First of all let’s bring you up to speed on Orbus Software’s performance and developments in 2015 and 2016.
After welcoming 70 new last year, in 2016 we are on track to welcome a further 90 customers to the Orbus community whilst retaining over 92% of active maintenance paying clients.
Also this year, our primary focus was to expend our US operation and we are currently on track to increase new US revenues by 50%.
In the ASEAN countries, we are seeing a slow but consistent increase in new customers and our regional office based in Abu Dhabi has seen a significant acceleration in business as a result of on the ground, consultative support for our growing customer base.
Also in 2016 we expect the Partner Programme to further extend our strategic alliances across the world, exceeding 100 active partners.
Orbus welcomed the Open Group release of IT4IT at the start of 2016 which became another important addition to the extensive range of standard supported by our flagship product iServer.
Additionally we have released support for ArchiMate 3.0 as well as the UML 2.5 notation.
Our continuing Partnership with Good e-Learning allows us to provide extensive, ‘self-paced learning’ to our customers worldwide, across our product range and professional certifications.
Orbus, an accredited Microsoft Gold Partner, was recognised as the market leader in the Forrester Wave EAMS 2015 and we believe that our leadership position will be further extended in 2017 as a result of development throughout our product range.
Orbus Customer Ecosystem
From January 2017 we will be introducing all our customers to the new Orbus Ecosystem.
A key objectives of the ecosystem is to ensure each iServer user in your team has access to self-paced learning, not only the product, but also on related business and IT certifications such as TOGAF, IT4IT and COBIT.
Making sure all your users have access to the Ecosystem will dramatically increase skillset development and iServer productivity across your team.
The ecosystem also provides the core support for our re-engineered customer experience processes, from pre-sale “proof of concept”, deployment and training to a quantifiable “value of investment”.
This new, unified, “ecosystem” platform will provide a single login location for access to comprehensive account information, product and service knowledge base, resources and a spectrum of training and support services.
By the end of 2017 we expect to have hundreds of corporates and teams and over 5000 end-users worldwide sharing experiences on this platform as it develops.
iServer updates
The new 2017 release will incorporate the following improvements:
- Substantial development to our Application Portfolio Management, or APM, product – will focus on capability for a variety of business scenarios such as application rationalisation, cost reduction and mergers and acquisitions.
- Workflow for Approval and Notifications – a full featured workflow system used to trigger notifications, update attributes and manage content approval in iServer.
- Portal 2017 (HTML 5) – Enabling the dynamic, business friendly, web-based portal for viewing iServer repository content in HTML format.
- PDF and other file type support – allowing you to upload and manage PDF document types in the repository and other file types such as videos and images.
- 204 minor customer-requested enhancements to improve user experience and tool performance.
Major enhancements
We are also currently in advance planning for the subsequent major release of iServer, aiming to launch in October 2017.
Planned highlights for this release include:
- Editing and contributing content via Portal: allowing business users to edit attributes via online forms in the web Portal.
- Streamlined and enhanced configuration allowing easier meta-model definition, user and profile management and object and relationship type management.
- iServer Localization: offering native language support for a range of languages.
- Graphical Views – an enhancement to the Impact Analysis feature with improved visualisations allowing graphical analysis of iServer content and relationships.
- Import from BDNA: with the ability to align technology standards by importing data from BDNA’s comprehensive repository: Technopedia