• All vendors evaluated on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision
• Enterprise Architecture a critical component in IT execution of business strategy
• New release 11.8 of Alfabet offers strategic portfolio management capabilities for the AI portfolio

Conrad Langhammer, General Manager for Alfabet, noted: “We are pleased with the recognition of Software AG as a Leader in the Gartner report for the enterprise architecture (EA) market. We believe seventeen consecutive years in the Leaders quadrant demonstrates Software AG’s ability to continually meet the demands of CIOs and IT strategists. Today, everything in business is digital-first. Making IT inherent in business strategy is hence, crucial, and yet many IT organizations find this difficult to achieve. By providing transparency and governance across the chain of digital business transformation activities – from prioritizing business change investments to IT delivery – Software AG ensures its customers remain competitive in the digital business age."

The Gartner report says: “In the EA tool market, leadership implies understanding, facilitating and supporting the strategic role that enterprise architects play at a much broader level. They are more business-strategy-focused, with a shared operating model at the business level that helps drive the relationship with IT.”

EA foundation for digital business change
A barrage of challenges, including maturing consumer expectations, accelerating technology advancement, increasing security threats, and growing regulatory scrutiny are forcing companies to act hastily and tactically – often abandoning their strategy. Companies that innovate without a vetted strategy risk investing in products that fail to deliver value and overload their IT with technical debt.

“Due diligence on a business strategy involves full transparency of the IT landscape and all its interdependencies to understand the impact of any change as per costs, risks, organizational upset and business disruption”, says Langhammer. “This is the role of EA – and Alfabet - in strategic business transformation. EA insights provide real-time transparency into the IT landscape, help reduce IT complexity, and allow management to tackle the technical debt that far too often slows the pace of change by bogging down the IT environment.”

New release of Alfabet with functionality for managing the AI portfolio
The sudden emergence of AI technologies that can significantly increase the value of a business’ products and services is challenging organizations to find the AI strategy that will provide the most business benefit without exorbitant costs. EA combined with strategic portfolio management (SPM) is commonly used to develop and evaluate business strategies. It is equally applicable to creating enterprise AI strategies. In evaluating the flood of competing ideas for AI investment, portfolio managers can define a broad AI vision, derive specific AI initiatives and projects, and understand the demands AI will place on the organization—all while juggling input from multiple stakeholders, and making sure their budgets aren’t exhausted.

A new release of Alfabet – Alfabet 11.8 – enables strategic management of AI usage and potential. It offers the following capabilities:

• Documenting AI technologies, vendors and AI-enabled applications for transparency
• AI portfolio analysis for portfolio optimization and to inform the AI strategy
• Implementation of regulatory requirements for AI usage
• Prioritization of AI investments in alignment with corporate AI strategy
• Risk analysis of AI usage considering confidentiality, ethics, security and operational perspective

Alfabet release 11.8 will be available December 13, 2024.

* Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, by Andreas Frangou, Austin Steinmetz, Shubhangi Jena, Andrew Gianni, 20 November 2024.

** Software AG acquired Alfabet effective from June 2013

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.will be available December 13, 2024.

About Alfabet
Alfabet for Enterprise Architecture and Strategic Portfolio Management helps business and IT leaders make better investment decisions and reduce transformational risks by understanding when, where, how and why to make changes in the IT portfolio.

About Software AG
Software AG is a Software GmbH brand that helps companies to manage and optimize their operations, infrastructure and technology with products that simplify complexity, increase transparency and prepare organizations for change.
Trusted by the world’s best brands for more than 50 years, Software AG’s AI-enabled process intelligence, application development, high-performance database, and strategic portfolio management solutions are used by banks, retailers, manufacturers, governments and more.
Software AG is owned by Silver Lake, the global technology investment firm. For more information, visit www.softwareag.com. And follow on LinkedIn and X.