Sparx Systems
Architecting the Visual Enterprise

A sea change is underway in the organizational processes associated with the management and optimization of productivity. The archetypal scenarios of boardroom meetings, teams huddled around a whiteboard and Kanban boards pasted with vibrant sticky notes, are all being rapidly superseded. For business decision makers, the advent of enterprise architecture frameworks has made it easier to develop a deeper understanding of enterprise processes and by automatically capturing the records associated with cataloguing, mapping, visualization, sharing, and inspection has eliminated the associated process complexity.

Enterprise Architect, the brainchild of Geoffrey Sparks has become the new norm in the enterprise architecture arena and ‘ups the ante’ for businesses looking for the best enterprise architecture management solutions. Founded in 1996 Sparx Systems is “a software company at heart, specializing in providing high performance visual modeling tools for planning and designing business processes, for team-wide management and collaboration,” says Geoffrey Sparks, Founder and CEO.

Enterprise Architect has been designed from the ground up to facilitate change and strategic growth. The evolution of this standards based platform has been informed by the ‘adapt or perish’ imperative being driven by changes to business strategies, accountability, interoperability, threat management, and standards compliance. With a worldwide user base approaching 400,000—including 80 percent of the top Fortune 100 companies—Sparx Systems’ software is used by systems designers, corporate planners, business analysts, enterprise architects, standards developers, software engineers, and other key stakeholders. Enterprise Architect has evolved through a consistent development cycle since its initial release in 2000, to accommodate the myriad of industry standards, frameworks, languages, and database types.

In a period when the enterprise architecture development space is inundated with disparate tools, each providing a single viewpoint, “Our platform has been engineered with appropriate levels of abstraction to support deeply layered architectures and processes that capture the full end-to-end spectrum of knowledge and behavior, within a particular business or domain,” explains Geoffrey. “It operates across several distinct but essentially linked layers.”

The product incorporates a rich array of industry standards and frameworks, such as UML, SysML, TOGAF, Zachman, BPMN and other open standards for business model simulation.

Sparx Systems specializes in providing high performance visual modeling tools for planning and designing business processes, for team-wide management and collaboration

With a strong emphasis on UML as the underlying ‘meta-language,’ the Enterprise Architect platform ensures consistency, value, and longevity of knowledge capture and management.

Underpinned by an active user community of global partners along with the in-house support team, Sparx Systems constantly keeps innovating and refining the functionality of Enterprise Architect. “We offer direct technical support through email, online webinars, video tutorials and other third party created material,” adds Geoffrey. “With over 4,000 individual topics, thousands of pages of PDF based documentation and an installable library, our customers have a rich and detailed pool of information on tool configuration and usage at their disposal.”

Sparx Systems is driving significant transformation in managing and manipulating enterprise architecture for a variety of industries—from defense to government, aerospace to automotive engineering, finance to entertainment, and healthcare to smart grid. Geoffrey elucidates on a real-life application, where one of the company’s global partners helped build a state-operated health insurance exchange from scratch, amid bottlenecks such as tight deadlines, complex modeling, and extensive multitasking. Enterprise Architect helped the state address traceability and re-usability and track changes efficiently, making the project a huge and timely success. When the neighboring states were still facing delays in their initiative, the American state that Sparx Systems’ partner assisted, was already making headway in its process.

To further grow its stature, “Sparx Systems has aligned its roadmap to offer newer solutions and technologies and improve the current suite to provide the best-of-breed methods for businesses to effectively address the complexity of managing changing business models,” assures Geoffrey.