What advice do you have for others considering LeanIX?

When I talk about the infrastructure piece, one of the things that we looked at moving from the old technologies, for example, from their old database technologies to the new, we recognized they had a lot of tech debt. Old systems needed to be retired because old database technologies would not work with the new SAP backend database. Looking at their cloud infrastructure that they were building to recognize that they had AWS and Azure, which didn't make sense. We actually recommended looking at all of these licensing, looking at the performance, scaling of the environment, and then making recommendations, basically using SAP LeanIX to decide which path they should take. I was not involved with the pricing because I was not involved with deciding for the implementation of SAP LeanIX. I went in to use LeanIX as an enterprise architect to help them out. I do know SAP licensing from an ERP standpoint, but I cannot speak to SAP LeanIX pricing. I have individuals at SAP that I can reach out to directly and have them push our tickets to get them resolved. I'm not a designated partner of SAP. Because of my relationship with SAP, I have quite a few contacts there. Whenever SAP has contracts that are smaller in nature, they provide it to my group. My group has a consortium of consultants, some of those who have worked in some of the big five, who work alongside me through my company, and we provide solutions to our clients. I would rate LeanIX at an 8.5, trending towards nine.

I recommend LeanIX highly at a level of eight out of ten. Based on organizational complexity, preferences can vary, but LeanIX excels in its domain for those considering it. I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

I consider LeanIX to be a very expensive tool for what it offers. Overall, I would rate the solution a five out of ten.

I am not responsible for maintaining the solution. I can recommend the product to others, but it all depends on their use cases. If people have different requirements, they can use other tools. Some people may want just one solution for their IT landscape and business process management, or they may need a product they can integrate and work with to create other solutions. Based on our implementation and the scope for which I have used the tool, I rate it a seven to eight out of ten.

I would like to rate LeanIX as nine out of ten. LeanIX has a holistic view of the app landscape, and they also have work solutions in terms of technology, computer, lifecycle integration, and ServiceNow, which makes the product robust enough to implement quickly and get the benefits. On the other hand, Essential Projects, Essential Docker, and Essential Cloud provide cost-effective solutions for small and medium organizations, and up to 170 customizable dashboards. I would like to rate it five out of ten.

Make sure you have dedicated staff to support the tool going forward. Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Users should see dashboards before buying and see it aligns with the CIO organization style of leadership expectations. It is very important to sustainability that users are keeping the system up to date by automating/integrating with other apps in the ecosystem/ITOPs.

Prior to choosing LeanIX, I would suggest verifying the ability to adopt it and its features to utilize its full potential. It does require significant expertise and technical proficiency, as it is a tool primarily used by a limited number of experts in the architecture field. I would rate it eight out of ten.

It is overall a good tool. I rate it nine out of ten.

I recommend this solution but it's important to engage the business first and acknowledge that they're the owners of the data. Engaging the business significantly improves the return on investment. I rate this solution nine out of 10.

I would rate the overall product an eight out of ten. It is always good to do a POC and validate what you are trying to achieve with a product before using it. You need to know the integration capability of LeanIX to make the choice meaningful.

I give the solution a seven out of ten. We should be aware of our enterprise architecture strategy, and the governance we want to implement and use the solution accordingly. There are many different architecture layers and methods, such as content service platforms and solution architecture modeling. For example, we could use Sparx, DT, or something else. It is important to choose carefully within the strategy of what app we want to use, as there are many options. For example, there are other interfaces for unified communication, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Atlassian Chat. It can be difficult to decide which is the best-unified communicator for a company if there is no report outlining which unified communication should be used for a global purpose.

I rate LeanIX 10 out of 10. If you plan to implement LeanIX, you should get someone who understands their industry and business, not just the tool.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

In terms of LeanIX deployment, we have a tier for it, they just provide us with cloud instances, and we use those. LeanIX is quite good because they just try to focus on the modern aspects of the applications and how the business evolves. I'm fine with their vision. The good part about LeanIX is that it is quite a new tool. When you have an old tool, they do have a lot of features, but the problem is that they have certain legacy thoughts, but LeanIX doesn't have that "baggage of thoughts", as it is a new tool. Instead, it has a modern way of thinking, and that's a good way to start. I'm not part of the Procurement Department, so I'm unable to comment on the pricing for the tool, but in general, because it's cloud-based, it's normally cheaper. It's quite popular because the overall pricing comes down a lot when you deploy tools on the cloud. My advice to others looking into implementing LeanIX is that it's a pretty good tool if they're looking to reduce costs, but still want better IT. If cost is their primary consideration, then LeanIX is a really a good tool. I'm giving LeanIX a rating of eight out of ten.

It all depends on how you put together the inventory. You need to be cognizant of what kinds of information you will need and what kinds searches you foresee. It's a tool. There should be an enterprise architect who understands what outcome he is looking for. You can then build that outcome using Lean IX. It's a tool that has a specific way of working. You need to understand the tool very well and determine if it works for your use case, for whatever you're trying to achieve. So first of all, you need to know what you want to achieve. You will need to spend time to get an agreement, internally, on how you model your business architecture and your application and infrastructure architecture, to build better expectations of outcomes of the system. There will definitely be internal work to get to a collaborative agreement. Once you do have that agreement and you understand how LeanIX works — and it is not a very complicated system — then it's easy to see how it will work for you, or at least how much it can bend. When you look into it, your first impression might be, "Oh, it's a little bit more of a closed system." Understand that this aspect does help you with adoption, and then look at the customization techniques and whether you can support them. Do you have the skillset, someone who will be able to work with it if you want to expand the system? That will be someone who works in Node.js and someone who knows GraphQL. If you're just at the beginning, in addition to those questions, I would go a little bit more in-depth into what exactly is included in the package, because sometimes that's not very intuitive. Ask questions about what is included and how much it will benefit you. For example, the ServiceNow add-on is a little bit more expensive and you need to understand if you are ready for it. Otherwise, you will be paying for nothing. Its overall ease-of-use plays a big role in adoption. As usual, you need to sell this tool, and the practice of EA in general, to the people who will contribute to it, and that's where LeanIX is really valuable. It helps you to drive the practice. They have put good effort into making it very easy to automate things and that is a valuable part of establishing an EA practice and for the adoption of it. It's not only the only part of that process. It cannot build the whole EA practice. You can't do that with one tool.

LeanIX is typically a data center application. So first prepare your internal organization for data repository and where you want to conceptualize. Have that in hand and then speak to businesses, gather all the system information, and process information. Then go to LeanIX and start building based as per their model. So your part is only bringing your data to support the application. The native connectors look very attractive but comes with a huge price for certain products. Please be informed on price part before getting attracted towards the benefits that you are going get from those native connector, Because like us, we may not be in a position to have more ROI than the actual expense that we incur for that native connectors. Its good to avoid the surprises later stage and struck with contract sign without learning the actual impact. Overall, we are very happy with the LeanIX features and functionalities, the way they are with customers but the bitter part is their customer payment strategies for native connectors. LeanIX CEO Andre Christ is real visionary in EA, appreciate that, sincere suggestion is addressing customer concerns in win-win mode would greatly help in long relationship. I would rate it an eight out of ten. I would recommend this tool for sure.

My recommendation would depend on the use case. We cannot go to the customer and just advise them to have one kind of tool. It depends on what they have in the architecture and what kind of solution they want to have. Some companies are just fine with a seven-point solution. Some companies want to implement very difficult workflows. Then I would tend to use Alfabet from Software AG but it really depends on the use case. If you have a company that's setting up Enterprise Architecture and already has all the documents produced in Microsoft environments, iServer's a nice solution. It really depends. I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because you always have that gap between complexity and easy to use. And the more complex the tool becomes, the more difficult it is to get the usability. For example, Alfabet is not bad, it looks good and it's not bad, it's easy to use. But therefore the meta-model has over 700 classes from the standard in comparison to the 10 classes in LeanIX. LeanIX is very, nice from the visibility side. This is the one point that I wouldn't give, but this was something that the gap is really hard to fill.

In terms of advice I would give to others thinking of using this solution, I would say that you need to be aware of what you want to achieve in terms of functionality and documentation. It has some limitations. I would rate this solution eight out of ten. It's a good solution in the sense of what it was designed for: formulating business capabilities, application factors, and managing dashboards. It's a very powerful and flexible tool for making nice reports. However, it's not made for handling tasks such as architecture design like Enterprise Architect is.