Open-source enterprise architecture tools are a class of enterprise architecture tool that are licensed such that they can be freely used, extended and modified by anyone. Traditionally, enterprise architecture tools are proprietary based and require a license and sometimes a support contract to be purchased. Some open source EA Tools are also free of charge.
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Enterprise architecture is concerned with understanding the detail of an organisation, and the links between them. The organisation is usually broken down into a number of layers; business, information, application and technology and these are viewed through a number of abstractions, conceptual, logical, and physical. The information is captured and modelled to allow senior management to report on and analyse it, allowing effective and timely decision making regarding tactical projects and strategic change initiatives across the organisation.
Enterprise architecture tools are used to aid the enterprise architect in a number of ways; allowing them to capture information regarding the enterprise, undertake modelling in all domains, capture the links between the various artefacts, provide a meta model to standardise the capture and hold this information in a repository to allow interrogation of the information, for example in the form of standard or ad-hoc reports.
Traditionally, enterprise architecture tools are proprietary and have a reputation for being expensive to purchase, customise and run. In a 2009 report [1] over 50% of respondents claimed not to be using a commercial EA Tool, with many making use of Visio, PowerPoint, Excel and/or SharePoint only and a 2008 survey [2] indicated the cost of licensing as the main barrier for EA Tool adoption.
There are a number of underlying issues for organisations that use Visio, PowerPoint, Excel and/or SharePoint rather than an EA Tool; the information captured quickly becomes out of date, the ability to quickly and easily re-draw a different view of the information is not available, the meta-model must be manually enforced.
The Gartner Group [3] has defined the requirements of an EA tool as being:-
Recently a number of Open Source EA Tools have appeared, providing an alternative to the commercial tools on the market. There are two main tools that provide the modelling capabilities necessary, combined with the means for multi user capture of the architecture and the ability to extract and report on the information captured. These are Essential and iteraplan.
Essential is a free, open source tool by Enterprise Architecture Solutions Ltd, a UK-based EA consulting company. It launched its first version in March 2009.
The Essential Project has been developed for use in conjunction with a variety of Enterprise Architecture approaches and Enterprise Architecture framework. It comprises:-
Following its open source ethos, The Essential Project is built on the open source Protégé repository and is available under the GNU General Public License.
iteraplan is an open source community EA management platform with roadmapping capabilities by iteratec, a software and consulting company. The new release, 2.8, was delivered in April 2011 and includes new features such as fuzzy search, UML/XMI export, and new graphical reports.
iteraplan is also available as an Enterprise Edition, which is built on the same code base as the open source project but adds Oracle and MySQL support to allow multi use mode, roles management including LDAP connection and an importing interface. The Enterprise Edition is license-free, but does not provide source code and a full maintenance/support contract is required.
Customer references are mainly in Germany and Austria. The webinterface of iteraplan is available in English, German, Spanish, French, and further internationalization efforts are fairly recent, with documents and its Web site supporting English language now.
Recent surveys [4] have shown that over half of all Enterprise Architecture initiatives are not using commercial EA tools. In fact many still rely on Visio, PowerPoint and Excel as their EA tool of choice.
A Forrester Report [5] has shown that there are many reasons for this slow uptake in EA tools, but one solution that is quickly gathering pace is Open Source EA Tools. Not only do open source tools give savings in license costs, but they also provide many other benefits such as:
Butler Group [6] believes it would be unwise to embark on enterprise architecture, and impossible to fully realise the benefits, without assistance from a tool specifically designed to support such an approach and they suggest an open source alternative is something that organisations should consider if lack of financial resources is preventing the use of a tool.