Interesting news the other day. Following on from their acquisition of cloud-based Enterprise Architecture tool vendor Corso earlier in the year, ERwin have purchased Casewise, the vendor of a tool that ERwin already has an integration with. There’s an interesting point made in the announcement by Alexandre Wentzo, former CEO of Casewise –
“No one else in the industry is bringing together data and business process modeling and enterprise architecture in one powerful integrated solution”
I beg to differ – PowerDesigner, Mega, and System Architect have been doing this for years.
Corso’s focus was Enterprise Architecture; as ERwin say on their web site, Data Modelling and Enterprise Architecture are “better together” (earlier this year, ‘twas a slogan for those opposed to Brexit). Corso’s background is interesting; it was founded by people who were heavily involved in the old Popkin System Architect product, recently sold by IBM; System Architect has supported multiple modelling techniques, including Enterprise Architecture, Process Modelling and Data Modelling, for a very long time. So, Corso’s expertise should come in very handy for ERwin as they expand.
The purchase of Casewise brings three products to ERwin, for collaboration, workforce management, and modelling ‘the way organizations work‘, capturing ‘an accurate picture of the business’s assets and processes’.
The combination of the three organisations could result in a powerful, integrated set of modelling capabilities. When the news broke, I tweeted the following:
“I hope they really integrate the tools, not just paper over the cracks. Don’t want to see another CA running tools again”,
which elicited a quick response from Mariann McDonagh (according to her Twitter profile, she’s CMO at ERwin):
“Hi George. We are building a powerful platform with deep integrations btwn products. Stay tuned for more info.”
Hmm, the operative words in this reply are “between products”. That’s a little reminiscent of the approach taken by Embarcadero over the years – multiple linked (but different) tools. ERwin need to aim for a single modelling product or suite with one user experience, not cobbling together three disparate products with file conversions in lieu of proper model and object linkages and conversions; this needs to be underpinned by a single repository.
Mariann, I’ll give ERwin the benefit of the doubt, I know you employ some very capable people, and you have a big job ahead of you. The ‘new’ ERwin is definitely not CA, so you have my good wishes.
Still, will someone please pass me the salt?