DEVOPSdigest

LeanIX announced the acquisition of Cleanshelf.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Cleanshelf is an 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 a provider in the enterprise architecture industry which offers 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. Whether it's Zoom, Teams or Slack, COVID-19 has further accelerated the adoption and heavy use of SaaS offerings in enterprises.

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 SaaS management and LeanIX's Application Portfolio Management complement each other perfectly," explains LeanIX CEO André Christ. "For large organizations, the new offering increases the level of automation and thus also the data quality of their application portfolio, which is a permanent challenge with traditional EA tools. Smaller and younger companies can now manage their application portfolio even faster, as they can rely on a direct capture of their SaaS landscape without having to go through a lengthy roll-out."

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 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." he emphasised.

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.

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. 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.