MEGA HOPEX Reviews

The main benefit of Mega is the fact that you can link data from multiple enterprise architecture practices so that, for instance, business architecture artifacts can link to system architecture artifacts, and so you can get a more complete picture. Things aren't siloed. It's not like the process models are just off to the side by themselves. There are aspects of the processes that you can link to systems which can link to technologies, so that you can say these processes require these technologies and then those technologies can link to other parts of Mega so that you can get a more complete picture.

--- Applications might use different technologies. It might use Cobol, it might use Java, it might need Internet Explorer, it might need a certain JVM. You can make those links. If you want to start with capability, to give a capability to the business, you use a certain process, that process uses certain applications, those applications require certain technologies. If you change that technology, you have that link all the way back to the business capability. If you had the users that are using those processes or capabilities, you can know who is going to be impacted if we replace one technology with another.

Mega can be used to start conversations with the business. We can put a process map or capability map in front of a business user and start a conversation that way. Rather than starting from scratch and interviewing them about what they do and what systems they use, we have something to start with and can then continue from there. They can say, "Oh that's not what we do," or "You're missing this or that." Working with the business we can update the information to make it more meaningful to them.

It also helps if we're doing some sort of business analysis to scope the problem and say, "These are the things (processes, capabilities, applications, etc.) that are in scope, whereas these things are out of scope." Being a business architect, I work more on the process and capability side, than the system and application side.

It's very prescriptive right now as to a particular diagram, what objects you can put on that diagram, and sometimes if you're working with the business you might want to just sketch something out rather than have those limitations.. When you diagram, it's going to take the things that you put on the diagram and link them together. We would like to have the ability to do some sort of a sketching type diagram, where you don't necessarily have to make all those connections. Where you can just put objects on the diagram, maybe turn off something that requires connections to be made, and allows you to just talk to the business and let them guide a conversation and you can build a picture that means something to the business. This diagram could possibly change over time into a diagram with connections.

One of the issues that we've had - we know what we want to do but we don't necessarily know which diagram we can use to do it. Because Mega is so vast, and it has a lot of different diagram types, you might start to use a diagram but it won't let you add a particular object that you need. Just in the last couple of months, someone gave me a query I can use to say, "I want to make a diagram with these three objects on it, which diagrams let me do that?" But if I didn't have that query, it's kind of hunt and peck.

 I would say the other big issue is documentation. Mega needs better documentation. I have had the experience where I can see an object, and I'll look it up in the index to get more information about it, and it won't be there.

I would say Mega has been stable and scalable. Any issues that we've had have been more the platform it's on. We currently run Mega on Citrix, so we have more Citrix issues than Mega problems. It's not because of Mega, it's because of Citrix.

I was not involved when Mega was initially setup, however I am involved every year when we do the upgrade; we do an annual upgrade to another version.

I would say it's relatively straightforward. After doing it on an annual basis, you always run into a glitch at some point. Right now, we just upgraded and everyone is getting a message that their licenses are expiring because they didn't give us a new key. But Mega's aware, and they're getting us a new key. They're responsive. No major issues with it.

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.

Transparency in developing a global enterprise inventory of the firm's application and technology assets.

The aspect of the tool that appeals to us at this time is the HOPEX IT portfolio management capability. What that portfolio management capability allows us to do is manage a document and manage our global application and technology portfolio.

The product itself has good reporting. Because we're an enterprise we have several different enterprise reporting tools, we use a data mart which is associated in order to use different enterprise reporting tools like QlikView, Cognos, Excel and BusinessObjects.

We found the IT portfolio management capability to be very comprehensive and well thought through, the front end is elegant at this point, it's easy to use, it's moderately intuitive, and it meets our needs. I would argue that it's probably the preeminent IT portfolio management solution on the market.

If you think about, it's about having transparency, a current, complete and accurate view of your entire application ecosystem. There are a number of benefits associated with that. Whether those benefits be for strategic planning, asset management, business planning, technology lifecycle management, or operational support. Having a complete and accurate inventory of a firm's applications is actually necessitated by regulation which we're subject to. It's also simply good business practice.

The IT portfolio management (ITPM) tool allows us to collect and manage the application inventory on an ongoing basis - the data is complete and accurate on an ongoing basis. We always have a current stake snapshot of the enterprise application and technology ecosystem.

Regarding compliance - there are various regulatory drivers that necessitate that the company understands what their application assets are, what their technology assets are, manage the resolution of problems and defects against those assets. In our case, the specific driver is the FFIEC, it's applicable to banks.

We've asked the vendor for a number of enhancements to mature the tool. One of those specifically, is a service based interface. Both for feeding data into the tool, and retrieving data from the tool, so that other vendor solutions can interact with the tool as a service based model.

The other is to improve the overall operational resiliency. We would ask the vendor to add, and they have actually built it into the tool already, but really allow us to have probe points, so we can measure the various aspects of the automated operational monitoring tool, so we can detect any type of performance degradation, or outage, so it can take automated corrective action. What we want to do is move forward the platform for the self healing model, where the platform doesn't need human intervention for an underlying infrastructure issue.

The ability for us to detect specific infrastructure issues with the tool are not as mature as we would like it. What we want is a more granular ability to probe where there might be an infrastructure issue affecting the tool, either from a performance or variability perspective.

In recent releases, it has been stable. Beforehand it had some teething pains.

It supports the number of users that we require. Obviously, the project has matured over the past several years to where it is scalable and stable. It doesn't have defects that impede us from using the tool effectively.

Anyone looking to adopt an enterprise architecture or IT portfolio management solution like HOPEX should consider what aspects of the tool will help them achieve their objectives. Different aspects of the tool address different objectives. In the case that we just discussed, the HOPEX IT portfolio management capability, there's other capabilities as well, which we're currently using. Really determine what aspect of the tool that they would want to implement to really attain the objectives that they're looking to pursue, from either an architecture perspective or an IT portfolio management perspective.

I'll share some interesting observations with you. If any enterprise manages their IT portfolio in Excel, the data becomes dated literally after it's collected. Right after it's collected I give you the configuration of your room on an Excel spreadsheet. You may change your room, subsequent to my having persisted that configuration on an Excel spreadsheet. You may move a chair around, you may move a desk around. What ITPM allows us to do, is maintain that configuration in a current state. That is invaluable. Every time an enterprise has any kind of portfolio analysis, having a current view has tremendous value. It obviates having to collect that data again.

It impresses the regulators, because they want to know that you know what you have. The regulators want to know that you know what's in your room. Because of a tool like MEGA, we know that, and we can demonstrate that the data is current using the tool. That's very valuable - having that level of transparency. What it illustrates is that an enterprise is managing their IT assets.

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.

The most valuable feature of the tool is its ability to provide line of sight from Buinsess Outcome (Service to be delivered) down to how the resources are configured and connected to make it happen. Understanding how the Business and technology align to provide the organizational ability to deliver the niche that it plays in in our environment.

It does this by allowing us to capture the business process, business elements, and the technology elements and create relationships between them.

The ability to create diagrams and documents that tell the right story is a key feature. With this product we are able to produce reports that take architecturally modeled information and produce System Design Guides that are foundational for our organization to certify and accredit our Investments. The ability of the report to "walk the architecture" and pull out relevant ports, protocol, and Service information related to which client applications are talking to which servers helps validate what firewall ports need to be opened, etc.

It started improving visibility and provided us a better picture of technology dependencies. It has allowed us to better document what the business needs and more cleanly identify the technologies that are going to be needed to support the business needs. It has allowed us to have a cleaner picture of how technology is expected to help the business and reduce redundant technology provided functionality accross the organization.

Stability is definitely a critical thing.

Organizations can not afford to have to be rebooting production systems to add a user or to reset a users session. It needs to be more self-healing.

The intuitiveness of the interface.

The ability for the tool to guide a user through a process to ensure architectural changes are made based on knowledge of modeling and business rules, especially where they are complex is very critical to ensuring an manageable architecture. This is especially true when an organization does not have individuals with a deep knowledge of the tool.

We have used this product both pre-web version and the beta versions of Hopex.

Stability has gotten much better.

We have used Hopex since it was beta. V1R1 was very unstable, it required multiple reboots a day. These were reboots of the applications and did not normally require a server reboot. With V1R2 Hopex became much more stable. V1R3 for the most part has been stable platform.

Because of our architectureal needs we tend to be more on the bleeding edge of their product than a lot of others are willing to be. This means we have identified more issues with Hopex than some of the other customers. The Department of Defense (DOD) in general, tends to have tighter security and configuration requirements. This means that we have pushed Mega to have to readdress some security design issues that other customers may not have found to be a concern.

In many cases Mega has been fairly responsive to addresses product defects. Not all of them have happened in what I would consider a timely manner. Unfortunately, some things that were identified were not be released until two or three versions down. If there is a functional issue that really is a pain point, a broken feature, and you hear that it is not going to get it fixed for four months, this really creates a business issue. They have sped it up in some cases. Some of the issues are due to the time difference as the corporate offices are in france which means they historically have not always got the responses back in as timely a manner as I think should be applicable.

In the current version, we still have to clean up processes on a weekly basis. Comparatively speaking, from version 1 release 1 to version 1 release 3 it's much more stable product, but overall, it's still not where I would expect it to be as far as stability.

It is hard for us to provide a reflective answer to scalability as we have on average, 3 or 4 editors working in the system making changes at any given time and only 20ish people accessing Hopex in a read-only role. That's not really what I would consider a scalability test.

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We contact technical support pretty routinely. The technical support guys in the United States are very responsive. They are knowledgeable. They do a great job of capturing the information and they coordinate with the corporate resources that they need to to try to address the issues. Where they can provide resolution quickly, they have done so. Where not, they have said, "Okay, we have passed it on to the right individuals. They are looking at it." At that point, there's not much more that the local tech support can do.

When we started the process back in 2011, I did a contract and had a support team and they went through the Gartner Quadrant. They identified Mega, Troux System Architect and two others, I can't remember the other names of them. We basically identified what we wanted to accomplish with the tool and identified a set of metrics that we can sit down and ask them questions to walk them to scenarios. Then did an evaluation and then did a selection.

Overall I would say that this platform, addresses the needs better than other solutions we have looked at, it requires less support. We only have myself and one other administrator that support it.

We have a very in-depth knowledge of the behind-the-scenes workings of the solution. I do know from personal experience that other solutions have more significant footprint of resources that would have to support it. From database people to administrators, etc.

Overall rating: 7-8 (out of 10). Stability is one shortfall and it's probably the major one. I would probably take somewhere between a point and a point and a half off for that. The other one is just the interface. The fact that we have to do some things through the full client on the server as opposed to being able to do everything from a web interface management platform is in the reach of another half a point to a point.

Know what you are trying to accomplish with it, to know what you need, and whether it can truly provide what you need. The best outcome that you can get is that you have that view into how everything is tied together. In other words, what should be out there in the architecture or what should be out there in the environment and what should be providing to support to support the business.

As a business and process analyst, I found the Mega Process module very powerful. Since Hopex is an integrated architecture, it was possible to depict business processes with BPMN notation, and identify every system that participated in the process then generate the application architecture. It is also possible to generate textual procedures from the process models with Mega Process, and it is possible to export all processes to the enterprise architecture (TOGAF) module if needed.

As a consultant, I implemented Mega Process in different enterprises. For example, you create a process referential, which means, you depict the general cartography and all the subsequent levels (process layers), until the finest level. You're able to see all these levels in one space, using the the drill down technique to spread them, and see all the details for each process the process referential can be shown to every SME or users by installing the publisher module.

The most important thing to be improved is the reliability. Mega should pay more attention because from time to time, the screen freezes or the application stops working without saving the work.

I've used it for more than 14 months.

I've had no issues with the deployment, and I've done three.

I've had no issues with the stability.

I've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

9/10 - They were very useful.

9/10 - They were very useful.

I used to use the AG BPM solution, and it wasn't my decision to switch.

The initial setup was a bit tricky, because Mega made a strong security procedure to avoid hacking their solution, but after a few times, the process become pretty clear.

As a reseller, I implement the solution with the help of the vendor in the client environment, so I am not very aware about the Mega Hopex architecture and technical view.

I found the price in the middle range of these kinds of products.

Before implementation, you will find it useful to visit the Mega community website https://community.mega.com/. I found it very helpful on many occasions, for example, you can find many tips about the implementation.

ITPM – It provides a central location to manage our technology portfolio and standards/governance.

It provides a central repository of all architecture artifacts as well as application inventory. It has made it easier to do impact analysis. It’s slowly becoming the authoritative source of current state application architecture.

We would like the reporting and analytics, road mapping, import/export functionality, and data modelling capabilities to be improved.

It was a bit challenging to convert our old Mega licensing model to the new Hopex licensing model which is at a more granular level. Managing the new licenses and roles was difficult on the initial setup.

There were no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Overall, they have good support.

We evaluated other EA tools but we already had Mega in-house and continued to use it.

Fairly straightforward. There were some steps in the documentation that were not clear but with tech support’s help we overcame the issues.

We implemented it in-house with an enterprise architect and system administrator working together. We developed an implementation plan before starting the initial deployment and/or upgrade.

Mega needs to simplify their licensing model more like other leading EA tools in the market.

Collect accurate and up-to-date data about your environment before implementing an EA tool. Have an approach in terms of what objects to create in the tool in what order. Set up a sandbox environment to familiarize the architects and other users with the tool. Avoid creating extraneous objects in the production environment; start with small set of objects and artifacts that add value and will be used.

We use MEGA HOPEX for business process management, enterprise application portfolio management, governance risk and compliance, and data intelligence.

The continuous evolution of the platform is significant. The last version includes an AI assistant for helping customers with natural language questions. It has been marked as a leader in all the analysts' quadrants, like Gartner.

There could be continuous AI enhancements for the platform. 

We can add as many users as we want. The product remains stable. 

The product is highly scalable. We have customers with thousands of users. The tool can generate a static website for consultation with a large number of users. 

They could make the setup process easier to adapt and incorporate all the rules and commands on compliance subjects into the tool.

It might be a good idea to have two instances, one for testing upgrades and another for production. Customers usually start with one point and then expand to include the application portfolio, which is well-managed. The main benefit of the tool is its modular nature. You can start from any discipline and it integrates seamlessly with other areas.

The product is reasonably priced for the value it offers. There's a good balance between cost and features.

The product has many built-in reports and the ability to create custom dashboards and screens. It's excellent for supporting decision-making.

I advise others to ask for a demo or have a conversation with a representative. It will answer all their questions and address their requirements.

I rate MEGA HOPEX a nine out of ten.