SAP to Acquire LeanIX

⇨ SAP is acquiring enterprise architecture company LeanIX

⇨ The transaction will be completed in the fourth quarter

⇨ LeanIX solutions will be added to a new business transformation solution suite

Marking a significant move in the enterprise landscape, SAP today announced that it plans to acquire LeanIX, a market leader for enterprise architecture management (EAM). LeanIX, founded in 2012, provides EAM solutions and a software-as-a-service management platform (SMP) tightly integrated with SAP offerings. SAP intends to use this acquisition to expand its business transformation portfolio and facilitate AI-enabled process optimization.

Over the past decade, SAP has strengthened its partnership with LeanIX and even integrated LeanIX tools internally (in 2019), in contrast to when SAP provided its own tools for enterprise architects. SAP’s Chief Enterprise Architect, Marco Michel, has also spoken at LeanIX events. While SAP’s older tools were model-driven, LeanIX’s offerings adopt a data-driven approach for gathering information that can be used to build a data-based repository.

The current announcement accompanied SAP CEO Christian Klein’s remarks on the acquisition. Klein commented, “Together with LeanIX, we want to offer a first-of-its-kind transformation suite to provide holistic support to our customers on their business transformation journeys. Building on our decades of expertise, we’ll embed generative AI to offer self-optimizing applications and processes that can help businesses achieve key goals such as maximizing cash flow while minimizing their environmental impact.”

The acquisition will introduce a new business transformation solution suite that will “give customers a comprehensive view of business processes and applications, including overlaying process dependencies and mapping the impact of potentiation transformations on the IT landscape.” The suite will include the LeanIX tools, SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, RISE with SAP, and SAP Business Technology Platform.

It is worth noting that SAP’s Signavio acquisition, announced at the same time as RISE with SAP, was central to the business transformation-as-a-service offering RISE with SAP as it provided organizations with the capability to update and transform their business processes. While the positioning on RISE with SAP has shifted since it was first announced, adding enterprise architecture management capabilities to a broader suite will provide capabilities that many organizations need. With organizations moving to the cloud and RISE with SAP, EAM capabilities are critical to ensuring complex landscapes are well-managed, efficient, and able to grow.

In alignment with this view, André Christ, CEO and co-founder of LeanIX, stated, “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.”

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

The LeanIX solutions are popular, and the company is a leader in EAM software. Adding these capabilities to the SAP portfolio will allow a much broader customer base to leverage these tools and help improve their landscape management abilities. This is a valuable tool for enterprise architects everywhere who are looking to create a repository or model of their existing IT landscape, use the technology to drive business transformation, or map business-led IT initiatives,.

SAP is also likely to use the LeanIX acquisition and business transformation solution suite as an incentive to encourage customers to adopt RISE with SAP. While there are currently no details on what the suite will exactly comprise and how pricing will work, organizations should expect limited use functionality as is the case with SAP Signavio solutions offered in RISE with SAP.