Avolution ABACUS Reviews

I worked with this solution to access the code that other people had previously worked on. This included accessing the database to assess the methodology that people had used for development. In doing so, we had to evaluate some technical aspects of this solution.

We worked with an on-premises deployment.

This product is very strong in terms of the meta-model because you can customize a lot according to the business plan. You can customize the models to use, what kinds of objects, and what kinds of attributes, so you can customize almost everything before you start the project, as well as during the project. If you face new challenges or issues then you can dynamically customize according to the business needs.

The user interface needs improvement because it is not user-friendly. They need dashboards because I think that it is really important in the market at the moment. Dashboards seem to be the solid bridge between the business and IT departments, and I didn't see anything there. The people that are going to decide to buy the product are the top management, and they are not interested in seeing the everyday operational aspects. Rather, they want to see results, which is why you need dashboards. They have an open door for integration with the model, but that's all.

Integration with third-party tools needs to be improved. We did some research on this, and they have open doors with certain tools, but at least in this assessment, it was not clear how to do it. They say that you can do it, but we could not figure out how. So, this is an odd part that I think they can make more clear. I asked whether they have APIs available, or whether we had to create them from scratch, but I didn't get an answer.

There is a feature called the versioning of the models, and it is not easy. It is hard because it requires a lot of technical skill to work with a model, process, or another artifact.

If they want to expand in the European market then they are going to have to improve their technical support.

We had some technical problems, so I would say that the product is not stable. Sometimes a restart was required.

I think that it is possible to scale this solution because this is what they are saying to the customers, but it is not so clear.

Technical support for this solution needs to be improved. I am in Luxembourg, and I think that the issue is more or less in Europe. I think that they have a central office in Europe, in London, and sometimes the customer was complaining about them.

Our customer had some technical problems and they did not receive adequate answers. It was taking a lot of time to get the correct answers, so I don't think that they have knowledgeable enough people in London. I think that the issues had to be escalated to the technical team in Australia, and it takes a lot of time to get responses from them.

I have worked with similar products in the past, including ARIS. The difference is that the customers are very happy with the support. They are based in Germany, and when the customer asks a question they get an answer very quickly.

It is also a more stable product than ABACUS and does not crash as often. They can continue working, whereas with ABACUS the customers are stopping because of the crashes and they do not know what to do.

To me, these are the biggest differences between these two solutions.

The initial setup of this solution is a little bit complex. You can customize everything, so it is powerful, but it is not easy to do. Sometimes the customers prefer a black-box solution, where they know what they can do.

In this product, the package is very open and you can do everything. On the other hand, it is not easy because you have to prepare many things first, and customize many things before you start. This is like many products and not a problem with the solution. Rather, it's so powerful that the customization requires more time and more cost to set up.

I think that it would take at least a month and a half, or perhaps two months to set up a project. I don't think that it's possible to do it in less time. This is very subjective because I did not do it, but this is based on my feeling after what happened to us.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider both the technical support and stability, as well as the technical aspects of the product.

Based on my experience, this is not a product that I recommend at the moment.

When the vender launches a new version they should guarantee the core things are really working so that they do not have problems like this. They need to focus on what is critical and important in order to last in the market. 

The integration with other tools should be more open and clear, as it seems to be quite closed and proprietary. The market does not like this kind of thing. If the customers are not trusting enough then they are not going to buy the product.

This is a very powerful product and it is very customizable, and the concept of the product is good, but they need to improve a lot, including the user interface. We also had some crashes when we were using this solution.

This product may be easy for the IT team to use, but it is not designed for them. It is designed for business users. This is why the user interface has to be more user-friendly than it is.

In terms of it being a powerful tool, I would rate it a ten out of ten. However, the user interface is very poor, which I would rate a one or two out of ten.

Overall, I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

The portfolio management is really good. The dashboard and the reports for the end-to-end impact analysis are really good. These are the features I found most valuable in Avolution ABACUS.

What Avolution ABACUS can improve is their presence in the Middle East, e.g. they could have more partners in the region. Their local presence could also be scaled more, particularly in customer service.

Mobile dashboards for executive management out of the box is a feature I'd like to see in this product in the next release.

I've been using Avolution ABACUS for 10 years. I used it in my previous company, and in my current company, I'm trying to get it, but I'm still waiting on budget approval.

Avolution ABACUS is a stable product.

Avolution ABACUS is scalable. I have used it with complex architecture and in a complex environment where there was a lot of data in the repository. The performance was acceptable. It was good. I've never faced any slowness or hiccup while using it.

The technical support is okay.

As an EA, I didn't have a hands-on experience of setting this tool up myself, because it's the responsibility of a different team, but from the documentation and the interaction with the team, it's not that complex. Avolution ABACUS has a straightforward set up.

The cost of Avolution ABACUS is reasonable, given the features they offer in comparison to other tools. Their price tag is really, really okay.

I evaluated System Architect.

Avolution ABACUS is a really good product. I would rate it the best among the rest.

My rating for Avolution ABACUS will depend on the maturity of the team that uses it. If you're really good and you have good people who understand enterprise architecture, then they can really make good use of the tool. Assuming that the team is mature in enterprise architecture, I would rate this tool an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for handling the enterprise architecture planning in the company. We are in banking debt processing. We are currently using it for handling the application domain architecture.  

Something that is really valuable to us in using this tool is actually really very simple and generic regarding integrating application data components. Sometimes there is a component in an application that I want to use as a module or whatever as part of something else. Abacus actually provides functionality to make that very easy.  

For example, if you are using something like Graph Database you can create integrations to graphically represent data from other sources. The product is structured to support integrations like this. This is the number one most valuable feature.  

The second most valuable feature is the automatic detection and generation of the linking to the other applications. This is very good and simplifies using the product dramatically.  

One of the usual issues that I have and would like to see improved is something I have already talked to the company about through email support. It is regarding the support of UML (Unified Modeling Language). They are supporting a very old release of UML. I think the version of UML that they are supporting is version 2.1. The specification of this UML appeared 11 years ago.  

We need this update to manage parts of our modeling more efficiently. It seems Avolution does not think it is something that is of general user interest. We hoped that it was because it is important for what we do. It saves us a lot of time, actually. I hope they will take my suggestion and update it as it will make the product more useful. That is really our main issue for our situational needs.  

Some people will not utilize ABACUS as an enterprise solution. But actually, we want to extend the usage of this product and include it in our design detail for our enterprise architecture. To link this solution into our architecture is our ultimate objective.  

There are probably some things that Avolution could add to the product to enhance it and keep up with what some other products are introducing. For example, reverse engineering should be supported. It also does not support some of the common programming languages, like Java. I do stay aware of what other competing products are doing and I can see these features in other tools already. It would be good if they were implemented.  

We have been using Abacus for one-and-a-half years.  

The stability of the product is very good. We have not experienced a single problem with crashing or glitches.  

Currently, we have ten licenses. Eight of them are already being utilized. So we have eight current users up and running, and we still have two licenses because we hope to expand usage to other users. But there is no scalability requirement in our set up. If we needed to scale more than the ten licenses that we have, we could just purchase more.  

Even though we do not have problems with the product and the stability, we have probably used the technical support team a lot. We sometimes need them for advice on how to implement something or to answer other questions. They are actually very responsive and their responses are very clear.  

Positive

We did not have a previous tool to do architectural modeling and planning. ABACUS was our first choice for this type of solution.  

The deployment of the solution took one whole week. But actually we needed to spend more time with the tool so that week was not only for the deployment.  

The vendor came and led some of our team in training. I remember we were already detailing with Avolution how to do customizations and metadata modeling before they even came here for the training and installation. They came to give us personalized training for two days. Their implementation visit included helping us to deploy the initial metadata model and also the customization of the tool. Considering all that we accomplished, it was really quite fast and a productive week. But all the extra things that we accomplished is why the setup took one week to complete.  

The solution has been running for a year-and-a-half. It hardly requires any maintenance. We did one upgrade and that was all the maintenance that has been required. It is even very friendly in its usage of resources and storage. If we needed it, we add it. There is almost no effort required for the maintenance.  

One of the reasons why we selected this solution is because it came at a very reasonable price. I can not say it was cheap, but it was reasonable. Other comparable enterprise architecture tools are very expensive or were at the time we were making the choice.  

I really recommend this product to people who are considering it. For what it does it is very good and a reasonable price.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Avolution ABACUS as an eight-out-of-ten.  

The primary use case for this solution is for our customers, but it's confidential so I cannot release that information.

The deployment model we are using is on-premises.

The most valuable feature is the traceability, you can trace any object to the other.

This solution needs to improve resource usage because it has a heavy browser. 

It is easy to use, but it takes time to load and to run other programs.

It's not about usability; it consumes a lot of resources and memory. The open-source alternative is very light and easy to use on any device.

This solution is expensive for some people's budgets and they need to offer a Lite version at a cheaper price.

While this is one of the most powerful tools on the market, it does not integrate well with Microsoft Office or others. In the next release, I would like better integration.

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

I have not needed any technical support for this solution.

The initial setup was average.

The deployment was not difficult. It took a couple of hours.

I am not an implementer or a service provider, I offer consultation and provide solutions in enterprise markets.

Part of my job is to recommend and select the tools that are suitable for my clients and stay within their budget. 

There are times where the open-source tool is the most suitable, whereas at other times I can offer a more complex solution.

I would recommend this solution because it has some powerful aspects, but it won't fit everyone's budget.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use the on-prem model. Our primary use is for enterprise architecture. 

The most valuable features are the catalog and the diagram. 

The workflow and the collaboration need improvement. 

It is stable. I haven't had any issues with it. 

It is vastly scalable but you can't run it on a Mac or Linux so it has limitations. We don't have plans to increase the usage. We're happy with what we're using it for. 

Their technical support is good. I get good responses from them from a technical perspective. 

I started off with this solution. 

I would definitely recommend it but it depends on the use case. If you want a data model of flexibility and catalog scalability I would recommend it from that perspective. 

For an architecture practice, there's more detailed architecture than enterprise architecture so for that, I wouldn't recommend Abacus. It's just for different use cases that Abacus is good to have. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Its Analytical and Simulation Engine.

It is great for EA Repository and various EA analysis.

It needs more flexible analysis parameters and more capability as a BPM tool and doing BPM simulation, compared with Bonita BPM or Bizagi.

Since 2015.

No.

No.

It needs more support from the Federated EA.

Best.

Best.

Yes, Abacus is more powerful and easier to implement.

Straightforward.

We are a consultant.

Yes, ARIS, MEGA, and Troux.

It's a good product with a complete set of templates, frameworks, and notations.

There are plenty of features available such as the ability to test applications for issues and a user-friendly dashboard.

In the future, there could be improvements in integration and enhancements. A few important enhancements I would like to see would be advanced analytical reports, collective analysis, and real-time analytics. This would increase customer satisfaction.

I have been using the solution for approximately three and a half years.

The solution is stable.

We have had a good experience with technical support. They are helping us handle the digital transformation.

The setup is lightweight and straightforward.

There is a subscription for this solution. We are on an annual subscription because you sometimes receive special offers the longer you subscribe.

I have used three other EA solutions in the past, such as MEGA HOPEX, and this solution is better.

This solution is the leader in enterprise architecture, I would recommend it to others.

I rate Avolution ABACUS a six out of ten.