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Tag: LeanIX

  • Survey Shows Increased Reliance on DORA Metrics

    Survey Shows Increased Reliance on DORA Metrics

    A new survey found just under a quarter (23%) of respondents are now tracking all four of the DevOps metrics defined by the DevOps Research and Assessment Team (DORA), with another 17% now tracking three.

    The State of Developer Experience survey polled 129 IT professionals that play a role in software development and was conducted by LeanIX, a provider of a platform for managing the building of enterprise applications.

    Dominick Rose, vice president of product management and strategy for LeanIX, said the ability to track DORA metrics such as deployment frequency (77%), failure rate (73%), lead time for changes (63%) and mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) (55%) are leading indicators of DevOps maturity.

    DORA metrics, which are defined and maintained by a unit of Google, are being used most frequently to drive agile planning (69%) and optimize continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms (58%), the survey found.

    Overall, the survey revealed just under half of the respondents (47%) said their organization had a high level of DevOps maturity, defined as having adopted three or more DevOps working methods. Those working methods are: Being flexible to changes in customer needs; having implemented a CI/CD platform; all engineers build, ship and own their own code; teams are organized around topologies and each team is free to choose its own technology stack.

    Of course, each individual organization will determine for itself what level of DevOps depth is required. For example, not every organization would see the need for teams to be organized around topologies or be free to choose its own technology stack. In fact, Rose said the survey made it clear that larger enterprise IT organizations tended to have a lower overall level of DevOps maturity. One reason for that is many larger organizations are still employing legacy processes to build and deploy software, noted Rose.

    Most developers are also further along in terms of embracing continuous integration (CI) than IT operations teams are in adopting continuous delivery (CD), added Rose. However, as the number of applications being developed using low-code and no-code tools continues to increase, it’s only a matter of time before application delivery needs to become more automated, he said. Achieving that goal will become easier as more artificial intelligence (AI) is incorporated into IT operations, Rose added.

    Nevertheless, the survey made it clear there is still a long way to go in terms of bridging the divide between DevOps teams and the rest of the business, with only 20% of respondents indicating that they use a value stream management (VSM) platform to track engineering efficiency to tie development activities to actual business results.

    A total of 71% of respondents, however, tracked open support tickets as a measure of customer value, followed by 66% that tracked monthly users and 45% that tracked feature adoption.

    It remains to be seen how DevOps will be further promulgated throughout organizations but as more organizations realize how dependent they are on software, it then becomes a question of how fully they embrace DevOps best practices as the pace at which applications are being built and deployed continues to accelerate.

  • Survey Shows Increased Focus on Modernizing IT, Retiring Apps

    Survey Shows Increased Focus on Modernizing IT, Retiring Apps

    A survey of 140 enterprise architects and IT leaders published today suggested that, while moving applications to the cloud remains a priority, more attention is being paid to reducing technical debt by retiring applications.

    Conducted by LeanIX, a provider of a platform for managing enterprise architecture and managing value stream management (VSM), the survey found 40% of respondents identified reducing technical debt created by legacy applications and modernizing legacy systems as their top IT priorities. A full 96% said their company has at least one project planned for this year aimed at reducing technical debt with more than half (52%) noting that retiring IT applications is the primary means they will employ to reduce technical debt.

    Nearly 60% considered migrating applications to the cloud to be a high priority, as well. However, less than a quarter of respondents (24%) identified cloud initiatives as a top IT priority. The second most important cloud initiative, identified by 41% of respondents, is to increase the number of SaaS applications being employed.

    Regardless of the approach to the cloud, nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents said enterprise architects should form a closer connection with software development teams, with an almost equal percentage agreeing on the importance of tracking the business impact of software development.

    However, only 16% of those surveyed considered the evolution and improvement of their security posture a top priority, even though more than two-thirds considered security initiatives—such as improving risk assessment capabilities and adopting more zero-trust IT offerings—as important or highly important.

    Dominik Rose, vice president of product management for LeanIX, said enterprise architects—or someone within IT who assumes responsibility for enterprise architecture—are trying to minimize disruptions to the business as IT environments continue to expand and evolve. The challenge they encounter is there is usually a divide between software development teams and the rest of the business. The size of that divide will vary by organization; in general, though, digital business transformation initiatives should help bridge the gap—assuming enterprise architects can establish and maintain close connections with software development teams, noted Rose.

    LeanIX is making a case for an enterprise architecture management (EAM) platform that provides visibility into IT environments. The company also makes a VSM offering available on top of that platform that provides visibility into software delivery processes. The number of organizations that have adopted VSM platforms remains relatively small, but as organizations depend more on software to drive digital processes, the need for senior business and IT leaders to have more visibility into software delivery schedules is expected to increase.

    In the meantime, it remains to be seen just how aligned DevOps teams are with the strategic goals of the business. The ability to build and deploy software faster does not automatically equate to gaining a deeper understanding of the needs of the business. In fact, there may come a day when software is built and deployed faster than most organizations can effectively absorb unless they have some equivalent of a VSM platform in place.

  • LeanIX Combines SaaS Management and Enterprise Architecture to Help Drive Continuous Transformation

    As the use of SaaS in the enterprise explodes, LeanIX is the first Enterprise Architecture company to offer automated SaaS discovery and management to global customers

    Bonn, Germany and Boston, MA – May 18, 2021 – LeanIX (https://www.leanix.net/) the platform to plan and manage the Continuous Transformation journey, today introduces LeanIX SaaS Intelligence (SI), becoming the first Enterprise Architecture company to offer both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) management and Application Portfolio Management (APM). IT leaders can now gain visibility and governance of all applications in use across the entire IT landscape, as SaaS increasingly plays a critical role in digital transformation initiatives.

    LeanIX will demonstrate its new offering to more than 1,000 IT professionals at EA Connect Day Americas 2021, a virtual event on Thursday, May 20, 2021. For more information and free registration, visit www.eaconnectdays.com.

    “Our work with CIOs and CTOs revealed that a secure and well-managed cloud architecture is crucial, and modern Application Portfolio Management must now include automated SaaS discovery and cataloging,” said André Christ, LeanIX CEO and co-founder. “SaaS now represents more than 50 percent of software investment for enterprises, and it continues to accelerate due to digital transformation and remote work. With our acquisition of Cleanshelf and the addition of LeanIX SaaS Intelligence, we are redefining how automatic and unified discovery for SaaS and Application Portfolio Management can accelerate the effectiveness of IT operations.”

    Whether Zoom, Slack or HubSpot, SaaS applications have become an indispensable part of the corporate world. Experts estimate the current SaaS market at more than 15,000 providers and counting. While SaaS brings flexibility, cost efficiency and scalability, its promise is in danger of turning into the opposite. With freemium and low-barrier product-led growth business models, SaaS providers now bypass traditional IT procurement processes. This independent access to licenses is now a growing challenge for finance and IT managers. Today, many companies know only half of their existing SaaS applications and accounts, resulting in rising and unclear costs, increasing security risks and compliance violations.

    LeanIX SaaS intelligence uses machine learning and the most integrations available on the market, more than 3,800, to automatically capture, analyze, and report all SaaS applications within the enterprise.  It automatically identifies unmanaged contracts, duplicate licenses and wasted cloud software subscriptions. For IT managers and finance teams, it provides SaaS discovery and cataloging, utilization and user engagement metrics, cost and subscription optimization, access, vendor management and security, and renewal management.

    LeanIX acquired Cleanshelf in March 2021. “The same vision unites us: we make companies capable of acting in the future with the right tools,” said Dusan Omercevic, founder of Cleanshelf and now VP Product/SaaS Intelligence for LeanIX. “With LeanIX, we have re-engineered SaaS management to meet the needs of some of the largest enterprises in the world, such as Adidas, Bosch, and Volkswagen. Now that we are part of the LeanIX family, our customers will receive the best product and technology offering in the industry.”

    LeanIX SaaS Intelligence will be available to companies as a standalone solution of the LeanIX Continuous Transformation Platform®. Cloud-native startups and scaleups will benefit from managing their SaaS applications just as much as large corporations with mature infrastructures. Enterprise architects will have the SaaS discovery and cataloging functionality available as a free component of the LeanIX Application Portfolio Management module in July 2021.

    “In the future, there will be no enterprise architecture management without automated support for managing SaaS applications,” said Christ. “We enable companies to make their IT landscape fully visible and easily manageable and thus establish smart governance – instead of erecting new barriers with restrictions. Independent access to software has positively changed the working world and accelerated processes. Companies need precisely this agility to be fit for the future – it’s part of the continuous transformation we’re seeing.”

    About LeanIX

    LeanIX’s Continuous Transformation Platform® is trusted by Corporate and Product IT for hundreds of enterprises that require comprehensive visibility and superior governance. Global customers organize, plan and manage IT landscapes with LeanIX’s automated and data-driven approach. Offering Enterprise Architecture – with SaaS-, Cloud- and DevOps Management, LeanIX helps organizations make sound decisions and allocate resources with complete confidence.  The company is headquartered in Bonn, Germany, with offices in Boston, San Francisco and around the world. For more information see www.leanix.net

  • LeanIX Acquires Leading US SaaS Management Provider Cleanshelf

    With Cleanshelf acquisition, LeanIX is now the first provider in the enterprise architecture industry to offer an out-of-the-box solution for SaaS management

    Bonn Germany and San Francisco, March 24, 2021 — LeanIX, a platform that enables Corporate IT and Product IT teams to plan and manage their Continuous Transformation journeys, today announced the acquisition of Cleanshelf Inc. Headquartered in San Francisco, Cleanshelf is a leading enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) management solution with more than 3,000 integrations and it currently manages $700 million in SaaS spend for its customers. The software provides an automated view of all SaaS applications in an enterprise, simplifying management and enabling resource optimization.

    Cleanshelf is a perfect complement to LeanIX’s Application Portfolio Management and solves the problem CIOs and CFOs face keeping track of a company’s decentralized software tooling ecosystem. With the Cleanshelf acquisition, LeanIX is now the first provider in the enterprise architecture industry to offer its customers an out-of-the-box solution for SaaS management.

    The market for SaaS tools has expanded dramatically in recent years. There were just five SaaS providers listed on the stock exchange in 2012, and there are now more than 100. 70 percent of companies are currently investing in SaaS and public cloud offerings and will continue to do so, according to a  recent Gartner I&O Leaders Survey. Whether it’s Zoom, Teams or Slack, COVID-19 has further accelerated the adoption and heavy use of SaaS offerings in enterprises.

    SaaS Management from Cleanshelf Brings Automated Transparency

    The rapid expansion of online subscriptions to a wide variety of SaaS applications is mostly decentralized, making it difficult for companies to keep track of increasing expenditures as well as security and data protection. SaaS spending per employee is continuously increasing, as is the total amount of this spending. For CIOs and CFOs, the use of suitable SaaS management platforms is becoming increasingly important in order to gain transparency over decentralized IT purchases, without losing the benefits of quick access to software applications available online.

    With Cleanshelf, customers save an average of 15 percent of their SaaS spend in the first year by discovering unused licences. The technology is based on extensive integrations with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, spend and contract management solutions, identity and single-sign-on (SSO) providers, and automatically identifies SaaS applications used in the enterprise. The combination of over 3,000 integrations with more than three years of training data makes Cleanshelf technology unique. The data is supplemented with individual licence information and KPIs on the use of SaaS tools. This allows companies to optimize licence usage, make the right decisions about licence renewals and identify where application usage is not meeting expectations. Extensive data is also available for IT security to identify which SaaS solutions are not secured with the company’s SSO, and to automate the regular review of user access and terminations.

    Cleanshelf founder and CEO Dusan Omercevic will drive product development in SaaS management as LeanIX VP Product SaaS Intelligence and Managing Director Slovenia. He will also lead the Slovenian office in Ljubljana, which employs a large part of the previous Cleanshelf development team. “We are excited to become part of the LeanIX family,” he emphasised. “We have a strong enterprise focus with our fully SOC2-compliant technology. This vision is a perfect fit for LeanIX – the Google Maps for IT. And, we can deliver immediate value to the entire LeanIX customer base.”

    Cleanshelf investor Dawn Capital becomes a new shareholder in LeanIX. This comes only nine months after an $80 million Series D funding of LeanIX led by Goldman Sachs, and with participation from Insight Partners and DTCP (Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners).

    To implement the acquisition, Cleanshelf was supported by GP Bullhound as exclusive financial advisor. PwC and Mintz acted as legal advisors to LeanIX.

    LeanIX Offers Comprehensive Platform for All IT Areas

    Starting May 1, Cleanshelf’s technology will be available as a new product called “LeanIX SaaS Intelligence” and will primarily support CIOs, CFOs, IT procurement, IT managers and IT security teams in managing all SaaS applications in the company. Enterprise architects will have the SaaS discovery and cataloging functionality available as a free component of the LeanIX Application Portfolio Management module in Q2 2021.

    LeanIX is not only expanding its Continuous Transformation Platform with the Cleanshelf acquisition. Today, the company also introduced its newly developed offering for CTOs and product IT teams – Microservice Intelligence. With Microservice Intelligence, LeanIX enters the fast-growing DevOps space and offers reliable transparency on all microservices, its owners and dependencies with the automated cataloging of microservices.

    LeanIX CEO André Christ said, “We see the increasing trend of IT products being developed in-house. CTOs and DevOps teams need solutions to organize and manage the increasing complexity of microservices without compromising the Agile way of working. Automated cataloging is a smart solution for this.”

    With the SaaS Intelligence and Microservice Intelligence modules, LeanIX now offers IT management and IT teams suitable solutions in addition to its successful Enterprise Architecture Suite and Cloud Intelligence module to enable continuous transformation. The modules of the LeanIX platform can be seamlessly linked with each other, and can be used independently by executives, IT managers, solution architects, DevOps teams and leaders of Cloud Centers of Excellence.

    About LeanIX

    The LeanIX platform promotes continuous transformation and enables Corporate IT and Product IT teams to establish superior governance while efficiently organizing, planning, and managing IT landscapes. From SaaS management and enterprise architecture management to the organisation of multicloud environments and the cataloging of microservices for DevOps teams: LeanIX follows a collaborative and data-driven approach, focusing on speed and control in cloud environments and enabling companies to make sound and fast decisions based on comprehensive data.

    More than 400 enterprises including adidas, DHL, Volkswagen and numerous well-known technology companies such as Atlassian, Dropbox and Workday trust in LeanIX. More than 40 certified partners such as Deloitte and PwC rely on the dynamically growing IT company co-founded in 2012 by 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, headquartered in Bonn, has additional locations in San Francisco, Boston and Denver (USA) as well as in Ljubljana (Slovenia), Munich (Germany), Utrecht (Netherlands) and Hyderabad (India) and employs more than 350 people worldwide.

    About Cleanshelf

    Cleanshelf is the leading enterprise SaaS management platform focused on tracking, controlling, and benchmarking SaaS applications. The SOC 2-compliant and AI-powered technology help companies save up to 30% on their SaaS spending by automatically identifying unmanaged contracts, duplicate licenses, and wasted cloud software subscriptions. Cleanshelf is based in San Francisco with subsidiaries in Denver and Ljubljana (Slovenia). The company founded in 2017 by CEO Dusan Omercevic has closed an $8 million Series A funding round by Dawn Capital and LAUNCHub Ventures in March 2020.

  • Leanix Launches Microservice Intelligence To Help Manage The Growing Complexity Of Scaling Microservices

    DevOps and engineering teams can automate documentation to boost productivity and build reliable software

    Bonn, Germany & Boston – March 24, 2021 – LeanIX, a platform that enables Corporate IT and Product IT teams to plan and manage their Continuous Transformation journeys, today announced Microservice Intelligence, the latest addition to the LeanIX Continuous Transformation Platform. Microservice Intelligence automatically creates a microservices catalog that integrates with DevOps toolchains to provide 360-degree transparency of all cloud-native applications, ownership and dependencies. Knowing where microservices are deployed, who is responsible and how they support the business enable engineering teams to control complexity, boost developer productivity and build reliable software.

    “Running microservices at scale requires IT organizations to adopt cloud-native application development and bring data from disconnected sources, like CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes, together,” said André Christ, co-founder and CEO of LeanIX. “To effectively break down information silos, developers and engineering managers must establish shared objectives to get applications from design to production efficiently. Microservice Intelligence provides the transparency to assess and optimize the growing number of microservices, dependencies and owners across the software delivery lifecycle.”

    Today every organization needs to be a software company, and success requires building digital services quickly and with high quality. Agile practices, microservices and cloud-native development are rapidly adopted and used to decompose large monolithic architectures. However, as scale and complexity increase, it isn’t easy to understand the totality and context of all that is happening and where responsibility lies.

    Microservice Intelligence automatically catalogs an organization’s microservice landscape by surfacing and correlating metadata from disconnected toolchains, pipelines and Kubernetes clusters. It provides a 360-degree view to help engineering leaders establish transparency across all microservices and their dependencies. By monitoring critical deployment KPIs such as deployment frequency, mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) or failure rates, engineering leaders can help increase development efficiency and make software decisions based on data and insights.

    Here is how Microservice Intelligence helps DevOps teams:

    • Increase Visibility: Documentation is fully automated by discovering services built via CI/CD pipelines and deployed to Kubernetes. It creates a knowledge base of ownership and dependencies for development teams. This open and accessible understanding of product service availability and context of responsibilities shortens incident response times.
    • Resource Allocation: With Microservice Intelligence, teams can easily monitor development frequency, MTTR and failure rates of all software services. Having these insights helps balance resource allocation for application improvement or new feature investments.
    • Improve Trust: Microservice Intelligence helps de-risk microservices and quickly establish trust across the entire portfolio. It automatically maps libraries and their versions to microservices to identify and prioritize patches and reduce open-source library vulnerabilities. It helps ensure compliance by detecting and removing copyleft licenses.

    LeanIX Microservice Intelligence comes with out-of-the-box connectors for Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitHub Actions and Openshift. It also integrates with the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite to provide Product and Corporate IT teams with shared data and visibility into how microservices support business capabilities. The task of managing technology risk and obsolete software is greatly simplified and more thorough.

    “Continuous transformation does not stop by migrating to the cloud,” said Christ. “Virtually every company is now a tech company and increasingly is delivering in-house software. Microservice Intelligence helps customers navigate the microservice landscape and reduce the complexity that occurs when decomposing the monolith into more loosely coupled services.”

    For more information about Microservice Intelligence and LeanIX, please visit www.leanix.net.

    About LeanIX

    The LeanIX platform promotes continuous transformation and enables Corporate IT and Product IT teams to establish superior governance while efficiently organizing, planning, and managing IT landscapes. LeanIX follows a collaborative and data-driven approach, focusing on speed and control in cloud environments and enabling companies to make sound and fast decisions based on comprehensive data.

    More than 400 enterprises including adidas, DHL, Volkswagen and numerous well-known technology companies such as Atlassian, Dropbox and Workday trust in LeanIX. More than 40 certified partners such as Deloitte and PwC rely on the dynamically growing IT company co-founded in 2012 by 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 300 employees worldwide.

     

  • LeanIX Extends Application Management Reach

    LeanIX Extends Application Management Reach

    LeanIX today unveiled a catalog that enables DevOps teams to more easily track the relationships between microservices as they are built and deployed.

    At the same time, the company also revealed it has acquired Cleanshelf, a provider of a platform for managing software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

    LeanIX CEO André Christ said the Microservice Intelligence catalog will make it simpler for IT organizations to keep track of their ongoing software development efforts, while Cleanshelf provides the mechanism for centralizing management of SaaS applications that are now widely employed across the enterprise.

    The Microservice Intelligence catalog is the latest addition to the LeanIX Continuous Transformation Platform used to manage enterprise applications. It automatically captures and correlates metadata being generated across disconnected toolchains, pipelines and Kubernetes clusters to create a 360-degree view of microservices and their dependencies, said Christ.

    In addition to being integrated with the LeanIX Enterprise Application Suite, Microservice Intelligence comes with out-of-the-box connectors for Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitHub Actions and Red Hat OpenShift platforms.

    By monitoring deployment frequencies, mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) and failure rates, Christ noted it will become easier to make software engineering decisions based on data and insights surfaced via the Microservice Intelligence catalog. DevOps teams can also annotate the microservices recorded by the catalog to provide additional information, Christ added.

    The Microservice Intelligence catalog provides the added benefit of making it easier to onboard new developers, said Christ. Each new member of a development team can, on their own, explore the overall application environment without requiring an IT team to dedicate someone to describe it each time a new member of a DevOps team is hired, Christ noted.

    At the same time, other stakeholders, such as cybersecurity teams, can explore the application environment to better understand dependencies as well as the potential impact of a newly discovered vulnerability, Christ added.

    In general, Christ said, as application life cycle management across the extended enterprise becomes more complex it’s clear new platforms will be required to manage legacy monolithic applications, emerging microservices-based applications and SaaS applications that, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, are being used to enable employees to work from home. The Cleanshelf platform, in particular, will be rebranded as LeanIX SaaS Intelligence to address that latter issue. A SaaS discovery and cataloging capability will also be made available as a free component of the LeanIX Application Portfolio Management module in the second quarter.

    IT environments have never been more distributed, and it’s clear most organizations are under pressure to reduce the total cost of IT by centralizing management functions. It’s too costly to dedicate a management platform for each type of application deployed across an extended enterprise. LeanIX is making a case for a platform that enables IT organizations to finally centralize the management of application environments.

    It’s unclear at what rate that centralization may occur, given the level of inertia that exists within most IT organizations today. However, as application lifecycle management continues to evolve, the centralization of the management of application portfolios that continue to grow is all but inevitable.