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.

The first use case pertains to the certificate price domain. Secondly, we use it for enterprise reporting. Governance is one of the key areas.

The solution lacks additional models compared to other tools.

I have been using MEGA HOPEX for four years.

Setting up MEGA HOPEX requires a substantial budget allocation to ensure its functionality and effectiveness.

We are currently in the process of evaluating whether we should collaborate with MEGA or opt for another product. We are planning to utilize this tool for external purposes.

We are in the phase of avoiding redundancy and exploring its potential use cases. Primarily, we use it for business and application portfolio management, which is crucial for our operations. We're assessing our assets. We have another tool for asset management and are considering replacing it with MEGA.

We focus on transitioning towards a product-centric approach. Thus, all our business operations are aligned accordingly.

We can handle MEGA HOPEX. It's one of the best tools available. Another advantage is its accessibility; with MEGA HOPEX, We can use it anywhere. You can use BIN, PCE, Centograft, and more. MEGA HOPEX has its own proprietary standards that users must adhere to.

An additional model offers a constructive and guided approach to implementation. When dealing with an open-world scenario, convincing people can be challenging. Having a predefined model helps stakeholders understand the standards being followed. Alphabet or MEGA both fall under SysTrack. One of the best features of Abacus is the ability to select multiple models, which is essential when dealing with different business needs. It's important to recognize that one solution does not fit all requirements, so understanding how your specific requirements fit into the models is crucial.

I recommend MEGA HOPEX if the business context is straightforward and clear. Its stability depends on the audience you're interacting with and their technical or ER tool proficiency. If your audience isn’t tech-savvy, explaining MEGA HOPEX can be challenging.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We are using the solution in one bank in Colombia. We are going to start implementation in two financial entities in Ecuador.

The support experience in Latin America is great. For us, it's very important to have local connections and use cases. MEGA has had a lot of partners in Latin America. It's the differentiation with the other companies. Many others use services outside of Latin America - in Europe or the USA. However, we like the local connection, which was the main selling point for us.

We need better traceability available. We want to have traceability between the business and the technology.

The initial setup can be quite complex at first.

The resolution needs to offer more potential for collaboration. Right now, it is much more geared towards one person working on the solution.

We have one year of experience using that tool.

We are managing the implementation via corporate and governance. We are going to scale all of the entities in the group. We are a financial group that has a presence in different countries in Latin America with different entities and we decided to manage this implementation in an incremental model starting from some specific companies. The plan is, in 2022, to integrate all the other entities in the group.

So far, we have less than 20 people using the product, however, we are going to increase the number of personnel.

Technical support is great. they are local and readily available. We like that they are so close, and we don't have to deal with support from the USA or Europe, which is much further away.

In the beginning, there was some complexity. We don't understand the benefit and the use of the tool. We defined a robot for business capabilities to be covered across all of the companies in the group. We are solving for the original lack of knowledge with a training process in the consulting services we have on offer.

We implement the solution with a partner and they have less than three people that help us. To use the tool, we need the technical staff to use the solution. 

We leveraged the expertise of local partners while initially implementing the solution. 

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

We have a standard fee for the use of the solution via their SaaS model and we have some consulting costs that depend on the scope of its implementation in each entity.

We have an agreement, a commercial agreement with MEGA, to support all the entities that are going to implement the solution.

We are a financial and insurance services industry company. We are focused on banks and insurance.

For new users, it's important that they understand the business architectural definitions and have knowledge of processes to gain the most value out of the solution. If the team that is evaluating the solution doesn't have such knowledge, there might be issues.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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.