BiZZdesign HoriZZon Reviews

We use it as our enterprise architecture tool, for keeping our enterprise architecture documentation. That not only includes infrastructure components but everything else as well. For example, what are the different components that we have, enterprise-wide? What are the technologies being used? What are the technology services being used? Who are the business actors and what are the business departments? What are the business capabilities that we have in the organization? We keep everything in BiZZdesign. 

We are also using the tool for architecture governance and the gating process, and all the different business-view needs. Whenever they're implementing any application, they document the solution architecture of that application in BiZZdesign. It then goes through our weekly governance process in front of our architecture review board. Based on the documentation quality and on certain standards, we evaluate whether this application is fit for implementation. If not, we provide feedback: what the corrections are that need to be done. Once again it goes through that feedback process and, once approved by all the relevant stakeholders, the application is ready for implementation.

There are certain applications that are transformation-type projects. We use BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio to document the current architecture, the transition architecture, the future architecture, as well as the network, monitoring, infrastructure, and security views. These are the things that we usually cover as part of the governance process.

It is running on AWS cloud. We don't use the desktop version.

We are, of course, able to generate visualizations and charts that can be understood by people who are not enterprise architects. Primarily, it depends on the person who is creating that chart and how much information they put in. But if they use it properly and create the charts with all the relevant information and publish it, it is definitely going to help the business users and others understand what we are doing.

For example, our CTO wanted to have a "10,000-foot view" of everything. Previously, that was not possible. Now, with BiZZdesign, we have started publishing those views in HoriZZon. She just logs in to HoriZZon and can take a quick glance at the different artifacts published there and provide feedback. That view includes the different business areas and covers things like the costs we are incurring, the technologies being used, and our overall reference architecture. It includes almost everything.

Among the valuable features is the ability to document standards. For example, we have mandatory operating standards that need to be followed by every application and every architecture. We use things like table charts and pie charts for documenting the costs incurred across the systems. All of these are good features.

Another good feature is for documenting architectures. We use the classic view to put together all the components and to establish the relationships among them.

A third important feature is the HoriZZon part, where we actually publish all these views. We control access privilege in BiZZdesign, restricting edit permissions, meaning Enterprise Studio access, to only the architects. HoriZZon, on the other hand, is exposed to pretty much everybody across the organization, because it provides view-only access.

The breadth of capabilities the solution provides is also good. The best part is that it follows the ArchiMate principle, which is something of an industry-wide accepted principle.

First and foremost within the scope of improvement for the solution would be the cost. It's very costly, which restricts us from using it more extensively and requires us to get approval from the CFO level on how many people we are going to expose the tool to and how many people are actually going to use it. For example, if a particular team has three architects, we always restrict access to only one because of the cost impact, even though those three architects may be taking care of three different areas. We first expose it to one architect and let him complete his part and then we revoke the permission from that person and give it to another architect to take care of his areas, etc.

So every time somebody requests BiZZdesign access, we have to recalculate our existing licenses and how we can effectively prioritize and reuse them. We understand that enterprise architecture is not cheap, but I still believe that there is room for improvement from BiZZdesign on this issue.

The second point is the user experience. When somebody is documenting solutions in BiZZdesign, it's not very user-friendly at all. There is a learning curve for people to get accustomed to it. The drag-and-drop features and adding properties are okay. But suppose somebody has drawn something incorrectly. The way that type of thing is reverted requires training. There are things that a user can't figure out on his own. He definitely has to sit with somebody from BiZZdesign, if his organization does not have any experience with the solution. Or, if his organization has people with experience, then he has to sit with a person who has already worked on it. Otherwise, he will have to spend quite a significant amount of time learning it. It's not at all user-friendly and requires a lot of practice to get the hang of it. I feel that there is a lot of room for improvement here. A tool like this should be intuitive.

I have seen table charts where, if the chart is a little too big, it does not fit in HoriZZon and it is not at all visible. Even if you zoom out and scroll, it's nasty. I don't know an enterprise architecture tool like this—and HoriZZon, in particular, is meant for viewing things. The visibility of things and the user experience in HoriZZon are horrible. There have been several times where we could not publish a chart properly and we had to break the chart into small tables and create multiple artifacts, creating a complete mess. This should be seriously taken up by BiZZdesign because there is a lot of scope for improvement in terms of usability. It's not at all good, unfortunately.

There is documentation, of course, and the documentation is good, but not everything is written in the documentation. You will definitely need some intervention either from BiZZdesign's paid consultancy or from a person who has experience working with BiZZdesign. Without that, there will be areas where people will be stuck, for sure. They cannot just figure it out on their own, reading the documentation.

In addition, if an organization does not have experience with the solution and needs to work with BiZZdesign, the BiZZdesign consulting cost is also very high.

I would rate the solution’s ability to help us manage costs and risks when it comes to the IT and application portfolios in our organization at six out of 10. The pros in this respect are that we can load the costs, create charts, and create different artifacts and publish them to HoriZZon for the key stakeholders to look at. The con is that, while BiZZdesign does have API capabilities, they come with a different licensing strategy. Also, when we looked into it about one year ago, it was not that mature. We have various systems where these costs are stored. We have to export the data from those systems into a spreadsheet and then import it into BiZZdesign. The entire process is manual.

Cost is something that is dynamic. For example, we are heavily using AWS cloud, and we get a bill from the vendor every month. How can we monitor those costs? BiZZdesign is not suitable for that kind of monitoring. There are other tools, like CloudHealth by VMware, that give us more of a real-time view of these costs. Whereas with BiZZdesign, because it's a completely manual process, every month-end somebody has to confirm receipt of the bill, get the export of the cost from the system, import it into BiZZdesign and then notify the CxOs. But it's not a real-time view. By the time we load the cost, it's already late. It's a six out of 10 because it has some capability, but it does not have the capability of showing data in real-time. And it's not only cost data. It has connectivity with ServiceNow and SQL Server, but nothing else. We mostly rely on spreadsheet input, but that's a completely manual process.

Finally, BiZZdesign has some capabilities in terms of business process flow, but it's not comparable with other tools. Our organization is already spending a lot of money on BiZZdesign. But since BiZZdesign does not have business-process documentation capabilities, our organization had to go for another product called BusinessOptix, to document the business process. We are actually losing the goal of having everything in a single repository. Our enterprise-architecture-related artifacts are in BiZZdesign and our business-process-related artifacts are in BusinessOptix. A compromise solution we have come up with is that, because BiZZdesign is able to provide a hyperlink, we have included all the business process flows as hyperlinks from BiZZdesign, so that people can refer to them from BiZZdesign. But we ended up having two licenses for two very costly products. We have a few users in this one and a few users in that one and some users in both systems. From a business process perspective, the bottom line is that BiZZdesign is not ideal.

If these things can be improved, a lot of people will start using BiZZdesign. These are the areas that are restricting organizations from using it.

I have been using BiZZdesign HoriZZon for around close to a year.

The stability of HoriZZon is good. There have been outages, at times, a couple in the last year, but they have not been very frequent. Because it's an enterprise architecture tool, a couple of outages for a couple of hours is acceptable because it is not something that is going to destroy the business. Maybe people are not able to document, or people are not able to view something, but it's not stopping the business. The effect of the outages has been minimal and the number of outages has also been minimal.

We don't have a huge number of people in our organization. Scalability-wise, there has been no issue. We are growing the number of artifacts and there is a huge difference between the number of artifacts we had initially and what we have now. But we have never faced issues in this regard.

We have 15 to 20 designers and about 50 users. Those 50 people are mostly using HoriZZon, while the 20 people are using both HoriZZon and the Studio. And there are three or four people who are admins.

Their technical support is good. They're really professional and they respond quickly to any queries. They are good, but they're costly.

Return on investment is definitely there because we never had a single view of everything. Although we are not there yet, there is still a lot more work to do, we are slowly getting there.

Be very clear about your objectives, what you want to use BiZZdesign for. It is an enterprise architecture tool. It's not for documenting low-level designs. A good use case would be if an organization is trying to transform its overall enterprise. They obviously need to know what they currently have, where they want to go, and how they are going to get there. If these kinds of things are being discussed in your organization today, then business design tools like BiZZdesign will be very effective and valuable. But if you are only looking to document solutions, BiZZdesign might not be a good investment because BiZZdesign is very costly. You should probably look for other tools.

We use this solution to publish our customers' enterprise models.

I find the publishing on the web feature to be the most valuable. The interface is intuitive enough as well.

The users of BiZZdesign should be able to enter their data or make modeling changes via HoriZZon.

I've been working with BiZZdesign HoriZZon since 2018.

It is stable, and I would rate the stability at eight out of ten.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon is scalable, and I'd give it an eight out of ten for scalability. Our customers are enterprise level companies, but the solution is suitable for small and mid-sized companies as well.

My experience with technical support has been good.

We used Software AG previously and switched to BiZZdesign because it is more scalable.

HoriZZon is a cloud platform, and we need to install it for our customers due to certain regulations. Thus, an easier implementation process would definitely help. If it is on-premises, it usually takes at least two days. Two dedicated staff can handle the implementation.

The price is reasonable.

My advice would be to scale your organization and project well, and BiZZdesign will fit your requirements.

Overall, I would rate this solution at eight out of ten.

One of the main advantages of this solution is that they have representation in the Open Group Forum, which means that any changes in ArchiMate are immediately implemented in BiZZdesign. The other big advantage is its ability to interweave various modeling languages and provide a seamless view between them that allows one to navigate from one language to the other through the integrated links and cross-model relations.

This tool is something of a beast - it takes a long time to learn, and it isn't possible for casual users and most architects. Unless a person spends 500 or 1,000 hours on the tool or does very concentrated sessions using all its functionalities, it's very difficult to master. Improving the capability of architects to use the tool would be a big improvement. In the next release, I'd like to see better integration with other product companies in this space, like CMDB and ServiceNow, and for BiZZdesign to introduce knowledge-sharing sessions to showcase new best practices, what's being promoted, client success stories etc.

I've been using this solution for the last four-and-a-half years.

This is a fairly stable tool in terms of integrity and performance.

BiZZdesign's technical support could be improved. For example, we have given them access to our environment, but when we log tickets, they're taken by their level-one team and only go to the experts with access to our environment once they progress. It would be better if when we're logging a specific problem in our environment, it could go directly to a person with access, which would propel the turnaround time. 

Implementation was fairly complex because of constraints on resources when it comes to architects. Layers get implemented at various speeds, so there are gaps, which creates problems because the core layers are supposed to be addressed in parallel. The documentation is also not up to standard, and we would expect better support material in general.

The pricing model is slightly on the high side and could be more competitive for long-term partnerships.

I've evaluated ARIS (which has an additional capability of process mining on its BPM layer and the Alfabet to handle enterprise architecture), TransUnion (whose Sparx tools are loose in the standards and haven't had good feedback), and Signavio.

If you're thinking of implementing BiZZdesign, take it from a capability perspective. The first and primary element to be covered is the architecture capability the organization wishes to establish. Then have your use cases defined very clearly and factor in a fair bit of time for implementation to give it time to produce results. I'd rate this solution as seven out of ten.

We are thinking of making BiZZdesign as a single source of truth for the entire American Century organization. We have found out a lot of information through their enterprise architect, scattered here and there, and it is very difficult to track. Our aim is to consolidate all the information and do something with that data/information, where meaningful insight can be extracted and presented to the executive level and other departments at American Century.

People have created many artifacts or system architecture diagrams for different American Century systems. These are now scattered here and there. We are currently working to load the architecture diagrams into BiZZdesign, which can't just be copied and pasted because of PPT. The way things do not work exactly in the same way with HoriZZon. So, we are redrawing all those artifacts and putting them systematically into the BiZZdesign system. This is the use case that I have been working on for the last month and a half to two months. Two people besides me are working on this.

We are currently in the process of starting things. We will start with its capabilities. From those capabilities, we will then go from the business to application level. After that, we will go from the application level to the technology level, then from technology level to infrastructure level, if required. In this way, we are tagging things. In American Century, there are many different applications that have different properties and parameters. Once we link everything, then it will be easier for us to generate different fields to determine, for example, what type of relationships application A has with other technical layers or the infrastructure layer. With these types of views, we can easily generate, then show the application's linkage and how this particular application can be used in a business unit, related to its capability. These types of things are currently going on. We have categorized some capabilities for Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 to tag.

We have an Adobe license, which is currently being used for investment management, distribution, enterprise architecture, etc. Now, I can generate how much I am paying for distribution, investment management, or enterprise architecture. Our senior management is very much interested in cost-related stuff, which helps them out.

We can find out why the cost is there. For example, if I have spent $10,000 in the last six months for some AWS licenses, then this information was found in different systems and scattered. Now, by using BiZZdesign and generating some charts, this information can be easily viewed and helpful for others to see.

It has different process flow diagrams. In American Century, we do something a bit different because BiZZdesign, the company, bought another software mostly for the process flow part. Now, process flow diagrams can be drawn and very easily referenced from BiZZdesign. 

We classify architecture in three ways: business layer architecture, application layer architecture, and technology layer architecture. Within these layers, different artifacts can be found. So, we are working to convert our PPTs into meaningful information. 

Once things are put in BiZZdesign, it is very easy to use. I can just click on an application component and find out if we are using this particular component. This provides us flexibility.

This solution enables us to generate different charts or graphs that can be understood by people who are not enterprise architects. We are mainly preparing these charts and graphs for senior management who don't understand much technical stuff. So, this feature can be useful. Our CEO or other executive-level personnel don't have a lot of time to look into the details. There is the BiZZdesign HoriZZon platform and their Enterprise Studio, which are two different things. The executive-level personnel don't go into Enterprise Studio at all. With the HoriZZon platform, it is very easy to link everything in a dashboard on the HoriZZon site. So, somebody goes there, clicks it, and then they can see everything. Hopefully, once everything is in place, the charts should be useful for business stakeholders to make decisions more quickly.

BiZZdesign follows the ArchiMate principle, which is very good because it is standard practice. For the last year, from architecting, enterprise, and microservices perspectives, this particular tool has been good. This is a good tool with ArchiMate capabilities. 

One good thing that I found out about Enterprise Studio is its import and export capabilities. For example, if an Excel is properly added, and that particular meta model is done in HoriZZon, then we can import thousands of records and assess their relationship very easily. This import function is a good feature in that context. HoriZZon has very good connectivity with ServiceNow, SQL tables, and Excel.

In HoriZZon, there are different matrices. In some of the cases, there is an option to aggregate them, but in other cases, we have not done this, e.g., to see the proper costs. For example, if I have 10 different matrices, then I need to create an aggregate view out of those 10 matrices somewhere. That is where we have been struggling a bit. We have a counterpart from the HoriZZon product team with whom we have bi-weekly discussions. We have suggested to him that this can be improved. He said, "He will take care of it," but he will probably give it to someone.

They have some capabilities where there is significant room for improvement when exporting. Sometimes, some of the enterprise application systems may need to be disenabled for some queries, and then I will get different returns. Once I get different returns, then the components and relationships will be created from that. I think HoriZZon should work on this. While the Excel connectivity is working, I don't think this particular REST API capability is quite there.

I have been using it for around a year.

It is deployed with AWS, so scalability should not be an issue.

The enterprise architects are using it everyday. 

For the entire staff, we make some arrangements, like admin access has only three enterprise architects, including me, at American Century. Now, for different system architects and other fellows who also need BiZZdesign, we usually try to categorize them into two parts: 

1. Somebody needs to contribute, like a designer. 
2. Somebody who only wanta to see the dashboard and information, but usually is not going to contribute. 

For this, we have set up a single sign-on mode and somebody needs to raise a request, if somebody is interested, that will come to us. One of our people will validate and approve the request after the role is assigned so the access is relevant.

Currently, we are educating people in system architecture, because somebody may only be comfortable doing something in PowerPoint. Now, if we need to put something into BiZZdesign, then some extra things need to be done. Therefore, we are currently working very closely with their enterprise architect. We are meeting with them biweekly and weekly. We are shown how some meaningful information can be extracted, which is already there, and how some meaningful information can be added to BiZZdesign.

Support is very good. I would give it 10 out of 10 because I usually receive very prompt responses from their support guys.

Previously, I worked with IBM Rational Rose, which is also very good software. It is very difficult for me to compare because I am not familiar with the latest version of Rational Rose. I used it seven to eight years ago. So, I do not know what features they currently have. 

Another guy worked with others to set the solution up for American Century.

I haven't found any issues with the scalability and licensing parts that are access-related.

This tool is good for enterprise architecting. It should be used for architecting purposes only. We can derive some meaningful insights from whatever data that we have, which is the main thing.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

This is very good software and very useful. As long as you are intending to do design at a business process level, at application processes levels, or even at data op level.

When you go down to modernizing the architecture of your infrastructure, which is part of my job, it's not at all made for that. They have only covered the eye level part of architecture design in IT, but they have not provided the capabilities to properly do what an organization is designing to do in the future.

It's a good tool. My colleagues that are making use of it for application, business processes, or data modeling, are very satisfied with it. They find it easy to use. The graphical representation is simple but therefore efficient, so I know that they are planning a very good commencement on the use of these tools.

It lacks capabilities with regard to infrastructure modeling.

I have been using BiZZdesign for around two years. 

It's a cloud-based solution but I have not noticed any issue connecting to it, or any problems while using it, and my colleagues have not reported having any kind of issue with it, so I would say that it is pretty stable.

We have five users using this solution. 

It is used on a daily basis.

I haven't needed to contact customer support. 

My advice to someone considering this solution is to follow the training. It's nice to use when you know how to use it. At first, it's good to have some explanations on how it is working. And this information is very important in order to set up your BiZZdesign environments, your libraries, typically, from an architecture standpoint, to make sure that you use it efficiently.

I know that this has been a problem at setup time, so it's not a software installation problem. It is a problem with customization. It's important to have a proper understanding of how BiZZdesign works if you want to make the right first configuration.

In the next release, I would like to see the modernization of the software.

I would rate BiZZdesign an eight out of ten. 

My primary use cases are for consulting on enterprise architecture and support of digital transformation, and I also use BiZZdesign as a tool.

The powerful editing function in teamwork project-based, common or shared modeling, based on a powerful repository and knowledge sharing in a portal are the most valuable features. These are the most important features for me. I can add the integration of individual modeling notations like Archimate plus BPMN and DMN, and so on. We travel from one location to another and the tool allows us to keep track.

The user interface and connectivity could use further improvement. The interface could be more user-friendly and intuitive. There was a big step between version 3 and version 4. I still have to learn how to use a lot of functions in version 4. I'm looking for further adjustment or adaptation to Windows style because for me it's a little difficult to switch the experience between both tools. I guess that the tool is adapting and converting to Windows step by step.

It should be more open to integrating with other existing tools. Although there has been progress in the past.

Some of my clients need a translation of the menu into Eastern and Central Europe languages, but EA professionals are able to work in English, so it's not critical.

It is stable although there have been a few cases where it shut down. But the instances were a lot less than Windows itself. 

Scalability is up to my needs because I model just a few thousands of objects and it's powerful and scalable enough. Hopefully, it will continue like this for bigger clients also.

Only one technician is maintaining the solution itself and one enterprise architect on the client side. It only requires a small team for maintenance. 

I would rate their technical support a four out of five. It's sufficient because when I need something explained or to know, for example, how to do imports, the service desk really carefully solved my needs. Also published user/solution documentation is in the current version very comprehensive, I am satisfied.

Before this solution, I would make a model in Visio, PowerPoint and such, not enterprise architecture management tools.

The first time I set it up years ago, it was really difficult for me to customize it because I am more of a business guy than a technician. Now it's much easier because of the metamodel editor that this solution now has so now it's much easier. 

Deployment takes about a few days or weeks. It's easy to use and adapt it, but it's a little bit difficult to negotiate with the client in terms of what to implement, what to be modeled, what kind of methodological backgrounds will be used. 

It's important to plan and think in advance, to be prepared in terms of what to model, for what purpose and for whom, and to prepare an internal enterprise architecture framework. Then only afterward implement it into a tool because the tool will guide you. But if you don't know what you want it's really open and customizable, but will not guide you. It's really important to work a few days or weeks on your framework and then easily implement it in the tool. 

The other advice I would give is from the beginning be in touch with C level management as a sponsor of enterprise architecture and use the reporting possibilities of the tool to satisfy them with insight into the architecture.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten because it's really powerful and I still haven't been able to take advantage of all if its many features. 

BiZZdesign Architect makes separates model from views and has a quite extensive set of analytical stuff built in to be very useful in complex environments. Typically enterprise architecture management and strategic portfolio planning can be supported with these tools as the architecture capability matures.

Next to a useful tool for strategic planning it is really helpful in a less mature environment as well. I used the software to easily import catalogs with applications, interfaces, contracts, and many other artifacts to start the modeling of my scope of concern pretty fast and come to compelling results for a plateau planning and roadmap.

It is only available for Windows right now and it really is an outdated interface and framework that is being used. As a Mac worker I really hate that and therefore any other product with less features would be considered a really good alternative.

I find the licensing model not fitting the market.

10 years

Nope. No issues with deployment. Easy installer. It just works.

Yes, it can crash. Save your work frequently!

Nope, no issues and no need.

Good - 8

Good - 8

I used Archi at first but this is only for creating views and not for maintaining a model, which in the core is the real architectural work.

Straight forward. You have to tune to get the best practice results out of the tool. A course is highly recommended.

in-house.

n/a

You need good tools. Just choose one and be good at it!

Yes but not to much. I was certified in the tool, archimate and togaf at Bizzdesign headquarters so it is mainly because of that, that I use this product.

Choose wisely. I did not take the time to investigate on other tools until now. I am willing to let Bizzdesign Architect go for a good Mac solution that also has a separation in model, views and analytics.

Our customers' primary use cases include application portfolio, information, and data architecture.

The most valuable features are the application, portfolio, data, architectures, and modeling things.

The automatic data collection and interface need improvement. 

We've been using this solution since 2016. 

The stability is fine. 

Scalability is okay. There are twenty users in my company.

We require two staff members for the maintenance. 

Their support is really good.

The deployment took one month. 

We are the implementation consultants. 

I would recommend it.

In the next release, I would like to see an open API.

I would rate BIZZdesign a nine out of ten.