This was supposed to be a big year for IT spending. Gartner projected IT budgets to rise another 4% to $4.4 trillion in 2022. But concerns over a potential global economic recession have dampened enthusiasm. CIOs are tightening their budgets and reassessing spending priorities to focus on what’s going to keep their businesses afloat during what could be a lengthy period of supply scarcity and uncertainty.

Against that backdrop, SAP has broadened its partnership with German firm LeanIX to help those implementing SAP (or adding additional modules) to get the most value for their investment, simplify operations and bring about a business and IT digital transformation. This takes the form of deeply integrated solutions to map business processes as well as a joint product roadmap, which will deliver an integrated view of enterprise and business architecture and the achievement of rapid and actionable insights. 

“Business transformations of today are driven by a variety of factors, but ultimately the objective is to ensure that the future IT landscape supports the business in the most efficient and effective manner to maximize value,” said Johan Jerresand, finance transformation digital lead, PwC Sweden.

EAM gets SAP stamp of approval

To aid in such transformation, the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) solution has become an SAP-endorsed app and is now available in the SAP Store. SAP Endorsed Apps are premium certified by SAP. This means that they must include enhanced security, have undergone in-depth testing and have successfully performed when measured against existing SAP benchmark numbers. The SAP Store provides access to more than 2,000 solutions from SAP as well as partner solutions that extend SAP applications. LeanIX EAM is the only enterprise management solution that has earned this SAP status to date.  

“The partnership will also involve joint sales and marketing activities focused on two use cases: business process transformation and the SAP S/4HANA transformation,“ said LeanIX CEO and cofounder André Christ. “It brings business architecture and enterprise architecture closer together, enabling SAP customers to accelerate transformations with an eye towards operational excellence and delivering business results faster.“ 

SAP S/4HANA is the successor to both SAP R/3 and SAP ERP. As the company’s ERP platform of choice for large enterprises, it’s optimized for SAP’s in-memory database SAP HANA. Most customers these days seek to deploy this platform in the cloud. As this typically means that they need to move an older ERP system or legacy SAP ERP package from an on-premises environment to the cloud, implementation projects are rarely straightforward. Configuration issues, dependency challenges and integration headaches are generally the norm. 

Jointly with SAP, LeanIX will provide best-in-class support for more than 10,000 SAP customers to assist them in executing SAP transformation initiatives in the cloud and migrations to the SAP S/4HANA ERP platform in the cloud. These efforts will complement the existing RISE with SAP solution, which is designed to support business needs in any industry, geography or for any regulatory requirement, with SAP being responsible for the service level agreement (SLA), cloud operations and technical support. Additionally, the LeanIX partnership involves deeper integrations with the SAP Process Transformation Suite.

“Most ERP transformation programs strive for a high degree of standardization,” said Jerresand. “Increasingly, businesses are looking into SAP S/4HANA transformation projects and standardization is commonly a key value driver.” 

LeanIX EAM helps companies map business processes to their existing enterprise architecture, SaaS and microservices landscapes as a means of providing greater process transparency and control. Further benefits include end-to-end integration with SAP Signavio Process Manager, which delivers a streamlined experience from the business context to system configuration and application lifecycle management capabilities. (Signavio is a business process management suite acquired by SAP in 2021.)

“LeanIX’s EAM solution will help customers adapt faster to changing enterprise architecture requirements while enjoying the benefits of process excellence available through integration with SAP Signavio solutions,” said Gero Decker, general manager of SAP Signavio. “The SAP-endorsed app complements our portfolio and meets the needs of customers looking to transform as they move critical applications to the cloud.” 

Moving to the cloud 

While many applications will remain on premises and some have returned from the cloud to on-premises, the overwhelming trend is for applications and workloads to migrate to the cloud. Unfortunately, those businesses making the move to the cloud are running into many challenges. It’s common to run headlong into murky data landscapes filled with unused, siloed, and outdated data. And long-term reliance on legacy technology presents issues related to hardware change outs, the need to re-code applications, and difficulties in migrating data.  

Those moving to SAP S/4HANA through the RISE with SAP solution, for example, require a comprehensive overview of the interconnections between SAP technologies and all related applications in their software estate. LeanIX EAM provides this overview and complements the overall SAP solution set through integration with SAP Signavio Process Manager and native support for the SAP Activate methodology Among other integrations, LeanIX offers an out-of-the-box integration between SAP Signavio’s modeling capabilities.