SAP LeanIX had a landmark year, marked by breakthrough product innovations and standout moments at the SAP Transformation Excellence Summits. Discover what shaped 2025 and where we’re headed in 2026.
From being recognized for the fifth consecutive year as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, to introducing AI capabilities that can help enhance and optimize how enterprise architects work, 2025 saw SAP LeanIX strengthen our commitment to helping organizations navigate IT complexity.
We’re guided by an agnostic approach, delivering value regardless of what makes up your technology stack. As we look toward to 2026, we’re doubling down on adding innovative new product capabilities to further help enterprise architects contribute meaningfully to their organization’s transformations.
Let's look back at our achievements in 2025, and forward to what we have planned in 2026...
Enterprise architecture was never more important than in 2025, when organizations were tasked with leveraging innovative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions into their technology landscapes. Throughout the year, companies have grappled with modernizing legacy systems, optimizing costs, and adopting emerging AI technologies, while maintaining operational stability.
The real challenge wasn’t simply managing complexity, but converting that complexity into strategic value. Enterprise architects, having long since evolved beyond documentation roles, play a pivotal role in shaping future-state visions that align technology investments with business outcomes.
Three customer success stories illustrate this:
NTT in Japan used SAP LeanIX solutions to gain full visibility of their IT landscape and ensure all employees had access to the same information in the same place. This allowed them to collect all system data from siloed spreadsheets and put it into a single source of truth that documented the end-of-life status of all systems.
MediaMarktSaturn used SAP LeanIX solutions to gain full visibility into their IT landscape across 11 countries, successfully rationalizing their software landscape by decommissioning the 10% of their application portfolio that they no longer needed within 12 months, while tracking progress on their major cloud migration.
Similarly, Deutsche Bahn used SAP LeanIX to gain a single source of truth for its IT landscape, enabling over 27,000 users to access EA-driven information and creating tailored dashboards that enhance C-level decision-making.
This year also marked notable recognition from industry experts. SAP LeanIX achieved a significant milestone in 2025, being positioned as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools for the fifth consecutive year.
Complementing this achievement, G2 users recognized SAP LeanIX as a leader across six distinct categories in their winter 2026 reports:
Grid Report for Enterprise Architecture Tools
Momentum Grid Report for Enterprise Architecture Tools
Enterprise Grid Report for Enterprise Architecture Tools
Grid Report for Application Portfolio Management
Momentum Grid Report for Application Portfolio Management
Enterprise Grid Report for Application Portfolio Management
2025 was a remarkable year of SAP LeanIX product innovations that can help advance your enterprise architecture practice. Let’s explore six notable innovations:
We introduced new capabilities that help organizations document, track, and govern architecture decisions. These capabilities can help enterprise architects and architecture review boards to make faster, more-informed decisions while collaborating asynchronously, transforming governance from a bottleneck into a strategic accelerator.
Why it matters:
Many organizations struggle with scattered, inconsistent architecture-decision records. Our centralized solution provides an efficient approach that can help align technology decisions with business strategy and organizational goals.
Our breakthrough AI inventory builder can help enterprise architects upload architecture data in images, pdf documents, xml and json files, and various other formats for automatic parsing and extraction of architectural elements. These include applications, IT components, and their relationships.
Why it matters:
This revolutionary capability can help reduce manual data entry, allowing architects to redirect their focus from administrative tasks to strategic analysis and value-driven activities.
Instead of manually creating static presentations, the SAP LeanIX architecture executive dashboard can help deliver relevant, live data directly to business leaders, enabling faster, more-informed strategic decision-making.
Why it matters:
Business leaders require current intelligence for strategic decisions. This dashboard can help reduce time-consuming manual reporting, while giving leadership access to the same data that enterprise architects rely on for their analysis.
The AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX can help organizations discover, manage, and govern AI agents within their enterprise architecture context. Our MCP server for SAP LeanIX solutions can help provide a secure, standardized gateway for connecting AI agents to enterprise architecture data.
Why it matters:
As organizations rapidly adopt agentic AI, they need comprehensive visibility and governance over these powerful technological assets. Our solution can help deliver clear oversight of AI agent performance, adoption patterns, and business impact.
Application total cost of ownership report as seen in SAP LeanIX
SAP LeanIX added application total cost of ownership (TCO) capabilities to capture comprehensive application cost data, surface key cost drivers, and quantify rationalization opportunities through embedded TCO calculations and advanced visualization capabilities.
Why it matters:
Cost transparency across application portfolios can enable faster, data-driven decisions on application rationalization, directly improving organizational efficiency, and optimizing budget allocation.
We extended SAP discovery capabilities in SAP LeanIX with new integrations that can help discover applications created with SAP Build and applications deployed in the SAP Business Technology Platform, Cloud Foundry environment. These capabilities can help enterprise architects gain comprehensive visibility into their IT landscape and application portfolio and support planning for a clean-core approach to SAP ERP.
Why it matters:
Understanding both SAP applications and their customizations enables organizations to create a clean core for their SAP ERP and accelerate transformation. This clarity can help ensure that SAP estates are optimized for sustainable growth.
Our integration with SAP Business Technology Platform can help with unified enterprise architecture management, bridging business strategy and IT implementation by mapping applications to business capabilities, managing technology risk, planning critical transformations, and enabling innovation through AI and integration capabilities.
When reflecting on the year, our SAP Transformation Excellence Summits stand out as particularly impactful moments. From Austin to The Hague, we welcomed vibrant communities of transformation leaders, enterprise architects, and process experts throughout 2025, showing how enterprise architecture, process excellence, and digital adoption come together to support real, lasting business change.
The SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in The Hague marked a watershed moment for our enterprise architecture network and beyond. With 1,000+ customers and partners in attendance, and 52 external speakers sharing pragmatic insights, real experience, and bold visions, it was our largest summit yet.
Attendees were treated to more than 60 breakout sessions across four tracks:
Business Transformation Management
Process Excellence and Mining
Enterprise Architecture,
Digital Adoption
Austin built momentum with an equally energizing program. More than 700 people came together for 50+ sessions that showcased real-world transformation and enterprise architecture stories, industry trends, and hands-on guidance to help accelerate business value.
To keep the inspiration going, you can watch sessions from both Austin and The Hague summits on demand.
We also introduced the SAP Expert Series for Transformation Excellence, delivering curated insights through accessible, bite-sized episodes. This series provides practical guidance on modern business transformation best practices, featuring insights by industry leaders who have successfully leveraged enterprise architecture to power their transformations.
The best part? You can watch it on demand now, too.
We’re doubling down on exciting new releases in 2026, including AI-assisted architecture guidance, diagram templates, and integrations. Plus, expanded AI agent hub capabilities to help you see more, decide faster, and collaborate better across enterprise architecture.
Let's look at five upcoming innovations:
We plan to introduce AI-assisted insights to surface opportunities for optimization and cost savings across your IT landscape. The initial release will focus on application rationalization and will expand to additional use cases over time.
We’re exploring diagram templates that enable users to define reusable diagrams and automate their creation. This can help reduce manual work, improve consistency, and enhance the overall diagramming experience.
For customers using the SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance, an upcoming integration can automatically synchronize software and hardware components into SAP LeanIX, create IT component fact sheets, and help enable obsolescence risk reporting. It can also help sync existing applications from SAP LeanIX to Jira, to improve portfolio transparency and strengthen collaboration between enterprise architecture and IT operations.
We are adding AWS Bedrock Agents and AWS Bedrock AgentCore as discovery sources to discover AI agents and sync relevant metadata into the AI agent inbox in SAP LeanIX. We also plan to add capabilities to discover MCP servers from the Microsoft MCP server registry, helping provide a broader view of agent architectures.
We plan to add a unique identifier field with automatic generation (for example, ADR-1) so decisions can be confidently referenced outside SAP LeanIX. Teams will be able to define letter-based codes per template with non-overlapping incremental numbers, and each decision is planned to include a stable, shareable link for long-term traceability.
Enterprise architecture has evolved beyond documenting existing systems to architect for future possibilities. Organizations that embrace this change position themselves to adapt quickly, innovate consistently, and thrive in increasingly complex business environments.
As we enter 2026, SAP LeanIX remains dedicated to helping you transform IT complexity into sustainable competitive advantage. Success belongs to those who can envision beyond current limitations and architect solutions that deliver measurable business value.
Ready to transform your organization’s approach to enterprise architecture? Discover how SAP LeanIX solutions can help you navigate complexity and drive meaningful change in the year ahead.