because of time to market. For instance, before we moved to HOPEX, reporting was meant to be a big thing. They said, "Hey, HOPEX is going to solve most of your reporting problems." We moved to HOPEX, we are still not there yet in terms of what our customers want. In terms of innovation and time to market, we would see a lot of improvement. The core competency from the product is great. Just marketing it and getting it in the hands of the people that will be using the tool, is still a struggle, at least in my enterprise.

Other advice to users: get a handle on the common features of the tool. Most people don't do that, so they essentially struggle if they don't go through that training process. I wish there were videos available from the vendor which we could use to bring people quickly onto the toolset. I would like to have them look at YouTube videos and say "In 15 minutes, you know how to get in, how to navigate and understand." That is something that is lacking, so for me, to give the tool to someone, there is a little bit of hesitation right away, because it puts more burden on me to train them, or my colleagues to train them.