SAP to buy LeanIX to advance process optimization with AI

Back in 2020, SAP said it will support S/4HANA through at least 2040, but will only support its legacy ECC6 and Business Suite 7 applications until the end of 2027. But three years on, only 12% of SAP customers have completed their transition to S/4HANA, according to a recent survey of international enterprises conducted by LeanIX. That leaves a lot of work for SAP, its customers, and their systems integrators to do in the four years before it turns off mainstream support for the old software.

SAP has made a number of moves since then to help enterprises make the move. In January 2021, it acquired process mining company Signavio to help enterprises identify their existing processes and recommend improvements to help with their S/4HANA migration. And in February 2021 it launched Rise with SAP, an all-in-one offering combining licensing, maintenance and cloud hosting of SAP’s core ERP applications that CEO Christian Klein described as digital transformation as a service.

Just months after the Signavio acquisition, Gartner analyst Paul Sanders told CIO.com that SAP “should have had this five years ago, when they launched S/4HANA, because this is the hardest thing for companies to understand and change.”

Demand for the process mining software is still strong in 2023. “Signavio is one of our key growth areas,” SAP’s chief strategy officer Sebastian Steinhaeuser said in the same conference call. “LeanIX has been a partner to SAP Signavio for quite some time. SAP and LeanIX have more than 500 joint customers, including some very large household names.”

While ownership of LeanIX will give SAP more control over the software’s capabilities, the company won’t be abandoning its non-SAP customers when the deal closes later this year, Christ said.

Rouven Morato, GM at SAP Signavio, jumped in to point out that when SAP acquired it, only 25% of Signavio customers used SAP. “It’s important for us to continue to support non-SAP landscapes, because we want to provide customers a holistic view of the enterprise architecture,” he said.