Lenses.io joins forces with Celonis to bring streaming data to business execution

Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Lenses.io is joining Celonis, the leader in execution management. Together we will raise the bar in how businesses are run by driving them with real-time data, making the power of streaming open, operable and actionable for organizations across the world.

When Lenses.io began, we could never have imagined we’d reach this moment.

Here in this blog I’ll reflect on why we built Lenses in the first place, how we came to join Celonis, share what our plans are and what you can look forward to as a customer or user of Lenses.

How we got here

We have been contributing to the Apache Kafka and Kubernetes ecosystems for more than five years. We started building Lenses back in 2016, when these open-source technologies, changing the big data game, were a breakthrough on the horizon.

Still, we could already see that this great streaming power came with great operational complexity. Christina, Andrew, Stefan and I were leading projects at large financial institutions, and we couldn’t stop running into a recurring problem: for all Kafka’s greatness and potential as a technology, it had created an operational hell in human dependencies.

Kafka has been, and still is, a technology for a subset of specialist technologists. Very few engineers can actually access and understand how data behaves in Kafka, never mind move, transform and scale it into production. We also saw rising business demands to deliver event-driven applications quickly and that became a crucial and exciting challenge for us.

How could we make this complex new data processing paradigm accessible to everyone? How could we abstract all technology and foster collaboration when working with data? Improve productivity while reducing overwork, stress and the growing knowledge gap? With this thinking, we were defining a category: DataOps. And Lenses was born.

Why Celonis?

As we moved from success-to-success in bridging the gap between technology and business value, we kept bumping into Celonis - the creator and market leader of process mining and pioneer of the execution management category. CEO Alexander Rinke and I had frequent conversations over a beer about democratizing and unlocking more use cases with real-time data.

This resonated with Lenses.io and our journey with technologies such as Apache Kafka and Kubernetes, because their power and potential to change the way businesses operate, even today, it is not yet ready for the business user - the digital citizen. It’s time for this to change.

As one of the fastest-growing companies of all time, Celonis delivers operational excellence to any process, in any business and in any industry. Combining the power of Lenses and Celonis brings the real value of streaming data - into the ability to process and act on events across the business process universe.

I continue to be humbled that such an influential company shares our vision and invites us aboard their rocket ship to make data and intelligence actionable in a way that is truly impactful.

But it is really thanks to our good fortune in working with amazing, insightful and supportive customers that got us to where we are today. People that trusted our team from early on in our journey, and worked closely with us to improve Lenses and work towards our mission.

What does this mean for our customers?

As we move forward as part of Celonis, we will continue to develop Lenses as the core streaming data operations superpower we always dreamed of when we began building the product.

Lenses 5.0 is on the horizon offering deeper ways for developers to build digital services with streaming applications. In parallel, we have co-developed a Celonis Kafka Connector, providing users of the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) with the ability to move their data from out-of-reach infrastructure to the front-line to drive better business execution.

This connector forms a backbone for instant insights into business processes, laying the foundation for real-time data that works on behalf of business executives, rather than creating more heavy lifting for them.

Same but different: A new era

So we begin a new chapter. Lenses.io continues to grow and serve our Kafka and developer community at new heights.

And now we are also excited to play a part in the future of business execution as part of Celonis - an adventure that has already begun.

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