LeanIX Acquisition | Business Transformation at SAP

An organization’s capacity for change has become a competitive differentiator, and the ability to quickly respond to change of any type is now viewed as a foundational competency for any business. This need for ongoing adaptability is one of the key drivers behind today’s announcement of SAP’s intention to acquire LeanIX.

LeanIX, as a market leader in enterprise architecture management, will further enhance SAP’s ability to digitize and simplify business transformations.

With the drivers of change – customer behaviors, market conditions, innovation disruption, talent shortages, environmental conditions, etc. – transformation has become an imperative. This is backed up by survey data that show that 90% of organizations link their own performance with the progress they have made on transformation.*

As SAP we are at the heart of business execution for so many companies out there. When talking to them, we hear that they clearly understand this need to transform. But we also hear that they struggle on how to get there. Their reality of business processes, data quality, and system landscape has grown over the last 10 to 20 years into a complexity that is hard to undo, let alone transform to an agile and dynamic set up.

When we as SAP reinvented our strategy three years ago, we elevated this need of our customers to get more help along their transformation journey to one of our key priorities. We acquired Signavio and established SAP Signavio as a very successful business unit to help our customers transform on the process side. We know that when our customers adopt a process-centric approach, they are able to visualize the impact of technology architecture on the day-to-day flow of work and business outcomes, giving them a clearer foundation for change and ongoing optimization.

In the two years since acquisition, we have listened closely to our SAP Signavio customers and engaged in their transformation project. They want to digitize the transformation journey as much as possible – the rewards of digitization are better collaboration and business buy in, accelerated time to value, and data-driven decision making. They look to us to deliver solutions that accelerate and de-risk their transformation journeys. They want better integration into operational systems to ease deployment and roll out of new processes, and they crave information on best practices and industry standards. We listened and the constant theme we saw was bringing together the process world with the IT world.   

At the center of what’s needed is a stronger connection between IT landscape and business processes, the ability to identify the impact of technology on business outcomes. IT landscapes, like process landscapes, have exploded in complexity and have become webs of interconnected applications, data, and workflows, making it nearly impossible to predict the consequences of any change, large or small.

That is where LeanIX comes into play. With LeanIX’s ability to have full transparency into the IT landscape and ideal planning capabilities for the future design of the applications we are perfectly complementing the transformation capabilities of SAP Signavio in the process world – like two sides of the same coin: process and systems.

The addition of LeanIX will allow CIOs and IT leaders to gain the transparency and planning capabilities for their enterprise architecture to own the transformation and proactively drive the conversation with the business stakeholders. As SAP Signavio for the process world, LeanIX will give CIOs and IT leadership more relevance in critical business decisions and their impact on core operations, and greater ability to react to market trends and seize new opportunities such as generative AI.

Our vision is the creation of a complete business transformation suite. SAP’s market leading technology platform and our broad and innovative application portfolio are already helping our customers become future-proof, agile and intelligent enterprises. We are now on our way to delivering the most complete business transformation portfolio to help all of our customers on their transformation journeys.

With the addition of LeanIX’s IT-centric transformation capabilities to our existing portfolio of RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP, SAP Signavio solutions, cloud application lifecycle management, and SAP Business Technology Platform, we are uniquely suited to deliver for our customers a clear path to success.

Change, whether incremental or revolutionary, is constant and inescapable. Effectively managing change requires trust – trust in people to do their best, trust in technology to seamlessly and securely support work execution, integrations and new business models, and trust in the long-term purpose and vision.

At SAP, we strive to be a trusted advisor, working hand in hand with our customers as they manage their transformation journeys. We are excited to bring LeanIX’s people and capabilities together with our own, giving us a stronger foundation for helping our customers seize the opportunities inherent in the changes that are coming, whatever those changes may be.

Rouven Morato is general manager and chief revenue officer of SAP Signavio.

*SAP Insights “Senior Executive Priority Study” 2021/2022