Celonis, IBM and Red Hat Form Strategic Partnership to Help Transform Business Execution

NEW YORK, MUNICH, ARMONK, N.Y. and RALEIGH, N.C.
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April 1, 2021
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Celonis, IBM and Red Hat today announced a global strategic partnership to help accelerate the adoption of the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) and help deliver more flexibility and choice in how customers deploy the technology. The collaboration seeks to accelerate how customers apply process mining, intelligence and automation to the core enterprise system functions and processes that drive business execution.

The collaboration between our three companies gets at the heart of what we often talk to customers about: how can they transform to enable new innovation and choice while maintaining consistency and the ability to scale.

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The strategic partnership aims to help address many challenges business leaders face as they seek to digitally transform their operations. Despite trillions of dollars¹ invested in technologies, solutions, and transformation initiatives, businesses often execute below their full capacity because of system and technology complexity, broken or inefficient processes, and fragmented data that sits across various IT and cloud environments. Celonis EMS sits on top of core enterprise systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management, pulls real-time data from them, and applies process intelligence in order to help identify and unlock execution capacity across a business.

IBM Global Business Services (GBS) is bolstering its consulting approach by implementing Celonis software as part of its methodology, alongside the application of IBM data and AI solutions. GBS is also helping clients build new solutions using Celonis EMS. Clients across all industries and domains can benefit by accelerating their transformation and re-envisioning work with intelligent workflows. Additionally, Celonis is embracing an open hybrid cloud strategy by re-platforming on Red Hat OpenShift to deliver more flexibility and choice in how customers deploy their technologies.

“Through the strategic partnership with IBM and Red Hat, we plan to help power the shift from analog to intelligent business execution, helping many of the world’s largest companies with their transactional systems, boosting their business performance,” said Miguel Milano, Chief Revenue Officer and co-owner of Celonis. “It’s incredibly powerful for our customers to be able to combine the Celonis Execution Management System with Red Hat OpenShift’s hybrid cloud approach and IBM Global Business Services’ expertise.”

“This strategic partnership accelerates IBM’s billion-dollar partner ecosystem commitment and reflects our bold approach to expanding into high growth, emerging categories to help meet the evolving hybrid cloud and AI needs of our clients,” said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services. “The bottom line is our clients are looking to accelerate the transformation of their workflows and make them more intelligent. Through this powerful new global strategic partnership with Celonis, we’re adding to IBM’s suite of technology capabilities to unlock value and help propel our clients’ growth and innovation.”

Harnessing value through digital transformation

GBS is bringing deep consulting experience to complement Celonis’ execution management and process mining capabilities to help create intelligent workflows that are more responsive, accurate and predictive. GBS is embedding Celonis software into its services methodologies and is broadly deploying Celonis’ capabilities via 10,000 practitioners throughout its industry and domain practice areas, from consulting and business process outsourcing, to enterprise applications like customer care, to finance and supply chain.

“Working with IBM Global Business Services, we have analyzed our procure to pay processes across several countries in Europe and Africa by applying Celonis process mining tools to uncover and fix inefficiencies. Our finance business processes have benefitted from greater transparency and the identification of tangible improvement areas,” said Jens Knoblauch, Executive Director, Digital Business Services at Linde. “We will need to further develop our operational excellence and can benchmark best practices across all our countries to help each perform their best.”

The strategic partnership between Celonis and IBM GBS will initially focus on:

• Advanced end-to-end consulting expertise: IBM GBS can deliver skills, capabilities and experience through a center of excellence that can accelerate customer enablement. IBM is integrating Celonis into its consulting work for clients across service line areas like supply chain, finance, procurement, HR, and customer experience including its application modernization work with leading independent software vendors.

• Embed in IBM Garage: IBM is embedding Celonis intelligent execution management software into its IBM Garage methodology to help deepen workflow analysis and accelerate intelligent workflows for critical processes like production, customer service, distribution, manufacturing and logistics. IBM Garage is a methodology to help collaborate with clients, generate innovative ideas, and turn those ideas into business value, leveraging both IBM and ecosystem technology.

• Business process outsourcing: IBM GBS is adopting Celonis across many of its business process outsourcing engagements to help them run more efficiently to drive better outcomes for clients.

• Industry-specific intelligent workflows: IBM GBS is building applications and assets on Celonis EMS for key industries and domains, particularly focused on regulated industries, to help bring actionable data and more intelligent workflows to large enterprises.

A flexible, hybrid cloud platform for deployment

Additionally, Celonis is embracing an open hybrid cloud strategy using Red Hat OpenShift to deliver more flexibility for customers in where they deploy Celonis’ software – across any public or private cloud environment they choose. This flexibility is especially useful in highly regulated industries and enhances Celonis’ interoperability across customers’ existing systems, bringing another level of agility in how critical data can be moved and analyzed to drive new value.

Red Hat OpenShift technology and experience can also enable agility, speed, security and scalability. Celonis is in the process of adopting Red Hat OpenShift across its entire software portfolio.

“The collaboration between our three companies gets at the heart of what we often talk to customers about: how can they transform to enable new innovation and choice while maintaining consistency and the ability to scale,” said Dave Farrell, general manager, Global Strategic Alliances, Red Hat. “Just as Red Hat Enterprise Linux did at the operating system level, Red Hat OpenShift provides a consistent foundation to enable Celonis to deliver its powerful platform across multiple clouds. And by using Managed OpenShift, Celonis can take advantage of the power of the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform without the complexity of building and managing a Kubernetes environment, enabling them to keep their focus on serving customers and innovating its EMS offerings.”

“With our move to Red Hat OpenShift, we’re offering our customers a new level of flexibility and agility for how they deploy Celonis to help meet their requirements,” said Martin Klenk, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Celonis. “Giving them more choice fits with our belief as a company in living for customer value.”

¹According to IDC, investments in digital transformation will approach $6.8 trillion by 2023. IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation 2021 Predictions, Doc # US46880818, October 2020

About Celonis
Celonis believes that every company can unlock its full execution capacity. Powered by its market-leading process mining core, the Celonis Execution Management System provides a set of instruments, applications, and developer studio and platform capabilities for business executives and users. The Celonis EMS offerings help companies manage every facet of execution management from analytics to strategy and planning, management, actions and automation. Celonis has thousands of customers, including ABB, AstraZeneca, Bosch, Coca-Cola, Citibank, Danaher Corporation, Dell, GSK, John Deere, L’Oreal, Siemens, Uber, Vodafone and Whirlpool. Celonis is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA and has 15 offices worldwide.

About IBM
To learn more about how IBM is working with Celonis to help enterprises transform with hybrid cloud technologies and services, visit https://www.ibm.com/services/business or engage with us on Twitter @ibm. For more information on IBM’s AI-powered Automation solutions, visit: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/automation