ABACUS Tops New Survey Into Enterprise Architecture Visualization Tools

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AVOLUTION, developer and supplier of software solutions for IT strategy, planning and enterprise modelling, today announced that its flagship Enterprise Architecture tool, ABACUS®, received the highest score of 19 EA tools surveyed by Technische Universität München (the Technical University of Munich), Germany, as part of their research into the ‘state-of-the-art and future development’ of Enterprise Architecture Visualization Tools. 

The survey, conducted by the Software Engineering for Business Information Systems (SEBIS) group, part of the University’s Informatics faculty, undertook extensive research into both the EA vendor community’s product offerings as well as the needs of over 100 enterprise architecture practitioners. Visualizations play an important role in EA management and are required for a variety of purposes. Visualizations help EA practitioners to analyse and communicate complex information, for example, as well as in promoting stakeholder involvement and increasing transparency.

By including feedback from industry experts, initiated from an on-line survey sent to over 1,000 EA practitioners in late 2013, the SEBIS research endeavoured to identify: which visualization types are currently used in practice or are planned to be used; what typical usage scenarios each EA visualization type supports; and new visualization types required in industry.

Twenty-six such visualization types were identified, which were then compared with those available in the EA tools of the vendor community. Of the 26 identified, ABACUS was able to produce 25 visualization types from its current product range, more than any other tool surveyed. These visualizations include: Matrices, Cluster Maps and Timelines; Flow Diagrams, Entity Relationship Diagrams, and diagrams based on industry standard notations BPMN, EPC, UML and ArchiMate;  Bar charts, Bubble charts, Pie charts, Scatter charts, Radar charts and Sunburst charts; and more specialist visualizations including Geographic Maps, Gauges, Tree Maps, Dashboards, a Business Model canvas, and full 3D visualizations.

Avolution founder and principal, Dr Tim O’Neill, said:

“The Technical University of Munich are highly regarded in the Enterprise Architecture industry for the thoroughness of their research work into EA techniques and practices, so we’re delighted to have been identified as the top vendor in this visualization survey.”

Information on the Technical University of Munich, the SEBIS research group, and the EA Visualization Tool Survey, are available at: https://wwwmatthes.in.tum.de/pages/6u8f5ki1t2yz/EAVTS2014-Enterprise-Architecture-Visualization-Tool-Survey .

 

ENDS

About Avolution

Avolution provides the ABACUS® solution which is unique to the enterprise modelling space in that it can create multiple solution alternatives (architectures) and then run various simulations (Discrete Event, Monte Carlo etc) against each alternative for metrics such as Performance, Cost and Availability.

Being built on a completely agile, open and flexible XML-based hierarchical repository, ABACUS offers support for more frameworks out-of-the-box than any other tool on the market, and users can create their own bespoke or hybrid repository meta-model through simple right-clicks and drag-and-drops in a matter of minutes.

 

About Technische Universität München (the Technical University of Munich)

Technische Universität München (TUM) is one of Europe’s top universities. It is committed to excellence in research and teaching, interdisciplinary education and the active promotion of promising young scientists. The university also forges strong links with companies and scientific institutions across the world. TUM was one of the first universities in Germany to be named a University of Excellence. In the international Shanghai Ranking (ARWU), TUM was rated the number one German university in 2011, 2012, and 2013. As one of 13 faculties at TUM, the Computer Science / Informatics faculty enjoys an excellent reputation, and delivers internationally respected research results.

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