We looked at several options. I don't remember the names but we compared the one we had, ProForma, and two others.

One of the products was really expensive and did everything and was amazing, but it was complex and expensive and you needed five people to operate it. The other one was a low-end, web-based diagramming tool.

We tried many options. We had a whole project of analysis of different tools and Erwin checked all the boxes. We looked at something called In2itive. That and System Architect were among top alternatives. We just found erwin to be the most suitable. It won out in several ways, but we thought that the web deployment — the Evolve capability — also looked really strong. We felt that worked well.

Every one of these solutions has an edge or a boundary to its capabilities. There are little things, quirks, that I would like to see erwin do differently. But every one of these tools has something that people either embrace or wish was easier to do. None of them is a dream to use. You have to know what you're doing and be able to get around the limitations.

We evaluated ARIS as well as a French solution called Mega HOPEX and another French solution called Bonanza.

The difference is the fact that in the erwin product, when you model, even if you don't have all the information, the content is on the web platform and ready to be discussed by those who need to access it. On the other platforms, it was noticeably less open. Because we had already used ARIS, we knew that it was really complicated and really annoying just to add an object. With erwin, you document what you can and it becomes available for people to contribute to and use. That's the main point. And Communicator, while they don't promote it, is good for us because we needed some documentation for the authorities.

We evaluated about 10 product besides erwin, such as MEGA HOPEX, Signavio, BiZZdesign, and LeanIX. 

This was done about 10 years ago, and I didn't lead that study. A friend of mine did. I do remember that they looked at Magic Tour, Rhapsody, and Systems Enterprise Architect.

Yes – ER Studio, Embarcadero.

We had a template in which we looked at the different architecture tools. We had some criteria that we said we wanted from a data architecture point of view, and this was the first tool that we had a chance to get our hands on other than the one that our software solutions architects were already using.

I have been using ArchiMate for a while. That's an open source, free architecture tool. It's quite simple. It's good enough for medium or small enterprises.

We did not evaluate other products. We just like erwin, so we decided to go with it.