LeanIX, a privately held enterprise architecture (EA) management solution, is set to be acquired by SAP, as announced on September 7, 2023 (click here). SAP has made this strategic acquisition to offer SAP clients access to a complete suite of tools essential for continuous business transformation. It includes AI-driven process optimization, particularly in enterprise architecture. André Christ, CEO and co-founder of LeanIX, says, “Our strategy is to empower organizations to continuously transform in a rapidly changing business environment. With an integrated, comprehensive view of IT applications and business processes, we speed up modernization and reduce transformation risks for our customers and also secure their ability to adapt to technology shifts such as cloud and AI.” SAP clients using LeanIX will view their IT landscape, uncover technical debt, gain help in designing for the future state, and facilitate architectural roadmaps.
What It Means For SAP Clients
LeanIX will offer SAP clients the following:
- Integration of SAP Signavio for business process modeling
- AI-enabled process optimization
- Management of the application landscape
- A proposed AI assistant to enhance automation, paving the way for an intelligent recommendation engine for IT landscape transformation
The acquisition should further enhance LeanIX’s SAP capabilities in EA management and value stream management capabilities for SAP-specific applications.
What It Means For Non-SAP Clients
LeanIX non-SAP clients will continue to be served after the SAP acquisition. As ever with SAP, clients should pay special attention to the preservation of the LeanIX roadmap and planned enhancements and make sure that they understand SAP’s strategic intentions and the onward stability of the product. Clients not using SAP will want to see that LeanIX capabilities remain vendor-agnostic and that SAP plans to continue to put equal emphasis on LeanIX clients that work with other large enterprise software providers. Clients should validate that the team that made LeanIX successful is retained and that LeanIX’s capabilities and value are not swallowed up whole by the SAP juggernaut, never to be seen again.
Conclusion
SAP’s acquisition of LeanIX is a large vote of confidence in the importance of enterprise architecture as a discipline. SAP enters the enterprise architecture management tools market via this acquisition, and it has the potential to be very disruptive. But there are serious questions that need to be asked around SAP’s intentions to continue investment in LeanIX and its commitment to continuing to serve and support non-SAP customers.
