Informing managers with a clear picture of complex software

Software is business

A digital nervous system sits at the heart of every business and is critical to every function. The ability to comprehend it is a key part of technology and business decision making.

Software mapping brings thousands of years of geographic mapping knowledge to the understanding of software: every system in a stable place, grouped by the part of the business it serves, joined by the integrations that carry its data. Shine a light on your digital nervous system to improve decisions and reduce risk.

An auto-built software map: applications as coloured rings inside hexagonal regions, joined by the integrations between them.

REA Group

The Challenge

REA Group was one of the earliest adopters of agile methodology and microservices architecture. Over the past decade this has lead to a highly complex architecture, managed by a highly distributed and autonomous workforce, a compounding challenge that makes delivery of end-to-end solutions difficult.

The Result

Introduced in 2018, Aplas is the central repository for software asset metadata within REA Group - across all Australian and Asian businesses. It is used as a key productivity tool to inform the executive and developers alike. It has allowed REA Group to stay agile while continuing to scale.

"Aplas is REA's key product to make sense of our microservices web. As the number of systems, integrations, teams and products increased our ability to understand our ecosystem decreased.With Aplas we now can visualize our digital ecosystem allowing us to make better decisions and effectively manage technology evolution.Aplas has a flexibility that perfectly accommodates our metadata, allowing systems plotted on the map to carry valuable information. This information is used by delivery, business and product people alike."

Dan AragioHead of Architecture

An organization's home page: five published views of one inventory — a map, a matrix, a graph, a table and a search.

Software literacy

Software literacy is poor in most businesses. A few architects understand the nervous system; everyone else is left in the dark, and decisions get made on a diagram that was current last quarter.

Aplas is designed to broaden that understanding. A published view is a URL your organization's members can open, on a laptop or a phone, and it is always the current picture. Ask the assistant a question in plain language — how many applications do we have, which of them depend on each other — and it answers from the inventory.

The assistant: Ask Aplas about your systems, with suggested questions such as How many applications do we have and Which apps depend on each other.

Aplas lives at the intersection of people and software - it is the foundation for making better decisions with software, empowering your business to thrive in a digital world

Software stories

Software architecture cuts into many other concerns — risk, cost, lifecycle, programme. Each is a question a manager needs answered on the same picture of the estate.

A map can carry many styles, each answering one of those questions on the same geography: which systems are business-critical, which are being retired, which a programme touches. The possibilities are yours to define, and each style stays in sync with the inventory behind it.

How views and maps work

The style designer: a software map on a dark ground, its applications ringed in colour by risk rating, with the style's layers listed beside it.

See it in the demo

Map

Application landscape

Every application in the estate, placed on a map and grouped by the business unit that owns it.

A stable place for everything: Assets are pinned to a grid, so the same system is always in the same place. Pan and zoom the way you would a city map.
Regions and roads: Business units draw as regions; integrations draw as the roads between the systems they connect. Click a road to see what runs along it.
Select anything: Click an application to see its fields, its relations and where it sits in the inventory.

Open the demo view

Matrix

Capability coverage

Which business capabilities are served by which applications, and where the gaps are.

Two fields, one grid: Choose the asset type to draw, what forms the rows and the columns, and what colours each cell.
Gaps are visible: An empty cell is a capability with nothing behind it — the question a matrix exists to answer.

Open the demo view

Five published views of one inventory, open to exploreVisit the showcase

Aplas for all

Many existing software asset repositories are so specialised to one audience that they become useless for everyone else. All the effort taken to populate their complex data models ends up being their undoing: they never have enough users to sustain the investment in keeping them up to date.

Aplas is a simple, workflow-agnostic, outward-facing platform that gives everyone a place to learn about software. See how Aplas serves the architects who build the inventory.

Architecture