Press release

World’s Largest Meeting of Enterprise Architects Concludes: Real-World Examples of Successful Business Transformation Journeys

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LeanIX, a provider of Software-as-a-Service solutions for Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Cloud Governance, today concluded day one of its two-day EA Connect Days conference. The EA peer event was attended by more than 3,000 IT managers and EA experts who heard enterprise architecture implementation case studies by Coca Cola European Partners, DHL, Siemens and others—plus a keynote talk by a former NASA astronaut, Mike Massimino, and leading investor and visionary, Frank Thelen.

A recent McKinsey study showed that 70%(1) of digital transformation and cloud migration projects fail. How this business transformation journey can be designed more successfully was the core topic of this year’s EA Connect Days 2020, organized by LeanIX. Enterprise architects can become game changers and dramatically improve success percentages if they use action-oriented IT governance solutions to control the entire transformation journey from the current as-is state of the IT landscape to the cloud.

Companies shared case studies at EA Connect Days showing how they managed their major business transformation initiatives using modern enterprise architecture practices. Examples included:

  • A fashion retailer that had to transform their entire global supply chain;
  • A global beverage company that had to rationalize IT operations from 3 merged companies;
  • A global electronics manufacturer that used EA to manage operational complexity and avoid the ‘dual-edged sword’ of microservices implementation.

LeanIX CEO and co-founder, André Christ, also used EA Connect Days 2020 as an opportunity to provide a sneak peek at several important expansions of the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite to support customers’ full transformation journeys, including more integrations with business intelligence systems and other ecosystem vendors, new data centers, and more actionable EA features to reduce technology risk and align IT with business outcomes.

Soon to be released from beta testing will be LeanIX’s new Business Transformation Management (BTM) module, which enables the planning and implementation of transformation projects from today to a definable state in the future and shows the dependencies on the corporate architecture.

Christ compares the functionality with a well-known system: “With the Apple Time Machine, you can have data shown retrospectively to any point in time. The Business Transformation Management module from LeanIX does the same – but into the future.” EA teams and stakeholders can plan different scenarios for transformation processes in parallel and independently of one another, and see the immediate effects on the architecture look at all the risks and make decisions.

“We are familiar with collaborative work on software code. Now there is a solution for collaborative work on transformation – similar to a GitHub for architecture management,” said Christ of the BTM module.

Use cases include upgrading large SAP landscapes to SAP S/4HANA, migrating legacy systems to a cloud native infrastructure, IT consolidations due to company mergers or spin-offs, implementing application rationalization programs, and providing additional powerful remote workstations.

LeanIX’s SaaS solution for EA and Cloud Governance bridges the gap between business strategic planning and IT project management, and can map IT assets and business processes into a live database in just days, which therefore improves business transformation success rates dramatically.

Support for Business Migration to the Cloud

Growth for hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform shows the enormous importance of cloud migration. Revenues for these and other cloud infrastructure services (IaaS) is forecast to grow to an estimated $81 billion by 2022 (2). However, the promise of flexibility and agility associated with the cloud is in reality a challenge in IT management for many companies.

Christ stated: “If there is a lack of transparency, if responsibilities and the relationship to the business cannot be clearly represented, then the cloud brings, first of all, more complexity, uncontrollable costs and risks, and a slowdown in inquiries. With the Cloud Native Suite, LeanIX offers the option of setting up simple and effective cloud governance. Our vision of a future-oriented enterprise architecture does not stop at taking stock of the current situation or planning the transformation. The aim is to support companies reliably and continuously with just one central database.”

LeanIX Certification Program

The EA Connect Days 2020 also marked the launch of the LeanIX Certification Program, which reflects the growing importance of enterprise architecture among large enterprises. The second day of the EA Connect Days conference was dedicated exclusively to this new training initiative, with several virtual training sessions and qualifications for LeanIX Certified EA Associates.

Further information about EA Connect Days and the speaker presentations can be found at www.eaconnectdays.com/eu. EA Connect Days / Europe took place for the first time as a hybrid event – with an IRL event held at the World Conference Center in Bonn plus a live broadcast on the web.

1) Sources: McKinsey Insights: “Why do most transformations fail? A conversation with Harry Robinson” (July 10, 2019); and “Why transformations fail: A conversation with Seth Goldstrom” (February 10, 2019)

2) Source: Gartner press release: “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Revenue to Grow 6.3% in 2020” (July 23, 2020)

About LeanIX:

LeanIX is the single source of truth for Corporate IT and Product IT to create transparency of the present and derive actions, to shape the future in an understandable business context. LeanIX provides its Software-as-a-Service to 300 international customers including well-known brands such as adidas, Atlassian, Dropbox, DHL, Merck, Volkswagen, Vodafone and Zalando. More than 40 certified partners such as Deloitte, Cognizant and PwC rely on the dynamically-growing IT company co-founded in 2012 by LeanIX CEO André Christ.

With EA Connect Days, LeanIX has been regularly organizing one of the world’s most important industry events in the field of Enterprise Architecture since 2014. The company is headquartered in Bonn, Germany with additional offices in Boston, Massachusetts; Munich, Germany; Utrecht, Netherlands; and Hyderabad, India. It has more than 240 employees worldwide.

To learn more about LeanIX, visit www.leanix.net, @leanix_net on Twitter, and https://www.linkedin.com/company/leanix-gmbh on LinkedIn.