Dear Archi Forum,
I work for a Bank in Venezuela, we have evaluated commercial software/tools to facilitate the incorporation of the practice of EA in the company.
The conclusion: There are very good tools, however, the implementation process is complex because they are more oriented to the tool than to the value that the practice of architecture can provide within the industry where it is or is intended to be implemented. Their licensing and implementation costs are very high and usually do not end up convincing the sponsors about the return on investment.
My recommendation: The focus of the architecture practice should be on the value it generates within the industry where it will be applied. Going to have a well governed repository, which allows to respond things of value to the business easily and within the reach of those interested. So that it allows them to advance to a new business result.
We evaluated Archi vs. The Essential Project and my recommendation was Archi, among the reasons is the noise generated by adding ontological themes to modeling. Being that our framework is based on TOGAF and this speaks in terms of Archimate. My recommendation was Archi.
What would we like to be incorporated in Archi?
Multi-user and collaborative facility. Which is in progress.
Extend the tool so that it covers the entire TOGAF architecture repository structure and the artifacts link to the model.
Incorporate a graph database to facilitate impact analysis at a greater depth level.
In my case we are doing a work to define/create the meta architecture (Phase A) that will start by modeling BIAN Landscape v6.0 (Phase A, B and C), Hybrid Cloud and dockerization (Phase D), DevOps (We are working on how).
Best regards,
José Alfredo Guillén
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-guillen-12160085