Enterprise architects can look forward to helping CFOs and CIOs better control IT spending and connect costs to data in IT landscapes. Through a technology partnership with Apptio, organizations will now have a direct and dynamic link between the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite and Apptio’s IT Financial Management solution to enable stakeholders to make data-driven decisions about their IT investments.
Slated for release on May 20, the integration with Apptio delivers an out-of-the-box connector that links the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management with Apptio’s ITFM solution. LeanIX becomes Apptio’s first EA Management partner.
Here are some use cases to show how this partnership will improve architectural tasks (and make the lives of financial officers easier in the process).
Data stored in LeanIX on key entities of IT landscapes like business capabilities, applications, user groups, IT components, projects, and providers can be transferred to Apptio’s industry-leading cost modeling software via automated means to broaden the reporting metrics of the two platforms and augment rationalization projects. By alternating from LeanIX to Apptio, IT costs related to these elements can be dissected from across numerous categories of analytics for comprehensive financial reviews and budget forecasts.
In LeanIX, high-level overviews of information from Apptio — whether general (e.g., OpEx, CapEx, total cost of ownership) or application-specific (e.g., application run costs, application development costs, application cost savings) — are paired to LeanIX Fact Sheets and incorporated into the overall reporting network. Of note, the evolving costs of architecture can be uncovered with views applied to LeanIX reports and seen in conjunction with architectural attributes such as service lifecycles, associated business capabilities, and technical and functional grades.
The LeanIX-Apptio integration equips enterprise architects with the means to accurately factor for costs while determining an application’s suitability in the cloud by using automated pathways to monitor the finances of IT entities. Such cost-based insights into cloud feasibility can be harnessed to both drive technical evaluations and monitor any specific cloud migration approach (e.g., lift-and-switch, re-platforming, etc.).
While application rationalization and cloud transformation are two of the primary use cases stemming from our technology partnership, here are two more we think you should consider.
As a single source of truth relied upon to improve IT landscapes, LeanIX offers even more architectural transparency when combined with Apptio’s cost reports. Resources to fill technological gaps affecting items such as business capabilities can be allocated in proportion to the financial value expected, and by leveraging convenient overviews of IT investments occurring throughout an organization, the results of architectural changes on costs pools can be seen.
To aid in technology risk management, end-of-life applications can be evaluated in terms of financial risk using the LeanIX-Apptio integration. In particular, the costs of retiring or maintaining technology components can be accurately estimated, and if migration to a new service is deemed necessary, cost metrics can accompany every phase of a transition. The integration similarly offers support when analyzing new opportunities to reduce cost through software consolidation.
All in all, as a result of generating higher quality data and reducing manual efforts, the Apptio-LeanIX integration offers more collaborative opportunities to the variety of business and IT stakeholders involved in evaluating cloud transformation strategies by linking the benefits of their preferred tools. Merging Apptio and LeanIX environments to generate such analysis was previously only possible by manually importing catalogs of Excel sheets, but thanks to LeanIX’s dynamic Integration API, users can simply use configuration settings to transfer application data, en masse or in any pre-defined fashion, and facilitate constant flows of insights.
A LeanIX-Apptio base integration will be available on May 20 in time for the virtual U.S. EA Connect Day. However, those interested in previewing the integration can do so by reaching out to us here: info@leanix.net.