Have you ever had an amazing idea? That fleeting thought that runs through your head while you are in the shower? Yes? Then I bet that you also forgot about it minutes later as you were running to get dressed to go to your nine to five job… but there are exceptions, exceptions like LeanIX.
All startups have a story, a reason behind that seemingly crazy idea that no one had thought about before, and LeanIX has an incredible one to tell.
Jörg Beyer, former CIO at DHL and in charge of the IT strategy of the logistics division, was working alongside André Christ, managing consultant. During this time, they repeatedly had the frustrating experience that information about the IT landscape was not readily available. This meant that in numerous projects a lot of effort was put into creating transparency around the IT landscape. Once, this even meant travelling around the world to collect information in various workshops with the country IT about local applications, infrastructure etc. A lot of time went into collecting and structuring information about the IT landscape, rather than solving the real challenges at hand.
When looking at Enterprise Architecture tools at the market, Jörg hesitated to make the invest. Not only did the solutions come with a heavy price tag, they also were complicated to use and needed trained experts to handle them. That was when Jörg and André decided to take matters into their own hands. After debating on the topic, the two founders concluded that they would do the IT management world a favor: create LeanIX. LeanIX was then founded in January 2012 sharing a vision that business software needs to change drastically to unlock the full potential of IT in companies.
Profound experience in IT management in combination with the clear vision to help companies becoming global leaders by building better IT architectures were the perfect combination to shake up the category of Enterprise Architecture tools. The founders’ key idea was to apply modern Software-as-a-Service elements to Enterprise Architecture solutions: public and private cloud options, a state-of-the-art user experience and scalable pricing. In short, they created a solution as easy to use as Google, as useful as Excel, and as open as Wikipedia. This resulted in the widely-loved tool we know today, used by customers from A, like Adidas, to Z, like Zalando.
While for startups the feedback of real customers is always the most important one, it is a nice add-on when numerous prizes of the startup scene are also won constantly... And LeanIX has a lot of them: E.g. winner Pirate Summit, Future Price Digital Transformation, Best Startup at ‘Hamburger Strategietage’, Winner Best of Startup. These prizes confirm that LeanIX is on the right way on redefining and yes, also reviving, the Enterprise Architecture world.
In case you are interested in reading more about the ‘cartographers of IT landscapes’, as Handelsblatt nicely put it, you can do so here: