Sparx Systems is a world’s leader in creating visual tools for the modeling, planning and designing in domains such as software systems, system engineering, requirements management, enterprise architecture and business processes.
Sparx Systems’ renowned Enterprise Architect® is well established as market-leading tool. Some of the industry standards Sparx Systems is committed to are the Unified Modeling Language™ (or UML), SysML, XMI and BPMN™.
The question of how to interchange models—for instance business process models—between different tools and standards typically arises where companies and organizations utilize heterogeneous enterprise management tools. And this is exactly the spot where BPM-X technology comes into play and provides rich interchange capabilities for Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect®.
An example for such a model interchange is the transformation of BPMN-based process models created with Enterprise Architect® to models compatible with TIBCO Business Studio™. In practice it means to process Enterprise Architect’s models exported in XMI format, to transform all model entities and their attributes, to output them in XPDL format, and finally to smoothly import them into TIBCO Business Studio™. Even though XMI and XPDL are standardized, there are vendor-specific extensions which need to be taken into account properly.
Certainly, the model interchange also works in the opposite direction: models from any other tools can be transformed to Enterprise Architect®. This implies that also the bi-directional integration of Enterprise Architect with other modeling tools is an interesting option, even if the involved tools are based upon modeling standards other than BPMN™.
Together, Sparx Systems and BPM-X deliver a real value-add in extending the range of Enterprise Architect®.