Gartner - Magic Quadrant For Enterprise Architecture Tools-2020Q4

12/18/2020 Gartner Reprint
Licensed for Distribution
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools

Published 14 December 2020 - ID G00464467 - 63 min read
By Analysts Derek Miers, Akshay Jhawar
Moving beyond the traditional IT scope, EA tools now provide a shared, enterprisewide
repository and operating model for change. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation
leaders should select EA tools that support long-term business transformation,
modernization and innovation goals.
Market Definition/Description
EA tools allow organizations to examine both the need for, and the impact of, change. They help
organizations to shine a spotlight on themselves and their industry. They capture the
interrelationships and interdependencies within and between an ecosystem of partners, operating
structures, capabilities, processes, applications and technologies. They provide a central
repository to capture data and metadata about the artifacts that an enterprise cares about — all
types of objects and assets, and their related life cycles. Models represent the relationships
between these objects, and are themselves treated as assets that help describe and shape the
future of the enterprise. EA tools help with investment decisions at the level of both IT and the
broader enterprise. When models are combined with operational performance data, they can help
improve business outcomes and shape the construction and ongoing development of digital
platforms.
EA tools must include features for:
■ Repository
■ Modeling
■ Analysis
■ Presentation
■ Usability
■ Configuration and management
■ Frameworks
Optionally, EA tools include features that support:
https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-24IZZNU3&ct=201103&st=sb 1/36
■ Extensibility
■ Publication
■ Integration
■ Automation
■ Innovation management
EA Tools Enable Insights and Better Business Decisions

EA tools operate at many levels and across a wide spectrum, in one way or another reflecting:
■ Business strategies, objectives, capabilities, competitors, ecosystem partners, and

products/services, as well as the KPIs, metrics, risks and costs related to them.
■ Supporting technologies and applications, the services they offer, and interfaces between
them, as well as infrastructure providers and vendors that provide these things.
■ Customer segments and stakeholder personas, customer journey maps, as well as the
processes, value streams and activities that the organization depends upon to deliver value.
■ Business scenarios, change and transformation programs/initiatives, and including the

individual projects and development sprints in IT.
Increasingly, EA tools service a wide range of stakeholders from the boardroom and the C-suite,
across all business strategic and operational roles, and into the IT estate. EA tools are also
leveraged by a broad array of architectural and IT disciplines — information, solution, security,
applications and infrastructure.
With such a broad array of stakeholders, EA tools must also facilitate their consumption of, and
contribution to, the information contained within the repository. As stakeholders undertake their
work, these users switch between an ever-expanding set of views and visual representations of
the datasets contained in the repository. Vendors employ different strategies to handle and
represent the data and metadata in the repository including the use of:
■ Classification, color-coding and tagging of an object with iconography. Typically used to

represent metadata about an object — for example, maturity, complexity or state of an object in
a business capability map, business process, ecosystem map or change project.
■ Grids to tabulate objects and aggregate metrics. Whether processes, ecosystems, capability
maps or even a set of ideas, grids and lists provide a simple way of representing and editing
data and metadata in the repository. Most tools also include a grid interface to enable
integration with Microsoft Excel as a lowest common denominator import/export mechanism.
■ Graphs of all sorts to visualize data and metadata in the repository. Bubble charts are often
used to contrast three different dimensions of metadata about a set of objects — for example,
assessing business impact against maturity in the X and Y dimensions, with the size of the
bubble capturing complexity. Similarly, a “funnel” might represent the life cycle of innovation
ideas as they progress toward projects or are killed off.
■ Roadmaps and project plans to represent a future vision, how to get there and any
dependencies. Vendors use both static and interactive Gantt charts, timelines, Kanban boards,
processes, value chains and storytelling features to describe how the organization needs to
deal with change.
■ Filtering to support the needs of different business and IT stakeholders. These include
synchronizing elements in a portal view or dashboard, where selections made in one pane of
the view (portal) are reflected in others. Both 2D and 3D tools are used to traverse the different
dimensions of repository contents (objects/assets) and the relationships between them.
Filtering is also used to highlight elements related to an objective, plan, change or any asset of
interest. At a graphical level, dendro diagrams and node maps allow users to traverse
repository contents.
Due to their strategic importance and the growing importance of models in modern business, we
expect to see some of the big players in adjacent market territories make strategic moves —
either buying or launching their own EA tools.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools
Source: Gartner (December 2020)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Ardoq
Ardoq is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Ardoq functionality is delivered as a SaaS solution to
nearly all customers. Well established in EMEA with a growing North America (NA) presence, its
strongest industries are government and finance. The roadmap for Ardoq (the product) focuses
on automation, maintenance and representation; using algorithms and analytics, and
personalization of user experiences to build engagement and collaboration.
Strengths
■ Product Offering: The modern, cloud-native repository is highly flexible and adaptable. The
metamodel is developed and deployed “on the fly,” delivering just enough structure to meet the
need at hand, rather than needing definition upfront like most other EA tools. As a result, the
time to value is relatively short. Extensive surveying and collaboration features are
complemented by strong data ingestion tools with out-of-the-box integrations to products such
as ServiceNow. In-app chat with support resources is also commendable.
■ Innovation: As one of the early cloud-native EA tools, Ardoq has continued to differentiate itself
in several ways. For example, Ardoq uses branching of architectural elements and models (and
associated metamodel extensions). Another aspect is the NoSQL concept of not requiring all
data to comply with a single metamodel. The embedded storytelling functionality is another
strong differentiator.
■ Market Understanding: Recognizing the importance of model-driven business, Ardoq has gone
past the constraints imposed by a purely IT-portfolio-oriented view of the organization. While
that IT perspective is still important, Ardoq is looking to provide all stakeholders — strategists
and business leaders, enterprise architects, and CIOs, right through to developers — with a
shared, common business architecture and strategy.
Cautions
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Customer feedback and client inquiry reveal a lack of pricing
transparency, with marked differences between the stated pricing models and the final
proposals we review for clients.
■ Operations: Despite having recapitalized to fund expansion, roughly 80% of resources are
European-based. With a strong consulting/advisory segment to their value proposition, a
relatively small team and some large marquee clients, scaling the business remains a
challenge. Ardoq needs to ramp up its capabilities across many regions and dimensions.
■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Ardoq’s approach is industry-agnostic, although it has built some

business capability modeling use cases based on industry reference models — for example,
within local government. It relies on partners to provide vertical specialization and adaptation.
Prospective customers should satisfy themselves of its ability to meet their industry
requirements.
Avolution
Avolution is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its ABACUS product suite is available as SaaS, on-
premises or hybrid deployments. With customers spread across several industries, it has strong
operations in Asia/Pacific, EMEA and NA. The roadmap focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)
techniques to augment scenario analysis and recommendation systems, content creation, and
reporting, alongside downloadable algorithms for different industries or use-case-specific
metrics.
Strengths
■ Product Offering: Avolution has a comprehensive metamodel based on a graph database

technology. The vendor has sought to overcome the complexity inherent in EA tools through
the application of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), applying it to
support users as they struggle to maintain the content and integrity of the repository.
■ Innovation: Avolution continues its active involvement in the development of EA frameworks

such as The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and ArchiMate, which is also
reflected in its proactive engagement of customers to co-innovate products and solutions. This
approach to innovation also manifests through its patent strategy, support for academic
research, employees who dedicate a percentage of their time to innovation and its current
focus on AI within the product.
■ Sales Strategy: Avolution has bundled its core product into three distinct options focused on
the needs of individuals, small teams and large teams. With a cross-industry appeal and well-
established operations in most regions, Avolution is well positioned to serve the needs of
customers.
Cautions
■ Customer Experience: ABACUS is a tool designed for EA users; non-EA users are challenged,
although Avolution has taken steps to simplify the experience. However, even experienced EA
users still struggle to set up and configure the metamodel appropriately. This combined with
the lack of advanced in-application customer support functionality restricts a customer’s ability
to build long-term value in deployment.
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Avolution prospects and customers have indicated that it is often
difficult for the vendor to provide suitable resources for demonstrations and, later, to deal with
the complexities of customer support needs.
■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Avolution focuses on a broad-based market engagement strategy

through support for ArchiMate, TOGAF and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). It
employs minimal vertical industry sales and support resources, limiting its vertical industry
focus to standard frameworks such as Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN; banking),
Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD; insurance), and
enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM; telecommunications). Customers should ensure
that their industry needs are adequately covered.
BiZZdesign
BiZZdesign is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. The BiZZdesign product HoriZZon is delivered as a
fully hosted SaaS solution, on-premises, or as a hybrid of on-premises and cloud-based
components. Strong in EMEA, with a growing NA presence, its biggest industries are in financial
services and government. The product roadmap includes user experience (UX) improvements,
analytics and security upgrades, as well as API enhancements to handle a diverse set of data
feeds.
Strengths
■ Customer Experience: BiZZdesign’s consulting-led approach provides customers the
opportunity to have a jointly owned roadmap, with milestones to demonstrate value. This
entails the combination of software and services led by EA practitioners that focus on rapid
time-to-business value.
■ Marketing Strategy: BiZZdesign engages existing customers and prospects via social media,
blogs, podcasts, webinars and a wide cross-section of conferences (now mostly delivered
virtually). BiZZdesign also provides a simple and uncomplicated set of content focused on EA
challenges, delivered through a set of video and self-help mechanisms, which helps customers
resolve issues quickly and easily.
■ Market Responsiveness: BiZZdesign captures feedback and identifies new customer needs,
delivering new functionality and features into production through its biweekly release cycle. For
minor enhancements this means a couple of weeks from idea to implementation; whereas
more fundamental changes may take longer.
Cautions
■ Business Model: As a direct result of its focus on customer success, BiZZdesign’s business
model involves a high degree of consulting support. This limits the scalability of the business,
forcing the vendor to dedicate more resources to package consulting IP and partner
recruitment, which, in turn, limits the numbers of customers it can support directly.
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: BiZZdesign’s licensing is based on what it calls “Change Capabilities”

— effectively modules of functionality — plus what it calls “platform credits,” which are based
on different classes of users and the amount of API usage. Although not mandatory,
professional services charges linked to the “enablement” of each module are roughly the
equivalent of the subscription charges for that module in the first year. This combination of
module, usage and consulting is confusing for potential customers as it forces them to
question whether they are buying professional services or a product.
■ Geographic Strategy: The vendor focuses mainly on the U.S. and Western European markets,
which limits its direct representation in other regions. Other regions are represented by third-
party partners.
BOC Group
BOC Group is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its EA product, ADOIT, delivered on-premises or
via SaaS, has its main user base in EMEA, but it also has a growing presence in both NA and Latin
America, with a good distribution of customers across major industries. Roadmap enhancement
areas include the Internet of Things (IoT) and security, as well as improvements to customer
journey mapping and voice integration within the ADOIT mobile application.
Strengths
■ Marketing Execution: BOC Group has built an effective digital engagement strategy combining
centralized resources with those of the localized partner network. It employs multilingual,
multicultural resources to cater to the needs of customers in their native language.
■ Innovation: BOC Group has embraced innovation within its business model, for example, by
providing ADOIT:Community as a “freemium” starter point, which provides the vendor with low-
cost sales leads. Similarly, its multilingual sales and support team (predominantly German,
English, Spanish and French) positions it well for the digital future. At the product level, BOC
Group has completely deconstructed the underpinning components, enabling it to create
custom product bundles and reuse common functionality.
■ Offering Strategy: Several features in the product set stand out against the other tools
evaluated in this Magic Quadrant, including support for objectives and key results (OKRs) to
guide optimization, deep integration of Microsoft Office presentation mechanisms and design-
thinking tooling. Also of note was the “Architecture Time Machine,” which allows the user to
step through architectural models as they develop over time.
Cautions
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: The concurrent user-based pricing, along with a wide range of
optional add-ons, is meant to drive flexibility, when in reality, it drives complexity. This can make
it difficult for prospective customers to understand the product offering and associated pricing.
■ Marketing Strategy: With a historic focus on the combination of EA, business process
management (BPM), and governance, risk and compliance (GRC), BOC Group is now on a
journey to carefully reinvent itself. The challenges going forward involve educating both legacy
customers and potential prospects on the new brand promise, a focus on new use cases with
different personas, and the emergence of a shared operating model between business and IT.
■ Business Model: Despite a long history of providing EA tools, revenue growth is slow largely
due to the shift from perpetual to subscription licensing. Secondly, with virtually all resources
based in BOC Group’s headquarters and the majority of new customer wins still coming from
the home market, the vendor risks getting left behind by faster growing, nimbler, cloud-native
competitors with a more pronounced business-centric interpretation of EA.
Capsifi
Capsifi is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Primarily available as a SaaS offering with licensing
based on named users, Capsifi’s EA tool is called Jalapeno. Operations are largely Asia/Pacific-
based, with a growing sales presence in NA and EMEA. Clients are predominantly in financial
services, insurance, telecom and the public sector. The roadmap includes modularization for use
cases, support for OKRs, enhanced APIs and packaged connectors to common enterprise
applications, as well as AI-inferred insights.
Strengths
■ Market Understanding: Moving beyond the realm of IT, Capsifi has set out to democratize
insight and innovation, engaging all decision makers and operational staff. It has sought to
meet the needs of the broader stakeholder community in navigating change by focusing on a
shared, multifaceted view of the operating model of the enterprise.
■ Product: Jalapeno is built around a semantically aligned knowledge graph and an ontology for
business change that elegantly supports a wide range of functionality including inferencing and
reasoning on model content. Jalapeno can expose any query (or insert) as an encapsulated
RESTful service, easing integration with external environments such as ServiceNow or Jira.
■ Innovation: Capsifi has pushed the envelope of EA innovation by focusing on all aspects of the
operating model of the business, treating it as a core strategic asset. This puts the emphasis
on the future (rather than the current state) and elevates the traditional role of enterprise
architects, allowing them to more easily operate as internal management consultants.
Cautions
■ Overall Viability: Capsifi is growing rapidly and has solid revenue as well as “marquee clients”
and partners. However, it’s still a relatively young company. With its disruptive focus on the
business side of EA, customers will need to satisfy themselves that the company can capitalize
on this differentiation and win the race to scale.
■ Marketing Execution: To date, most marketing activity has focused on Asia/Pacific with some
presence in North America. To execute on its vision, Capsifi will need to increase its presence
and marketing in the Americas and Europe.
■ Offering Strategy: Given its focus on business operations, currently Jalapeno still lacks deep
integration with configuration management database (CMDB) tools such as ServiceNow, which
is the focus of many in the IT community.
Clausmark
Clausmark is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its EA tool is called Bee4IT, which provides
tooling to help manage EA, IT finance and program and portfolio management (PPM) within a
single repository. Clausmark operates in EMEA, NA and APAC, with the majority of clients in
manufacturing, financial and energy sectors. Its roadmap continues to focus on a platform-based
approach to provide transparency and analysis across the IT organization.
Strengths
■ Marketing Execution: Bee4IT focuses on the IT value chain, connecting strategy and planning
work to demand management and the delivery/fulfillment of requests in execution. Clausmark
targets customers looking to integrate the different IT roles and disciplines.
■ Marketing Strategy: With its core messaging to support holistic IT management, Clausmark
continues to focus on its core competencies like demand management, project execution,
governance and budgeting.
■ Offering Strategy: Clausmark’s proposition is focused on bringing EA, finance and portfolio
management together. With its deep integration into the core systems like ERP and IT service
management (ITSM), and modern ecosystems like Jira, Confluence, GitLab and Teams, Bee4IT
brings together all management relevant information.
Cautions
■ Product: Clausmark focuses on the business management of IT and has limited support for
each of the EA tool use cases that Gartner focused on in this assessment. Although Bee4IT is
strongest in application portfolio management, the tool lacks functionality and sophistication
relative to its competitors. Similarly, support for the management of the EA practice is weak.
Prospective customers should satisfy themselves that the product meets all their needs.
■ Innovation: Clausmark’s offering lags behind competitors in that its repository has restricted
functionality and it provides support for planning change and transformation, where the ability
to communicate future states is important. This reduces its appeal for customers undergoing
transformational efforts or for organizations that need to innovate to respond to disruptive
forces.
■ Business Model: Bee4IT does not focus directly on the different EA roles, such as business
architect, security architect, solution architect and information architect. Secondly, with its
resources concentrated in EMEA, face-to-face interaction with customers in other regions is
more difficult.
Enterprise Architecture Solutions
Enterprise Architecture Solutions (EAS) is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its EA tool is based
on the open-source “Essential Project,” which is then licensed as supported commercial products
in the form of a Docker instance or via cloud-based SaaS. Revenue is derived from customers that
purchase products and consulting support packages, rather than charging per user, module or
application. The roadmap includes virtual workspaces, derived personas and better organizational
collaboration.
Strengths
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: EAS has a highly disruptive approach to pricing — as a full open-
source solution, its model is not per-user-based. It focuses on a low-cost subscription service
to provide support to the product (with unlimited users). The net result for customers is an
order of magnitude less expensive than the equivalent offerings from established and
emerging vendors alike.
■ Market Understanding: EAS realizes that EA tools need to communicate at the CxO level,
allowing better decision making across the organization. With wider participation, business
colleagues and IT specialists can contribute to, and benefit from, data-driven assets. This
creates better alignment in the business, and enables coordinated change and a rationalized IT
portfolio.
■ Marketing Strategy: The vendor has changed the dynamics of competition through its free
open-source offering, which generates almost-free sales leads for its supported operation. This
innovation enables the vendor to focus its resources on driving self-service processes into
marketing and sales. Effectively, that means identifying and working through partners to
leverage their resources with customers, creating a win-win-win scenario.
Cautions
■ Business Model: The disruptive business and pricing model of EAS potentially creates more
demand than it can operationally service in a financially viable way. For long-term success, the
vendor needs to focus its efforts on partner recruitment and growing the skills and
competencies of those partners.
■ Marketing Execution: The market engagement model of EAS differs significantly from that of
its more established competitors. Its low-cost business model limits the funds available for
event participation and market outreach.
■ Operations: EAS must consider scalability of the business; carefully allocating its limited
resources, and ensuring all investments continue to drive broader enterprise adoption and
encourage more of its open-source users to convert to paid offerings.
erwin
Erwin is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. The erwin product is called erwin Evolve and is
delivered both on-premises and in a hosted offering. Customers of erwin Evolve are
predominantly in EMEA and NA, with banking, finance and pharmaceuticals the strongest
industries. The roadmap for erwin Evolve includes moving to a fully web-based offering, with
reusable components, better ideation support and increased use of machine learning.
Strengths
■ Sales Strategy: The vendor is well positioned to expand its footprint within major accounts by
cross-selling erwin Evolve to the large customer base of its sister products — erwin Data
Modeler and erwin Data Intelligence. In order to win net new customers, it has shown a very
focused, more flexible pricing approach in competitive situations.
■ Geographic Strategy: With the global erwin Evolve product unit leveraging local sales and
support resources, erwin has relatively strong international operations.
■ Market Understanding: Erwin understands the EA tool market, including the role of business
architecture and the need to support collaboration and engagement across the organization. In
support of that, erwin targets large enterprises in highly regulated industries with complex data
and processes, where data governance and compliance are critical.
Cautions
■ Product or Service: While the erwin product roadmap describes plans for a fully web-based
offering (Evolve NextGen due for delivery in 1Q21) at the time of writing, the product lacks the
modern architecture of many competitors. The current product lags behind competitors who
have focused on the challenges of building a shared enterprisewide business operating model.
■ Marketing Strategy: The primary market engagement mechanisms of erwin focus on the
challenges of the IT organization, business process management, risk and compliance. This
creates challenges in supporting the broader stakeholder community, who may focus on
creating better business alignment, business model reinvention, customer-oriented value
propositions and navigating business change.
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: The current pricing model supports both perpetual licenses and a
more forward-looking, subscription pricing model. While major customers will seek
enterprisewide licenses, the per-user pricing for model developers may encourage smaller
organizations to limit the number of people they have accessing and contributing to the
repository.
LeanIX
LeanIX is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite is a cloud-
native SaaS product with a primary focus on IT portfolio management. LeanIX has a strong
customer presence in manufacturing, pharmaceutical and finance. It has direct operations in NA
and EMEA. LeanIX’s roadmap includes a module to support digital business transformation,
which moved from beta to production at the end of September 2020, and integrations to support
business intelligence and innovation.
Strengths
■ Overall Viability: LeanIX recently completed an additional round of funding, which it plans to
use to expand its market presence and accelerate product innovation. As a result of targeting
organizations engaged in multiyear programs, such as digital transformation, migrating from
on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, or moving from project to product, LeanIX embeds
itself in the success of those programs.
■ Customer Experience: LeanIX has grown rapidly based on its focused marketing and dedicated
customer success program. This guides customers through onboarding and regular check-ins,
as well as building success roadmaps, and provides integrations and engineering guidance.
Gartner user reviews reflect that it has a highly user-friendly interface with an easy-to-use
platform and easy access to support. In addition, LeanIX also provides online video tutorials to
reduce the learning curve for new users.
■ Business Model: With its vision focused on IT portfolio management, LeanIX continues to
deliver on its ecosystem strategy by adding further out-of-the-box integrations like with Apptio
and Lucidchart. LeanIX has unbundled its product to make it more modular and to enable
customers to pick and choose elements of the tooling that are most valuable to them.
Cautions
■ Market Understanding: LeanIX has chosen a laserlike focus on the needs of corporate IT. In
support of that, LeanIX emphasizes use cases such as cloud governance and microservices
management, even as the market refocuses EA toward strategic business enablement and
internal management consultancy. As a result of its emphasis on IT, LeanIX has yet to fully
embrace the wider opportunities associated with a shared business operating model, strategic
business alignment, continuous business model innovation and customer-oriented value
propositions.
■ Offering Strategy: The vendor’s product offering focuses on application portfolio management
with several out-of-the-box integrations. However, LeanIX often depends on this ecosystem of
partners for key areas of functionality — for example, more advanced PPM tooling relies on
ServiceNow, whereas detailed modeling relies on Signavio and Lucidchart. Each of these
integrations requires separate licensing.
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: LeanIX core product licensing is based on the number of applications
and technologies that are referenced/under management in the repository. While this may suit
some scenarios, for many large organizations this makes it difficult to predict the annual
spend. Furthermore, given the ecosystem of partnerships, prospective clients should carefully
consider their desired use cases and the separate licensing required for each of the technology
partners’ products.
MEGA International
MEGA International is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Available on-premises, or via public or
private cloud, its HOPEX Platform integrates EA, application portfolio management (APM),
business process analysis (BPA) and risk management into a single platform. Its customers and
operations are geographically diversified, with most resources in EMEA. Its roadmap includes
automated data discovery mechanisms, AI-based intelligent advice, and a continuing focus on UX,
modernization and scalability.
Strengths
■ Marketing Execution: MEGA International has reinvented its brand identity via effective
campaigns that focus on persona-based use cases that depict the business value of EA tools.
The vendor carefully targets its messaging to a prospect’s stage in the buying cycle. To
increase awareness, it has established partnerships with industry bodies such as BIAN, and
greatly increased online events in response to the pandemic.
■ Operations: MEGA International gathers product utilization and performance data directly from
the Azure-based SaaS product. For the on-premises versions, the dedicated support team has
regular customer contact. In this way, the vendor can more easily adapt its tooling in response
to customer usage and needs.
■ Geographic Strategy: Geographic growth was a key priority for MEGA International in 2020. It
has a strong network of global partners and local alliances to support this ambition. The
vendor has boosted its partner programs in Africa and Eastern Europe, and it continues to find
new partners to fuel Asian expansion.
Cautions
■ Marketing Strategy: Although MEGA International positions HOPEX as supporting business-
outcome-driven EA, its interpretation of business architecture focuses on the scope of
business process management, information architecture and portfolio management. This
misses the opportunity to address broader business-centric challenges such as the
development of a shared business operating model, business model reinvention, better
business alignment and customer-oriented value propositions.
■ Offering Strategy: Inquiry conversations with Gartner clients point to a relatively long learning
curve, with new HOPEX users often feeling overwhelmed. While customers like the promise of
the HOPEX tool, they can find it challenging to set up. They can struggle to fully understand the
implications of how to deliver against their use cases. Even with an accessible and extensible
metamodel, new customers may want to rely on consultancy support from the vendor to
ensure they are set up correctly.
■ Revenue: As new customers increasingly opt for long-term subscription licenses, revenue
growth has slowed at MEGA International; however, it remains profitable. Also, the vendor has
lost market share and customers to new market entrants that have taken a strong, cloud-native
approach.
Orbus Software
Orbus Software is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its offerings leverage Microsoft 365 and
Visio, with iServer available both on-premises and in the cloud; whereas iServer365 and Solutions
Hub are purely cloud-based. Its operations are spread across the EMEA, NA and APAC regions,
with clients mainly in government, finance and healthcare. The roadmap includes support for
actionable insights and remote work management, along with microservices and cloud
governance.
Strengths
■ Marketing Strategy: Orbus Software makes strong use of its Microsoft-centric strategy to build
buy-in from a wider audience beyond EA. The vendor is attempting to capitalize on the high
adoption of Microsoft 365 in midsize and large enterprises.
■ Market Responsiveness: Orbus Software’s response to the entry of SaaS into the EA tools
market was its SaaS products iServer365 and Solutions Hub. It further released its Strategic
Portfolio Management (SPM) solution to serve portfolio management and decision-making
needs of clients.
■ Geographic Strategy: With customers across EMEA, NA and APAC, Orbus Software has an
extensive global strategy. It provides differentiated pricing for different regions based on EA
maturity and economic factors. To further support its rest-of-the-world strategy, iServer
supports multiple languages such as German, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese and, soon,
Portuguese and Japanese.
Cautions
■ Customer Experience: When new customers consider a broad array of options, they can
struggle to fully understand the implications of how to deliver against their use cases. Even
with an accessible and extensible metamodel, new customers may want to rely on consultancy
support from the vendor to ensure they are set up correctly. Moreover, while the vendor has
significantly improved usability in its iServer365 product, some customers have found the
modeling interface, built on top of Visio, dated and in need of improvement.
■ Offering Strategy: Through its reliance on a “Microsoft first” strategy, the vendor assumes that
there is a strong correlation between Microsoft adoption and the needs of EA. While leading
with that Microsoft orientation provides an interesting talking point, it focuses on the
technology rather than on business-oriented needs such as the development of a shared
business operating model, business model reinvention, better business alignment and
customer-oriented value propositions.
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: With its two core EA products, Orbus Software has different types of
licenses, making it difficult for prospective customers to assess the total cost of ownership.
Perpetual licensing is available for iServer on-premises, with a tiered pricing plan based on the
number of authors. The Solutions Hub is offered as an additional component to the on-
premises tools, but its subscription is based on different bands. On the other hand, the SaaS
offering — iServer365 — includes Solutions Hub with similarly structured pricing bands.
Planview
Planview is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Planview’s EA tool is Planview Enterprise One,
which uses EA principles to underpin its PPM functionality; while Planview Spigit provides
ideation and innovation management capabilities. Customers span all industries and operations,
and the vendor has a focus on NA and EMEA. Future plans include better support for OKRs,
interactive roadmapping and impact assessments.
Strengths
■ Market Understanding: Planview frames EA within its project and portfolio tooling, providing
the enterprise with an integrated view of change. Its approach is to engage a wide variety of
stakeholders both to provide information to, and consume the benefits of, the core EA
repository.
■ Market Responsiveness: Planview clearly articulates how it drives customer success and cites
interesting projects from marquee clients known for high standards. Having moved to
continuous (monthly) product release methods, the vendor is well positioned to deliver new
functionality to its customers.
■ Product: With the functionality of the acquired Troux product well embedded into Planview
Enterprise One, the vendor spans the entire spectrum from strategies and objectives, to the
applications and technologies of EA, into the scenarios and project portfolios of change
initiatives. Strong visualization tools complement the offering.
Cautions
■ Marketing Execution: Having set out the vision where EA acts as a critical cornerstone for an
integrated view of change across the enterprise, Planview needs to execute and convert that
into broad market acceptance. Given its primary marketing focus is around PPM, the difficulty
is convincing EA customers who do not recognize Planview as an EA tool provider.
■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Planview applies an industry-agnostic approach to market

engagement and relies on partners for vertical expertise. This generalist/horizontal go-to-
market strategy limits its competitiveness, especially for customers looking for more vertically
focused solutions.
■ Geographic Strategy: Planview concentrates on the North American and Western European
markets, which restricts its appeal to customers in other regions. Outside of the core regions, it
relies on partners.
QualiWare
QualiWare is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, QualiWare X, focuses on facilitating
collaboration between EA and non-EA staff. Operations focus on EMEA and NA with customers
across government, energy, finance and manufacturing. The roadmap focuses on providing
support and methods for smart cities (IoT), better 3D visualization, and support for the federation
and virtualization of data across systems.
Strengths
■ Market Responsiveness: QualiWare was quick to provide better collaboration support for key
external stakeholders. With support for customer journey mapping and business ecosystems,
the product supports enterprise architects taking an outside-in assessment of business
operations and processes. It has also added a new 3D visualization feature and developed an
AI service to help import unstructured data into structured models.
■ Operations: In addition to direct presence in EMEA and NA, QualiWare has extensive
operational support from more than 35 partners worldwide. Its partners are focused in regions
and countries such as South America, Canada, South Korea and Australia.
■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: QualiWare demonstrates good coverage in many industries,

including government, manufacturing and energy. It also provides a set of industry-specific
capability frameworks for industries like banking, insurance and energy.
Cautions
■ Marketing Strategy: QualiWare’s messaging continues to focus on collaboration, cost

reduction, performance optimization and digital transformation. This misses the opportunity to
position EA as providing better business alignment and actionable insights, and as the core of
a shared operating model of the organization.
■ Business Model: QualiWare is profitable, although it has not grown significantly in the past few
years as it has lost potential customers to new market entrants that have taken a strong, cloud-
native approach. Additionally, the move from perpetual licensing to subscription-based SaaS
licensing has impacted short-term growth. With further investment in vertical and geographical
strategies, QualiWare could improve its brand image in regions outside of Europe. Furthermore,
while functionally rich, the product now needs simplification to make it more accessible to new
customers.
■ Customer Experience: Although QualiWare has mechanisms to enable easy data import, the
challenge with this type of tool is keeping the catalog of hierarchically structured processes
and capabilities in sync with the applications, technologies and associated metadata. Also,
while there is context-sensitive help within the tooling and customers can leverage videos and
training materials on the website, the tool lacks the in-app customer support available from a
couple of competitors.
Software AG
Software AG is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Available on-premises, via a SaaS offering and as
a hybrid, Software AG’s core EA tool offerings are Alfabet and Alfabet FastLane, with ARIS
licensed separately as a process modeling repository. Its operations are geographically
diversified, and clients span all industries. The roadmap includes usability enhancements and
better IoT support, as well as AI-enabled analysis and decision support.
Strengths
■ Market Understanding: Software AG saw the disruptive potential of competitors with
consumable, lightweight offerings and responded with Alfabet FastLane, providing a reduced
set of functionality and a lower-cost entry point. The vendor also understands how EA needs to
evolve both to encompass the established IT-focused domain as well as to facilitate innovation,
collaboration and alignment across the organization.
■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Software AG has industry-specific, dedicated resources focused on

key verticals to support its sales and presales resources. It also has industry-specific EA
customer councils and supports a wide variety of frameworks and reference models.
■ Operations: The EA tool business leverages Software AG’s global sales network and an
extensive network of partners. Its core operations are certified through ISO 9001, ISO 27001
and SOC 2 compliance for cloud/SaaS delivery.
Cautions
■ Product: Rather than integrate ARIS and Alfabet acquisitions to provide a seamless user
experience across process modeling and EA, Software AG still maintains the two products
separately. Customers wanting business process management alongside their EA repository
are often encouraged to configure, maintain and pay for both Alfabet and ARIS. However,
Software AG does offer mechanisms for interoperability between the two repositories. This
dual product strategy exacerbates the challenge that customers face in keeping their
information repositories up to date.
■ Customer Experience: Gartner Peer Insights reviews and inquiries for Software AG’s EA
products indicate difficulties in sustaining implementations and overall usability challenges due
to the complexity of the products. Another consistent concern is the blurred boundary between
Alfabet and ARIS, which is confusing for prospective customers.
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Alfabet FastLane’s pricing bundle is published on the website. This is
not the case for the broader Alfabet product. Pricing for that product is based on a combination
of the components selected and a per-user calculation. As a result of the per-user pricing, it
may become difficult to justify engagement of large numbers of business and IT colleagues.
Despite better discounts at higher numbers of users, given the large scale of these
organizations, there is still a relatively large cost for Software AG’s products.
UNICOM Systems
UNICOM Systems is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Delivered on-premises or stand-alone,
the UNICOM EA product is System Architect suite, which is complemented by its Focal Point
product for PPM (separately licensed). Primarily sold in North America, UNICOM is strongest in
the defense and telecommunications industries, where it supports all the key frameworks,
notations and methods. Its plans include better support for Systems Modeling Language
(SysML).
Strengths
■ Sales Strategy: UNICOM Systems continues to target the public sector, government and
defense markets, which makes its sales strategy highly focused and simple.
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: UNICOM Systems has predictable and simple pricing models that
facilitate shorter sales cycles.
■ Geographic Strategy: Given its focus on U.S. federal government and defense markets,
UNICOM Systems concentrates on the North American market.
Cautions
■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: While the parent of UNICOM Systems (UNICOM Global) has a
significant worldwide presence, there are few System Architect customers outside of the public
sector and government market. This limits the ability of UNICOM Systems to focus on serving
other vertical markets.
■ Product Strategy: The core EA tool, System Architect, has been in this market for more than 30
years and was acquired from another vendor (who also acquired it). The core development
team has focused on the tool for more than 20 years and UNICOM has continued to invest
additional resources, recruiting some that worked on the original product. However, without
significant reinvention of the foundations to securely support a SaaS offering, this tool will
continue to get left behind by the more nimble and adaptable competitors.
■ Innovation: The vendor has modernized some aspects of its user interface, but its approach to
extensibility makes for a very complex user experience. The core of System Architect is
available only on Windows-based machines, with few capabilities for innovation and ideation
management.
ValueBlue
ValueBlue is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its BlueDolphin SaaS-based repository
product targets agile business transformation and portfolio management. With operations
focused in EMEA, its clients are primarily small to midsize organizations in finance, government
and education sectors. Its roadmap includes in-context reporting to enhance decision making.
Strengths
■ Product or Service: ValueBlue has improved within its niche by adding support for canonical
data modeling, capability modeling, extensible relationships and more presentation features. It
provides improved collaboration support with notifications, messaging and a presentation
mode. BlueDolphin offers modules for enterprise architecture, business process management
and data modeling.
■ Market Understanding: Echoing the need for EA agility, ValueBlue provides a collaborative
central repository. With support for different non-EA personas, like guest links for contribution
on specific objects, it is moving in the right direction to position itself beyond the limitations of
application portfolio management.
■ Customer Experience: With a structured customer success program, BlueDolphin has a

favorable customer experience. ValueBlue offers an in-platform knowledge base and an
interactive onboarding tour including collaboration features for different personas. It also
features in-app chat support with immediate response.
Cautions
■ Geographic Strategy: Based in EMEA, ValueBlue has relatively small operations in APAC and
NA. While the vendor is working to open offices outside of its home market, that effort is still
nascent. Therefore, prospective customers outside the EMEA region should investigate local
product support and local implementation partners.
■ Operations: ValueBlue is a small company with almost all of its staff in EMEA. As it expands, it
must develop a geographic strategy and related local resources to maintain its customer
experience and support.
■ Overall Viability: Despite ValueBlue’s rapid growth in the past few years, it is still primarily
limited to Dutch- and English-speaking countries in EMEA and is focused on the government
and financial sector. Developing mind share programs will benefit the vendor, building
awareness in other industry verticals and regions as it expands.
Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
Added
Capsifi — Although Capsify was founded in 2013, this was the first year it met Gartner’s inclusion
criteria for this EA tool Magic Quadrant.
Dropped
Sparx Systems — Sparx Systems was a Niche Player in last year’s Magic Quadrant. It declined to
participate in the research for this year’s iteration. Although Gartner’s Peer Insights indicate more
than 20 reviews of Sparx were added over the past 12 months, this data did not enable the rigor
we have used to analyze the vendors this year. The result is that the vendor was excluded for
2020.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

The inclusion criteria represent the specific attributes that analysts believe are necessary for
inclusion in this research. To qualify for inclusion in the EA tools Magic Quadrant, vendors must
meet all the criteria as set forth across the following three dimensions:
■ Performance: To qualify for inclusion in the 2020 Magic Quadrant, during 2019 the vendor had
to have either:
■ $8 million or more per year in EA tool perpetual licensing revenue
■ $5 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in SaaS subscription revenue
■ Achieved 50% year-over-year revenue growth for the past three years (as validated by the
vendor’s financial officer)
Perpetual license revenue includes software license, maintenance and upgrade revenue for higher
tiers of product, but excludes hardware and professional services. A SaaS subscription includes
annual contract value but excludes any professional or support services included in such yearly
contracts. For multiyear agreements, include only the contract value for the first 12 months.
■ EA Tool Market Focus: Your organization must have an installed base of at least 50 production
customers (i.e., across different companies) who use your product exclusively (enterprisewide).
Said go-to-market products/offerings must be available to all clients as part of a standard
release as of 31 March 2020. Product/offering must support all use cases and include/embed
all core capabilities, plus at least half of the optional capabilities as described in the Market
Definition section.
■ Market Momentum: Have demonstrated market momentum in 2019 through a minimum of at

least five new customer wins (net new logos), in each of a minimum of three of the four major
geographic regions (major global regions are defined as EMEA, APAC, North America and
South America). That is a total of 15 new customers in three regions in 12 months. Based on
this information and other sources, Gartner then developed a weighted “market momentum
score” derived as follows:
■ 40% based on the market wins assessed against the variety of vertical markets, and regions
represented.
■ 30% derived from the comparative numbers of Gartner inquiries (sourced from Gartner
internal systems).
■ 30% Gartner analysts’ opinions about the extent to which a vendor and/or product shows
significant potential to disrupt the market.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
We evaluated vendors’ Ability to Execute in the EA tool market by using the following dimensions
and criteria.
Product or Service: We assessed the core product and services the vendor offers to the EA tool
market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets and skills, whether
offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and
detailed in the subcriteria. We assessed any reliance on third-party products, especially where
products required separate licensing. We also assessed products on how well they met the core
and optional capabilities, as defined in the market definition. We used subcriteria and weightings
to calculate scores for:
■ Core capabilities.
■ Optional capabilities
■ Other differentiators
Overall Viability: This included an assessment of the organization’s overall financial health, and
the financial and practical success of the business unit. This also included an assessment of the
likelihood that the organization will continue to offer and invest in the product, as well as advance
the product’s position within the organizational product portfolio. We looked at all forms of
growth, including organic growth as well as acquisition and securing additional funding. We
valued organic growth more highly than other types of growth. Subcriteria used in this section
included:
■ Percentage of revenue used for investment (for example, R&D, sales, vertical and regional
strategies, as well as future acquisitions).
■ Percentages of new customers acquired compared with previous years.
■ Change in annual revenue over the past three years and the profitability of the EA tool business.
Sales Execution/Pricing: We explored the vendor’s sales execution and pricing including its
presales activities and the structure that supports them. This included their responsiveness in
sales engagement, deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overall
effectiveness of the sales channel. We also evaluated renewal rates compared to reported losses
due to nonrenewals. Subcriteria used include:
■ Analysis of revenue including (but not limited to) new EA tool customers, renewal rates,
average deal size and list prices.
■ Clear and transparent pricing policies, preparedness of the vendor to publicly disclose its
pricing structure, and how easy it is for prospects and customers to understand quotations.
■ Flexibility in negotiation.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: We considered the vendor’s history of responsiveness
to customer requests and changing market needs. We give high marks to vendors that were able
to respond quickly and change development and/or company direction to meet the needs of an
evolving marketplace. Subcriteria used include:
■ Mechanisms for listening to and responding to customer needs.
■ Number of product releases/updates per year.
■ Time to market for new product versions and enhancements
Marketing Execution: We looked for clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of marketing programs
designed to influence the market, increase product awareness, and build a positive perception of
the product/brand in the minds of customers. Along with web presence, mind share drivers
included a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth,
social media, referrals and sales activities. Subcriteria used include:
■ EA-specific events run or attended.
■ Ease of finding specific/targeted EA-related information on the organization’s website.
■ Mind share programs aimed at growing the EA market.
Customer Experience: We sought evidence of how products and services enabled customers to
achieve anticipated results. We gave high marks for an excellent track record of successful
implementations. We looked for clearly articulated mechanisms for ensuring customer success,
how customers receive support, and at what cost. We examined organizational responsiveness,
availability of user groups, and service-level agreements. We also factored in how customers
experienced doing business with the vendor and their perceptions of the organization. Subcriteria
used include:
■ Explanations of how the vendor supports its customers, from onboarding to resolving issues.
■ Client feedback on responsiveness (based on Gartner inquiry and Peer Insights data).
Operations: We evaluated the vendor’s ability to meet its goals and commitments. Factors
considered included the quality of the organizational structure, such as skills, experiences,
programs, systems, the underlying infrastructure and other vehicles that enable effective and
efficient operations. Subcriteria used include:
■ Quality and other standards the vendor has achieved.
■ Number of different roles engaged in a typical sale and number of approvals required to
confirm a deal.
■ Numbers of employees dedicated to major business functions across: (1) strategy, (2)
development, (3) marketing, (4) business development, (5) sales, (6) runtime operations, (6)
support and (7) professional services.
Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Product or Service High
Overall Viability High
Sales Execution/Pricing High
Market Responsiveness/Record Medium
Marketing Execution High
Customer Experience Medium
Operations Medium
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: We evaluated the vendor’s understanding of customer needs and how it
translates that into products and services. We looked for vendors to demonstrate a clear vision of
their market, as well as how they listened for, and understood their customer’s underlying needs
and used that to shape or enhance the market. Subcriteria used included:
■ Trends that the vendor expected will affect its EA tool offerings over the next three years.
■ Demonstrated understanding of the different use cases for EA tools and the needs of the
different “personas” that use such tools.
■ Clarity on how the vendor sees the EA tool market evolving and new use cases emerging.
Marketing Strategy: We sought clear, differentiated messaging that was consistently

communicated internally, and externalized through the website, social media, advertising,
customer programs and positioning statements. Subcriteria used include:
■ Clear, consistent messages targeted at EA practitioners and their needs.
■ Clarity of messages to different types of architecture audience.
■ Marketing initiatives in support of the above.
Sales Strategy: We wanted to understand the vendor’s sales strategy and how it leveraged direct
and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication. We also examined the use and reliance
on partners to extend the scope and reach of the vendor, focusing on the levels of expertise and
technology required, as well as the partner’s services and customer base. Subcriteria used
include:
■ Profiles or personas of target customers and the different sales strategies that focus on the
unique needs of customers of different sizes, levels of maturity, geographic locations, etc.
■ Size and positioning of dedicated sales resources for EA tools.
■ Number and size of partners delivering consulting services in support of clients setting up an
EA program.
Offering (Product) Strategy: We explored the vendors approach to developing a compelling

product and service vision with an emphasis on market differentiation, functionality, methodology,
and features as they map to current and future requirements. We used subcriteria and weightings
for:
■ Core capabilities
■ Optional capabilities
■ Other differentiators
Business Model: Our assessment explored the design, logic and execution of the vendor’s
business proposition. This included support for customers in different deployment modes
alongside the vendor’s business capabilities, its overall value propositions, related profit models
and the resources at its disposal. Subcriteria used include:
■ Evidence of sustainability and profitability.
■ The ratio of revenue between EA tools, consulting, support and maintenance.
■ How long-term customer relationships are established.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: We assessed the vendor’s strategy to meet the unique needs of
individual market segments. We considered how the vendor directed its resources (sales, product
and development), skills and offerings to focus on support for different vertical markets.
Subcriteria used include:
■ Demonstration of strategies to target and support different industries, and any partnerships
that address specific vertical markets.
■ Support for vertical industry standards and frameworks.
■ Percentages of revenue expected from the top vertical/industry sectors.
Innovation: We explored the vendor’s innovation vision, considering its resources, expertise and
capital for investment. We were looking for a strong product vision that pushes the market
forward and ideas for future differentiating business capabilities. Subcriteria used include:
■ Demonstrations of how the vendor has been innovative (rather than “following the pack”).
■ Examples of how the vendor proposes to deliver future innovation covering both product and
business model — especially in response to the needs of digital business and the impact of
disruptive, digital technologies.
Geographic Strategy: We looked at the organization’s strategy and ability to direct its resources,
skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of regions outside its “home” or native region.
Subcriteria used include:
■ Owned resources versus those of partners in each of the four major geographic regions (North
America, EMEA, South America and Asia/Pacific).
■ How prospects are converted to clients and how support is provided globally.
■ The percentage of customers in each of the four major geographic regions.
Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Market Understanding High
Marketing Strategy Medium
Sales Strategy Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy High
Business Model High
Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium
Innovation High
Geographic Strategy Medium
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders have a deep understanding of the realities of the market, a reliable global delivery record,
an ability to influence the market’s direction, along with an ability to attract and keep a growing
customer base. In the EA tool market, leadership implies understanding, facilitating and
supporting the strategic role enterprise architects play at a much broader level — they are more
business-strategy-focused, with a shared operating model at the business level that helps drive
the relationship with IT. Leaders must not only demonstrate a market-leading vision, but also the
ability to deliver on that vision.
At this point in development of the EA tool market, four vendors have sustained excellence in both
execution and vision long enough to demonstrate effective leadership. Like vendors in the
Visionary quadrant who are busy pushing the limits of what’s possible, the vendors in the Leaders
quadrant also demonstrate an ability to execute at a global scale.
Customers should note that a Leader is not always the best choice. A focused, smaller vendor
can provide excellent support and commitment to suit individual needs. Other vendors may
provide a certain capability — such as a focus on your industry, better cost performance ratio, or a
commitment to specific features or functions — that is important to your organization. This more
focused type of vendor would not appear as a Leader in the overall EA tool market; but, within a
specific market segment, it may well be treated as such.
Challengers
Challengers excel in their ability to attract a large user following, but this ability is limited to a
subset or a segment of the market. For that target audience, Challengers are effectively Leaders,
but that specificity presents a barrier to adoption for those outside that subsegment. For instance,
in the EA tool market, a Challenger may have a strong, proven presence or following, but lacks
sophistication in the evolving use cases for EA tools. Alternatively, a Challenger might understand
those use cases well and achieve a strong following in its home market, but still struggle to
deliver the same levels of success on a global scale.
Four vendors are rated as Challengers in the EA tool market this year. These players generally
have a traditional, IT-centric vision for EA. They are not as aggressive as the Leaders and the
Visionaries in pursuing business strategy and shared operating models, and in promoting better
business alignment.
Although Challengers typically are of significant size and have significant financial resources, they
may lack elements of the vision we expect, innovative ideas and plans, or an overall
understanding of market needs. In some cases, Challengers may offer products that dominate a
large, but shrinking, segment of the market. Challengers can become Leaders if their vision
develops. Large companies may move between the Challengers and Leaders quadrants as their
product cycles and market needs shift.
Visionaries
Visionaries in a market are the innovators driving the market forward by responding to emerging,
leading-edge customer demands and by offering new opportunities to excel. Typically, these
vendors appeal to leading-edge customers and may even have minimal mainstream presence or
name recognition. Their ability to deliver sustained and dependable execution in the mainstream
enterprise market is not sufficiently tested. In the EA tool market, Visionaries enable model-driven
enterprises, focusing deeply on the business and its strategy rather than on the traditional fixation
of EA on the scope of IT.
Within the EA tools market, there are four Visionary vendors, including one that combines EA with
portfolio management and enterprise agile planning supporting the strategy-to-delivery pipeline.
Another expands the definition of what’s needed with an interactive digital operating model based
on a semantic repository and focus on business transformation. Another offers high flexibility,
extensibility and scalability with graph analytics. While the final vendor is highly disruptive to the
established players with its open-source offering for unlimited users and low-cost support service
subscription.
Visionaries can eventually grow to become Leaders. Alternatively, they may decide to limit their
target markets to focus on their core competencies, core technologies or existing customers and
become Niche Players. They could also develop their specialties to advance in execution and
become Challengers.
Niche Players
Niche Players operate in a subsegment of a market, or they have a limited ability to innovate or
outperform other vendors in the wider market. This limitation may result from a focus on a
particular area of functionality, vertical industry or region, or because they are new entrants.
Alternatively, Niche Players may struggle to remain relevant in a market that is moving away from
them. Niche Players may have reasonably broad functionality, but limited implementation and
support capabilities and relatively limited customer bases. Niche Players do not demonstrate a
leading vision for their offerings.
The EA tool market has four Niche Players. Some of these vendors have transitioned from other
markets and need to focus fully on EA in order to progress in this market. A couple remain
stagnant in their vision and have limited ability to execute. Others lack the modern architecture of
many of the vendors in the Challengers, Leaders or Visionary quadrants.
Assessing Niche Players is more challenging than assessing vendors in other quadrants. This is
because some could make progress, while others may not execute well, and/or lack the vision
and means to keep pace with broader market demands. Even if a Niche Player seems perfect for
your requirements, it is probably developing contrary to the market’s overall direction, in which
case it can represent a risky choice with limited long-term viability.
Context
This Magic Quadrant focuses on EA tool vendors’ placement in the market, not specifically on the
capabilities of their products (for a more detailed evaluation of the products, see Critical
Capabilities for Enterprise Architecture Tools). Only one of the 15 evaluation criteria in this Magic
Quadrant relates to product or service functions. The other 14 evaluation criteria focus on the
vendors’ ability to meet the requirements of this market (for details, see the Inclusion and
Exclusion Criteria section, and the Evaluation Criteria section).
As part of our evaluation process, we used five key use cases that we believe are important to
enterprise architects, as well as senior leadership, that vendors need to support to maintain
relevance in the EA tool market:
■ Capture, structure, analyze and present models. EA practitioners need to model future and
current-state business capabilities, processes and rules, information, resources, ecosystems,
applications, products, and services.
■ Support change, transformation and optimization. Enterprise architects plan and track change,
including facilitating the development of new services and products, as well as supporting
acquisitions, mergers and divestitures.
■ Assess and manage an evolving IT portfolio. Delivering business value means designing
services, managing IT portfolios and solution architecture, guiding technology projects,
cost/revenue optimization and risk mitigation.
■ Enterprise architecture management. To meet the demands of stakeholders, EA leaders need

to deliver an agile and compelling set of services, and manage the knowledge and resources at
their disposal.
■ Innovation. This includes helping organizations track and leverage emerging trends and digital
technologies with support for structured, flexible and iterative methods and tools.
Market Overview
There are two types of organizations interested in EA tools — those who are buying one for the
first time, and those that want to validate their existing choice or switch to a new product. EA
teams considering their EA tool usage can:
■ Mistakenly limit their scope to cataloging the life cycles and constraints of the existing IT
systems, applications and technologies. Traditional EA teams tend to limit their EA tool usage
to focus on the needs of IT colleagues, identifying and deconstructing the IT-related elements
and components that constrain the organization.
■ Miss the opportunity for EA tools to capture the business architecture and strategy of the
organization. When seen in that broader business context, EA tools provide a shared, single
source of the truth and the basis for a shared operating model across the wider enterprise
(beyond the scope of IT).
While the technology systems are important, they represent only a subset of the needs of the
wider enterprise. For example, a change project may revolve around the emergence of a new
product that involves bringing on new suppliers, with a fundamentally different customer
experience. Planning for that launch involves a completely different set of stakeholders.
Moreover, when rooted in the business strategy and goals of the organization, the discipline of EA
creates a better-aligned enterprise that uses a cohesive and comprehensive set of models to
shape and drive its future. An EA tool helps capture and relate all those different models and
elements.
Indeed, this sort of activity is part of a wider trend, where organizations are becoming more and
more “model driven,” for example delivering:
■ Operating models and business models: To help the organization consider its goals, objectives
and future structure.
■ Service and ecosystem models: To support a composable business architecture, enabling the
organization to quickly adapt.
■ Design thinking models: Customer journeys and personas create a more customer-focused
enterprise.
■ Process and decision models: To support operationalization and automation both within a
workgroup and across applications.
■ Change programs and project plans and sprints: Models of how the organization will
coordinate its resources to meet the challenges in hand.
The Leaders and Visionary vendors in this Magic Quadrant understand and support that broader
vision. They have set out to support organizations working across that wider change canvas. The
scope of that change is now very much wrapped in a cloud-based delivery model. Participants up
and down the value chain are increasingly collaborating, and the use of web-based software
continues to accelerate.
However, when it comes to EA tools, there is a big difference between “web enabled” and “cloud
native.” Most of the traditional EA tool vendors have added cloud access to their SQL-based
repositories and are transitioning away from their legacy fat-client architectures. These tools live
on in their setup and configuration mechanisms. On the other hand, new market entrants have
adopted a stronger cloud-native stance, architecting the core of their products around modern
graph databases and elastic compute functions. We have explored the implications of these sorts
of features in the Critical Capabilities research that accompanies this Magic Quadrant.
Challenges for EA Tool Deployments

Given the scope of EA tools — from the board room and C-suite, across the entire enterprise and
into IT and the EA team — there are three major challenges that the organizations must overcome,
including:
■ Initially structuring and continually restructuring the repository. Most EA tools pride
themselves on the “extensibility of the metamodel.” What that really means is that an EA tool
can represent just about any sort of business concept or create the ability to capture/derive
any metric. In other words, once you move past the out-of-the-box structure provided by the
vendor, you must work out which problems you are really trying to solve, and then how to
represent that in the metamodel structure. This is not for the fainthearted as it involves looking
into the future to predict the value desired, how to get there within this specific tool, and who
should contribute to and consume that value. This is a “wicked problem” situation, where the
understanding of the challenge only unfolds the more deeply one gets into it. Often, EA tool
vendors have built significant professional services and consulting practices to help customers
overcome this challenge; charged separately as enablement of add-on modules, or set-
up/configuration services.
■ Populating the repository with consistent and usable information. First, the organization must
inventory its capabilities, applications, technologies, etc. Then it needs to capture appropriate
metadata around each (as defined in the metamodel), making the right relationships between
the individual elements in the repository. Much of the information needed is the responsibility
of colleagues and subject matter experts (SMEs) across IT and the wider business. That
means setting up appropriate access controls and engaging these SMEs to enter their data
(typically using survey mechanisms). It also implies structuring the tool correctly such that
SMEs receive the right context, allowing them to capture accurate and usable information.
■ Maintaining that information and evolving its use over time. This is the major obstacle that
inhibits organizations from realizing long-term value from their EA tool investment. Typically,
organizations fail to appreciate the heavy maintenance burden associated with these
repositories and the complex models built up within them. The software licenses associated
with the widespread deployment are dwarfed by the need to regularly revisit the processes and
models in the repository. The tools themselves usually support some of this activity, with out-
of-the-box workflows and reminders to ensure regular attestation and update of this
information by SMEs, but most organizations end up with a specialized team to maintain that
data.
On top of those complications, successful adoption and value delivery are framed by the need for
careful organizational change management. The EA tool itself is usually only a small component
of the wider change in governance and business practices of the enterprise on the journey to
business maturity.
EA Tools Often Come With a Hefty Price Tag

The traditional pricing model that operates in this market inhibits organizations attempting to
overcome the challenges of EA tool adoption. With a few exceptions, EA tools’ license costs are
driven by a combination of modules/features selected and tiered bands of user pricing. Those
users are typically categorized across power users, content contributors and content consumers.
The common consequence is a flexible, but complex, pricing mechanism that often results in
increasingly expensive license fees with growth in the user base or functionality.
As a consequence, customers tend to limit tool usage to just the core of the EA team, which, in
turn, means that the EA team acts as gatekeepers. This almost guarantees that the true value of
the EA repository fails to materialize — rather than broad adoption, the use of the EA tool
becomes the provenance of the inhabitants of the “EA ivory tower.” Using EA tools in this way
limits their overall value to the enterprise. Gartner recommends opening up the information
contained in the repository to a broader set of decision makers (e.g., for investment prioritization,
creation of a bill of materials for delivery teams, analysis of compliance and predicted impact
over time, etc.).
While some vendors provide free, or very-low-cost publishing and integration mechanisms for the
content of the repository, the difficulty comes in drawing the line between content consumption,
contribution and modeling. With dominant vendors attempting to rationalize their pricing models,
the major development is the emergence of a viable open-source offering — where any number of
users can freely access the repository. Customers only pay for a relatively low-cost support
subscription.
Market Trajectory
EA tools provide a centralized, single source of truth about the enterprise. EA tools capture the
constraints of the IT assets, processes, value streams, change programs and projects in support
of business strategy, and the ecosystem of relationships it has up and down the value chain. As
such, they provide a critical resource to help organizations mature and improve their business
operations as well as the enterprise operating model. They are increasingly integrated directly
with tools in adjacent categories such as PPM, CMDB and innovation.
For example, many of the vendors considered in this research provide tooling to integrate directly
with leading providers such as ServiceNow. This trend will continue with EA tools providing the
ability to accurately describe the connective tissue that ties together all the different elements of
the patchwork quilt needed to support the modern enterprise. We also expect to see some of the
big players in these adjacent territories flex their muscles, either buying or launching their own EA
tools.
Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

ACORD The ACORD Reference Architecture provides an enterprise architecture
framework for the insurance industry. It consists of business processes,
product models, development frameworks, information models, data
models and capability models, which help organizations to run, develop,
modify and maintain various insurance industry applications.
AI Artificial intelligence
API Application programming interface, which is a software intermediary that

allows two applications to talk to each other.
BIAN The Banking Industry Architecture Network is an independent, member-

owned, not-for-profit association to establish and promote a common
architectural framework for enabling banking interoperability.
BPMN Business Process Model and Notation
CMDB A configuration management database is a repository that is designed to

store many of the components of an information system. A key goal of a
CMDB is to help an organization understand the relationships between
different components and track their configuration.
ERP Enterprise resource planning
eTOM An enhanced Telecom Operations Map is a framework for enterprise

processes in the telecommunications industry.
GRC Governance, risk and compliance
ISO 27001 The International Organization for Standardization. This is the standard that
sets out the specification for an information security management system.
ISO 9001 The international standard that specifies requirements for a quality
management system.
ITSM Information technology service management
Metamodel A metamodel or surrogate model is a model of a model, and metamodeling

is the process of generating such metamodels. Metamodels catalog each
type of component in an enterprise architecture, provide detailed definitions,
document the relationships between one component and another, define
the structure and configuration of the architecture itself and help users
understand the structure and behavior of the architecture.
ML Machine learning
NLP Natural language processing
NoSQL NoSQL databases (aka “not only SQL”) are nontabular, and store data
differently than relational tables. NoSQL databases come in a variety of
types based on their data model. The main types are document, key value,
wide column, and graph.
OKRs Objectives and key results
RESTful Representational State Transfer. This is an architectural style for distributed

hypermedia systems and was first presented by Roy Fielding in 2000 in his
famous dissertation.
SaaS Software as a service
SOC 2 System and Organization Control; SOC 2 is an auditing procedure that

ensures your service providers securely manage your data to protect the
interests of your organization and the privacy of its clients.
SysML The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is a general-purpose modeling

language for engineering systems.
TOGAF The Open Group Architecture Framework
Note 1. Model-Driven Business

“Model-driven business” is Gartner’s term to describe the models of business architecture. These
models provide a shared communication mechanism between business and IT, such that when
the business wants to change its operations — or the applications/technology supporting those
operations — it uses models as the primary medium to clarify meaning.
Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This
includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether
offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and
detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the
financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business
unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and
the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and
market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver
the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and
other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen
to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer
programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth
of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current
and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or

capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.
© 2020 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc.
and its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior
written permission. It consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization, which should not be
construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from
sources believed to be reliable, Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy
of such information. Although Gartner research may address legal and financial issues, Gartner does not
provide legal or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and
use of this publication are governed by Gartner’s Usage Policy. Gartner prides itself on its reputation for
independence and objectivity. Its research is produced independently by its research organization without input
or influence from any third party. For further information, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and
Objectivity."
About Careers Newsroom Policies Site Index IT Glossary Gartner Blog Network Contact Send
Feedback
© 2020 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

Gartner - Magic Quadrant For Enterprise Architecture Tools-2020Q4

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Gartner - Magic Quadrant For Enterprise Architecture Tools-2020Q4

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gartner - Magic Quadrant For Enterprise Architecture Tools-2020Q4

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

12/18/2020 Gartner Reprint

Licensed for Distribution

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools

EA tools must include features for:

■ Conﬁguration and management

Optionally, EA tools include features that support:

EA Tools Enable Insights and Better Business Decisions

■ Business strategies, objectives, capabilities, competitors, ecosystem partners, and

■ Business scenarios, change and transformation programs/initiatives, and including the

■ Classification, color-coding and tagging of an object with iconography. Typically used to

Source: Gartner (December 2020)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Ardoq’s approach is industry-agnostic, although it has built some

■ Product Offering: Avolution has a comprehensive metamodel based on a graph database

■ Innovation: Avolution continues its active involvement in the development of EA frameworks

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Avolution focuses on a broad-based market engagement strategy

■ Sales Execution/Pricing: BiZZdesign’s licensing is based on what it calls “Change Capabilities”

Enterprise Architecture Solutions

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Planview applies an industry-agnostic approach to market

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: QualiWare demonstrates good coverage in many industries,

■ Marketing Strategy: QualiWare’s messaging continues to focus on collaboration, cost

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Software AG has industry-speciﬁc, dedicated resources focused on

■ Customer Experience: With a structured customer success program, BlueDolphin has a

Vendors Added and Dropped

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

■ $8 million or more per year in EA tool perpetual licensing revenue

■ $5 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in SaaS subscription revenue

■ Market Momentum: Have demonstrated market momentum in 2019 through a minimum of at

■ Percentages of new customers acquired compared with previous years.

■ Mechanisms for listening to and responding to customer needs.

■ Number of product releases/updates per year.

■ Time to market for new product versions and enhancements

■ EA-speciﬁc events run or attended.

■ Ease of ﬁnding speciﬁc/targeted EA-related information on the organization’s website.

■ Mind share programs aimed at growing the EA market.

■ Quality and other standards the vendor has achieved.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability High

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Marketing Execution High

Customer Experience Medium

Source: Gartner (December 2020)

Marketing Strategy: We sought clear, differentiated messaging that was consistently

■ Clear, consistent messages targeted at EA practitioners and their needs.

■ Clarity of messages to different types of architecture audience.

■ Marketing initiatives in support of the above.

■ Size and positioning of dedicated sales resources for EA tools.

Offering (Product) Strategy: We explored the vendors approach to developing a compelling

■ Evidence of sustainability and proﬁtability.

■ The ratio of revenue between EA tools, consulting, support and maintenance.

■ How long-term customer relationships are established.

■ Support for vertical industry standards and frameworks.

■ Percentages of revenue expected from the top vertical/industry sectors.

■ The percentage of customers in each of the four major geographic regions.