LeanIX 1,000 customers show value of enterprise architecture

LeanIX is proud to announce that Mars has signed as our 1,000th customer. We believe that this milestone in the LeanIX journey is proof of the urgent need for enterprise architecture management (EAM) solutions in the modern business world. Let's explore why EAM is exactly what your organization needs.

LeanIX is on a trajectory of accelerating growth. Founded in 2012, it took us until 2021 to get 500 customers. It's 2023, and now we have 1000. On top of that, we hired our 500th employee in March of this year.

This growth shows no signs of slowing, despite the economic turmoil the world currently faces. Here's how the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) bi-annual World Economic Outlook report characterizes the present outlook:

"The baseline forecast is for growth to fall from 3.4 percent in 2022 to 2.8 percent in 2023, before settling at 3.0 percent in 2024. Advanced economies are expected to see an especially pronounced growth slowdown, from 2.7 percent in 2022 to 1.3 percent in 2023."

World Economic Outlook, International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Headwinds notwithstanding, Mars has officially joined a list of other high-profile LeanIX customers, a list including:

Volkswagen
Adidas
Atlassian
Southwest Airlines
Discover Financial Services
Doctolib
Paysafe
Workday
and many more

So, what's the secret to continual growth in an economic downturn? Simply put, EAM tools like the LeanIX platform become more important during difficult times.

Enterprise architecture key to efficiency

During times of financial duress, every enterprise needs to focus on efficiency. This means gaining the greatest amount of value from the least-possible investment of funds.

As such, waste and inefficiency cannot be tolerated. Still, you can't put your wallet on lockdown, either.

Cracking down on parts of your business that are hemorrhaging money and, even worse, wasting time and resource, is an initiative that's worthy of your support and investment during trying times. The reduction in resource use will more than make up for the extra effort of streamlining your infrastructure.

Gartner estimates that IT cost optimization initiatives could save most businesses up to 25% of service costs in as little as 18 months.

Optimizing cost is even more crucial given the sacrifices companies are making today to weather the economic storm. According to Tech Crunch, the number of layoffs in January to April 2023 already outnumber the total amount for 2022.

Imagine how much of that talent might have been saved from redundancy by a 25% reduction in IT spend. Given the premium put on technical talent as we enter the era of digital business, it's easy to see why the number of LeanIX customers continues to grow.

Continuous transformation

So, what makes LeanIX so attractive at a time when organizations seem intent on cutting back and hunkering down? The answer is not too complicated. LeanIX solves a problem that sits at the root of any transformation an organization hopes to undertake.

“Companies cannot successfully address the many challenges they face without the understanding of their IT landscape that an effective enterprise architecture practice provides. We strongly believe this."

Andre Christ, CEO and Founder, LeanIX

An infamous BCG survey shows that 70% of digital transformations fail with no return on investment. The usual reasons for this include a lack of clarity on the state of the IT landscape before the transformation, and a lack of supporting cultural change.

These initiatives are bound to fail if organizations view digital transformation as an IT-only initiative. What part of modern business, after all, doesn't involve digital technology and IT?

Even our physical logistics and production are now inseparably entwined with the digital technology that monitors and analyzes it. Our stores run on point-of-sale systems and we access our offices with RFID keys.

Rather than digital transformation, we need to start thinking about business transformation, and business transformation never ends. Rather than just uploading your software to the cloud, business needs to adopt an agile strategy of flexibility and continual adaptation to match the increasing pace of change in the market.

We need to embrace a culture of continuous transformation, agility and flexibility, rather than acting as if digital transformation were a project with a set end date. Continuous transformation cannot be achieved, however, without a continuous understanding of how the various parts of your IT landscape exist together.

The various components of the LeanIX software platform exist to provide your organization with perfect clarity on the state of your current state, highlighting how your digital landscape supports your business and letting you map out this landscape's ongoing transformation.

How LeanIX supports you during economic turmoil

To effectively cater to today's market, organizations need a single, reliable source of truth for enterprise architecture that provides comprehensive visibility into the business landscape. LeanIX's solutions provide a dynamic, live view of the current state of your business from a high-level right down to granular detail.

This empowers you to master digital complexity through application rationalization and modernization, reduce costs, and modernize infrastructure and core systems like SAP S/4HANA enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

“We’re excited to be working with a team that is not only helping us model our transformation strategy but also identify redundancies in our IT landscape, streamlining our current planning and architecture management processes. We want to showcase the impact technology has across our organization. Being able to translate architectural data into value-driven deliverables for a range of stakeholders will be key to our success.”

Praveen Moturu, Global Vice President Digital Technologies and Chief Enterprise Architect at Mars

To enable this, LeanIX offers three connected tools for mapping and understanding your software landscape:

EAM

Gain full understanding of your IT landscape at any scale or level of granularity. Our enterprise architecture management (EAM) platform will collate information from your IT infrastructure and automated user surveys, as well as third-party systems, to map out your entire IT landscape. It's Google Maps for IT!

SMP

The rise of so-called 'shadow IT' is raising costs, increasing risks, and worse, building discord between IT and the rest of your business. Gain complete oversight of the valuable SaaS tools that your colleagues make use of every day with our SaaS management platform (SMP).

VSM

The US government is leading the charge on increasing scrutiny for third-party and open-source software. When a vulnerability is found, our value stream management (VSM) platform empowers you to identify exactly where the impact will be felt in your tech stack in minutes.