ER/Studio 17 General Availability

by Aug 10, 2017

We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of IDERA ER/Studio 17.0
 
ER/Studio 17.0 delivers significant new business process modeling capabilities in the Business Architect component.  Performance and quality improvements have been made throughout the suite, as well as platform enhancements. 
 
What’s New in ER/Studio 17.0?
 
Business and Enterprise Architecture
The new release of ER/Studio Business Architect provides process modeling capabilities that exceed the BPMN 2.0 standard, while also providing a common frame of reference to bridge communication gaps, streamline  operations, and align business processes with strategic goals.This is extremely important because:
  • Organizations have multiple stakeholders groups with differing perspectives of both data and processes.  If an organization doesn’t use a consistent approach comprised of data modeling and integrated process modeling (providing  organizational context to data creation and consumption), they will be left vulnerable to poor analysis, bad decisions, misalignment and huge missteps.
  • Using  ER/Studio an organization can:
    • Reduce risk
    • Focus on strategic outcomes
    • Provide a common framework and understanding of business processes and the critical data utilized across processes.
  • As businesses grow and change, it is critical for business goals to remain as the focal point of all decisions being made. Business processes should be reviewed and evaluated regularly due to evolving market conditions, business environment and regulatory compliance. Gaps or areas for optimization can be identified, including rationalization and consolidation of business processes due to mergers and acquisitions.
  • Organizations with a high level of process maturity will continually refine and extend their processes as a fundamental tenet of outcome-driven enterprise architecture. This includes utilization of business glossaries to provide a  common vocabulary, facilitating consistent comprehension across the organization.
  • BPMN 2.0 enables businesses to communicate about business processes in a clear and consistent manner.  Even the most complex processes can be decomposed, modeled and understood using comprehensive capabilities and constructs for choreography, conversation, and collaboration business processes. Validation against the BPMN 2.0 standard ensures that process models meet all the requirements for those organizations that need it, and can be turned off for those that do not require rigorous adherence to the standard.
  • Business analysts can easily map and model the relationships between people, processes, and data for a robust, holistic business architecture, which in turn can be used as a foundation for enterprise architecture and data governance initiatives.
Data Platform Support
  • Improvements have been made to datatype resolution when reverse engineering from Hadoop Hive
  • Numerous enhancements and additions to the Metawizard platform import bridges included with ER/Studio Enterprise Team Edition:
    • Several new NoSQL import bridges for several Hive and JSON based platforms
    • Additional new relational import bridges
    • Performance and quality improvements
User Experience
  • Team Server performance and quality improvements in several areas:
    • Major performance gains in several long running processes
    • Quality and performance improvements for model check-in and publish
  • Improved icons (task markers) throughout Business Architect
Data Modeling & Lineage
  • Three additional data lineage import bridges for ER/Studio Enterprise Team Edition
  • Improvements to resolution of logical non-specific relationships during physical model generation
  • 60+ quality improvements in Data Architect
Collaboration & Governance
  • Publishing of all new BPMN 2.0 diagram constructs and metadata from Business Architect to Team Server
  • 70+ quality improvements for model check-in, publishing and change management functionality
ER/Studio Business Architect process models can now be built and validated with all BPMN 2.0 constructs, in addition to the BPMN 1.1 compatibility that was offered in the previous versions. Some other products in the market claim to be BPMN 2.0 compliant but do not implement the full set of constructs with validation that conforms to the BPMN 2.0 standard.  We offer Business Architect as a standalone product, as well as an integral part of ER/Studio Enterprise Team Edition,  giving our customers maximum flexibility on their journey to process maturity.  We offer an easy-to-use solution that shares models, common objects, and associated metadata across the organization, which improves productivity and organizational alignment.
 
Through ER/Studio Enterprise Team Edition, we provide a comprehensive, collaborative platform that encompasses Data Modeling, Business Process Modeling, and Enterprise Architecture to  establish a foundation for governance initiatives. This builds on our strong history in which we have provided integrated data and process modeling within the ER/Studio suite for over 10 years. Other solutions in the marketplace claim to do the same, but are comprised of separate, non-integrated products.  One vendor In particular has been making numerous claims regarding their leadership in enterprise architecture despite the fact that they abandoned process modeling several years ago, them recently have tried to fill that void through corporate acquisitions, resulting in non-integrated and overlapping products. Thus, creating silos rather than breaking them down. 
 
ER/Studio is sold in multiple editions:
  • Standalone products
    • ER/Studio Data Architect for standalone data modeling.
    • ER/Studio Business Architect for standalone business process and conceptual modeling.
  • ER/Studio Professional Professional Edition
    • Combines ER/Studio Data Architect modeling tool with the repository to enable model sharing and facilitates updates to the models by multiple modelers, utilizing model check-out and check-in capabilities.
  • ER/Studio Enterprise Team Edition
    • In addition to the capabilities offered in the professional edition, Enterprise Team edition that provides additional model and metadata sharing, business process modeling, UML modeling, cross-organizational collaboration, and an enterprise glossary. It includes Data Architect, Business Architect, Software Architect, MetaWizard, Repository & Team Server
More information can be found on the ER/Studio Product pages:
 
Learn more in the upcoming webinar:
BA-DA-Bing, BA-DA-Boom! Better Business Architecture and Data Architecture with ER/Studio 17