MEGA HOPEX Reviews

We use the tool for application portfolio management, demand cycle management, and technology lifecycle management.

I find the process modeling and value chain features valuable. The application portfolio management functionality and workflow management capabilities are also nice. It provides a holistic view for stakeholders and helps align IT with business strategies. It facilitates collaboration across the organization and covers all domains, including business, applications, technology, and data.

The tool needs to have a viewer portal. Currently, we have to use a custom solution to display information, which requires additional effort and tracking of data on a daily basis. Having a built-in viewer dashboard portal would be beneficial.

I have been using the product for one and a half years. 

The tool is mostly stable. We faced issues due to the changes. I rate it a seven out of ten. 

I rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

We seek support through the partner, and it is good.

The solution's setup is complex. Configuring and maintaining the code requires significant effort, as it often needs customization to align with user requirements. As a client, we worked in the test environment set up by the partner, and once everything was validated, we moved to production.

The partner did MEGA HOPEX's deployment. 

MEGA HOPEX's licensing costs are yearly. 

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. You need a skilled partner to maintain it. 

The most valuable feature of the tool is its ability to provide line of sight from Buinsess Outcome (Service to be delivered) down to how the resources are configured and connected to make it happen. Understanding how the Business and technology align to provide the organizational ability to deliver the niche that it plays in in our environment.

It does this by allowing us to capture the business process, business elements, and the technology elements and create relationships between them.

The ability to create diagrams and documents that tell the right story is a key feature. With this product we are able to produce reports that take architecturally modeled information and produce System Design Guides that are foundational for our organization to certify and accredit our Investments. The ability of the report to "walk the architecture" and pull out relevant ports, protocol, and Service information related to which client applications are talking to which servers helps validate what firewall ports need to be opened, etc.

It started improving visibility and provided us a better picture of technology dependencies. It has allowed us to better document what the business needs and more cleanly identify the technologies that are going to be needed to support the business needs. It has allowed us to have a cleaner picture of how technology is expected to help the business and reduce redundant technology provided functionality accross the organization.

Stability is definitely a critical thing.

Organizations can not afford to have to be rebooting production systems to add a user or to reset a users session. It needs to be more self-healing.

The intuitiveness of the interface.

The ability for the tool to guide a user through a process to ensure architectural changes are made based on knowledge of modeling and business rules, especially where they are complex is very critical to ensuring an manageable architecture. This is especially true when an organization does not have individuals with a deep knowledge of the tool.

We have used this product both pre-web version and the beta versions of Hopex.

Stability has gotten much better.

We have used Hopex since it was beta. V1R1 was very unstable, it required multiple reboots a day. These were reboots of the applications and did not normally require a server reboot. With V1R2 Hopex became much more stable. V1R3 for the most part has been stable platform.

Because of our architectureal needs we tend to be more on the bleeding edge of their product than a lot of others are willing to be. This means we have identified more issues with Hopex than some of the other customers. The Department of Defense (DOD) in general, tends to have tighter security and configuration requirements. This means that we have pushed Mega to have to readdress some security design issues that other customers may not have found to be a concern.

In many cases Mega has been fairly responsive to addresses product defects. Not all of them have happened in what I would consider a timely manner. Unfortunately, some things that were identified were not be released until two or three versions down. If there is a functional issue that really is a pain point, a broken feature, and you hear that it is not going to get it fixed for four months, this really creates a business issue. They have sped it up in some cases. Some of the issues are due to the time difference as the corporate offices are in france which means they historically have not always got the responses back in as timely a manner as I think should be applicable.

In the current version, we still have to clean up processes on a weekly basis. Comparatively speaking, from version 1 release 1 to version 1 release 3 it's much more stable product, but overall, it's still not where I would expect it to be as far as stability.

It is hard for us to provide a reflective answer to scalability as we have on average, 3 or 4 editors working in the system making changes at any given time and only 20ish people accessing Hopex in a read-only role. That's not really what I would consider a scalability test.

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We contact technical support pretty routinely. The technical support guys in the United States are very responsive. They are knowledgeable. They do a great job of capturing the information and they coordinate with the corporate resources that they need to to try to address the issues. Where they can provide resolution quickly, they have done so. Where not, they have said, "Okay, we have passed it on to the right individuals. They are looking at it." At that point, there's not much more that the local tech support can do.

When we started the process back in 2011, I did a contract and had a support team and they went through the Gartner Quadrant. They identified Mega, Troux System Architect and two others, I can't remember the other names of them. We basically identified what we wanted to accomplish with the tool and identified a set of metrics that we can sit down and ask them questions to walk them to scenarios. Then did an evaluation and then did a selection.

Overall I would say that this platform, addresses the needs better than other solutions we have looked at, it requires less support. We only have myself and one other administrator that support it.

We have a very in-depth knowledge of the behind-the-scenes workings of the solution. I do know from personal experience that other solutions have more significant footprint of resources that would have to support it. From database people to administrators, etc.

Overall rating: 7-8 (out of 10). Stability is one shortfall and it's probably the major one. I would probably take somewhere between a point and a point and a half off for that. The other one is just the interface. The fact that we have to do some things through the full client on the server as opposed to being able to do everything from a web interface management platform is in the reach of another half a point to a point.

Know what you are trying to accomplish with it, to know what you need, and whether it can truly provide what you need. The best outcome that you can get is that you have that view into how everything is tied together. In other words, what should be out there in the architecture or what should be out there in the environment and what should be providing to support to support the business.

The solution can be used to model customer journeys and business processes.

I use the solution for my customers to model banking products. I also model and define business capability.

The biggest value of the product is that we can use it to work in different industries like government, education, and banking. The tool is very simple and intuitive to use. It is easy to manage different layers within the solution.

The product must improve integration with other tools.

I have been using the solution for almost seven years.

I rate the tool’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten.

I have worked with LeanIX. I switched to MEGA HOPEX because it has more features than other tools.

The initial setup was moderately easy.

I deploy the tool myself on-premise. I got help from the product’s technical support team to deploy it on the cloud.

MEGA HOPEX has produced a good ROI for our company.

The tool is relatively expensive. However, it is worth the money for the features it provides.

I recommend the solution 100%. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The ability to customize is valuable.

The interface must be improved. The tool is not user-friendly. We have to do a lot of workarounds to get a benefit out of it.

I have been using the solution for around five years.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable, but it has some limitations. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. We have ten users, including five dedicated users. The core team of five people uses the product daily. The others use it once a month.

We use different solutions for different domains, but we are planning to migrate. We use ARIS for business process modeling.

The initial setup is not difficult. It is easy to install and set up the workspace. The deployment took one week.

The implementation was done through a reseller. We need only one technical resource to install and run the tool. However, we need a team of five people to make the product useful.

The product has a high cost. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten. The solution costs us AED 450,000 yearly.

I'm a digital transformation advisor. I sell consulting services to my customers. One of my customers uses MEGA HOPEX. The product needs a lot of customization and workaround. I would recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

MEGA HOPEX is the tool of my customer, an energy and facilities company.

The tool is used for application modeling and application data exchange purposes. MEGA HOPEX is also used to classify applications by the business capability for anthology purposes. It's an application and data flow tool.

The reference model in MEGA HOPEX has benefited my customer working in nuclear plants.

What's most valuable in MEGA HOPEX is that it follows the reference model where each component is defined. When you put the component on the diagram, it shows you all semantic definitions, including the flags, data flow, interface, etc. 

I also like the diagram consistency in MEGA HOPEX.

An area for improvement in MEGA HOPEX is its vast learning curve. The tool is also heavy, so that's a pain point. MEGA HOPEX is also tricky to use if you don't train for many hours.

As a holistic tool, it's supposed to do everything, so everything's connected. For example, your application is connected to data, so your screen is full of information, which works when you have many people working on your information system using MEGA HOPEX. For example, my customer that works with nuclear plants is a big organization. However, the tool would be too complex for a functional organization or a small organization such as in the HR or Financial niche because not as many people work on the information system and the tool.

"HOPEX" in MEGA HOPEX stands for Holistic Platform of Excellence, so you can do everything and describe everything, but the tool is too complex for small business users.

I also found the modeling tool of ARIS better than the modeling tool of MEGA HOPEX.

I rate the tool six on a scale of one to ten because of its complexity.

I've been using MEGA HOPEX for one year.

MEGA HOPEX is a very stable tool, so it's a nine out of ten.

MEGA HOPEX is very scalable, so it's an eight out of ten.

I only used MEGA HOPEX. It's the only enterprise architecture tool I have experience with.

My customer has a special team dedicated to MEGA HOPEX implementation, so implementing it is no issue.

I've been told that MEGA HOPEX is very expensive, which is why small organizations dismiss the tool. It's complex and costly versus other simpler and cheaper solutions.

I'm a consultant and architect, so I'm using an architecture product called MEGA HOPEX.

MEGA HOPEX is deployed on-premises. The customer wanted to deploy it on the cloud but had to stick to an on-premise deployment because of sovereignty.

I'd recommend the tool for people with very critical use cases. Otherwise, you'll find more straightforward tools than MEGA HOPEX.

The main module we use is ITPM. The ability to have standardized reports around obsolescence and lifecycle management is probably the most valuable.

We are trying to move to a more standardized approach regarding how we do lifecycle management and having the ability to generate the obsolescence report which says what applications are impacted by obsolete technologies on a rolling horizon is valuable so that we can actually do our business planning and manage technical data in a more organized manner then the way that we have been doing it today.

It shows you for all of the applications that are depending upon obsolete technology, what is the technology that is going obsolete and what is the application that is impacted. Essentially, it's a list view.

We are not using the entire platform, although we are licensed for a couple modules. The main one that we are using is ITPM. The other thing that I think we find useful outside of the obsolescence report is also having a more organized view of our applications and their technology dependencies. Matching it up with roadmaps related to technologies in a singular view. We had an application technology view that also becomes quite useful.

I think it has a lot to offer, but we have been focusing in on ITPM. I think we ourselves need to do a little bit more exploration of how we can benefit from some of the other modules.

Something that might be helpful is to have a little bit more of a curriculum-based engagement of MEGA where we are actually educated more on the bigger picture, not just the tool, but really what is the big picture that MEGA is trying to solve. What are the different pieces and how they fit together? I think that will help expose the power of MEGA to us to see how we can actually use it better. Kind of the Art of the Possible type of positioning.

From the capabilities perspective, the user experience is not the best. It needs to be a lot more easy to use, more intuitive.

It could also drive adoption. We are a pretty large organization with a lot of application and it's not all architects that are using this tool. There are people that are in peripheral organizations that we rely on to provide information and the user interface really needs to be simple and clean and be able to move from task to task very efficiently. The feedback we have gotten so far has not been that. It's been, it's hard to navigate. It's not intuitive. It takes time to do multiple updates in a sitting.

What that means today is that people export data out of MEGA, manage an Excel spreadsheet and then do vault uploads and it kind of defeats the purpose of having a tool like this.

18 months. We are getting to the first real use of it with our business planning for next year and kind of starting now.

We have had challenges with scale. We had to refactor the way that we organize the data due to that scaling issue. Originally, we had brought in every application landscape as an individual application and if the reports were timing out and we were not able to get a performance response. In fact, our users were complaining as well. We have refactored so that applications are really more of our business service construct that are grouping multiple landscapes which are becoming software installations. It's working a little bit better, but we still have struggles with some reports that are large or go out to large data sets that the system sent tends to time out. In fact, we had to put automated timers to terminate tasks that are taking too long just because it becomes ineffective. These jobs are in the background that cause other problems. Performance and scale has been an issue.

If you have an interactive application, people don't expect it to be taking hours. People expect responses within minutes. When they're sitting there for 10, 15, 20 minutes and there is nothing back, something is obviously not done right whether the architecture behind the scenes is not done right or the way it fans out to compute is not done right, something is not right. We've had performance issues and continue to struggle with it. Another example is when we do these reports, as I mentioned, obsolescence, really have to do with volume.

You have to do it on a portfolio by portfolio basis. You need to go to the top level and say, "Run this obsolescence report for everything in my environment." Then we have to say, "Do it for a subset of the data set just because of performance."

My team actually runs the platform, I don't really deal with technical support themselves, but I do get feedback. Yes, they have used technical support. It's kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes we have gotten good results, but other times it hasn't been what we would hope for.

Generally we do engage them as well as professional services. In fact, we've probably been engaging professional services a lot more than we need to. That's a different issue.

We got an introduction to MEGA from a smaller group within our company. The conversation with the person that was already using it was essentially focused on how much customization were they doing.

At the time they told me it had unlimited customization and that is kind of what drove me to say we are going to adopt MEGA for the Enterprise, but truth be told, since we have adopted it, we are actually doing a lot more customization than I would have hoped for. The out-of-the-box capabilities don't really align with the broader vision. Hence, we are spending a lot of time with pro services.

When they did the assessment I think they looked at Alfabet and a couple of others.

Be very clear on what you need because MEGA has a lot to offer and if you are really going to be able to take advantage of MEGA's portfolio, then you should consider it. Be ready for the journey we went through which took 18 months to get to where we are at.

I use MEGA HOPEX for enterprise architecture and risk management.

MEGA HOPEX helps me to see the benefits of different solutions in terms of the entire ecosystem I have, by providing different integrations and overseeing the entire system.

MEGA HOPEX integrates different systems well and helps in overseeing everything.

There is still room for improvement in MEGA HOPEX in my field of work. Some aspects are not working efficiently.

Scalability is generally good, but it may pose challenges.

Customer service is rated as very good with a score of ten out of ten.

Positive

The return on investment is good. However, there isn't any specific metrics mentioned.

MEGA HOPEX is perceived as somewhat expensive.

I would rate MEGA HOPEX a nine out of ten.

We picked it as we wanted something that included all of the shapes represented in the software architecture solutions of our company. We created near 2,000 products that we have in the company. We used this product to represent the software architecture of our solutions and the mapping within the processes of the company.

We tried to map a set of fields and we have and combined it with the processes of the company.

The main feature that we like the most is the ability to have a unique repository where all the architects can interact and play together with the shapes of different architecture solutions. They have a unified repository where users can share the developments they're working on. 

Its availability is very good. 

We've had some internal changes in the company. It allows us to start with an initiative that will accumulate new architecture solutions. At this moment, the initiative works with specifically with HOPEX and we are able to adapt it to our new company direction.

I can't speak to which features are missing. I don't have any information on that and don't really have any input.

The solution is quite expensive.

We've been using the solution since before the pandemic. We started using it around 2019.

We use Sparx Systems as well as MEGA HOPEX. Our organization bought both solutions.

I found that the solution is very expensive for what it does. We are integrated with both HOPEX and Sparx solutions, however, Sparx Systems we work with on a set of licenses that we had previously, in 2018. We find it a bit less expensive.

Since we use both HOPEX and Sparx, it's easy to compare the two. 

For example, if you compare the price of MEGA HOPEX with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Sparx is cheaper. Our company is looking at pricing and it's an important factor we are taking into account. However, Sparx can be a bit slow. If you are trying to design software architecture, sometimes we run into issues and need to refresh. HOPEX also occasionally needs to be refreshed as well, actually.

We find Sparx to be more useable as well.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. If the architecture was a bit better, I might rate it higher.