Introduction of vendor lifecycle fields to IT components

In the last week of February, we will introduce new vendor lifecycle fields to the meta-model to enable you to track vendor and internal lifecycles of IT components separately. Distinguishing between the lifecycles will help you plan the phase-out of legacy assets in your organization before the vendor's end of life, even in cases of individual support extensions.

A dedicated 'Vendor Lifecycle' field will be added next to the existing fact sheet lifecycle of IT components to all workspaces. Instead of managing the vendor lifecycle as the fact sheet lifecycle, potentially synched with the reference catalog, you will be able to leverage the existing fact sheet lifecycle to track your own lifecycle of the IT component.

The availability of values in this field depends on the products the workspace is subscribed to:

• Available and visible by default to all workspaces and can be edited manually:

  • Custom End of Life (Vendor): Your organization's end-of-life date negotiated with the vendor, e.g., a contractually agreed support extension.

  • Comment: A separate field to elaborate on specifics about the custom end-of-life date.

• Available and visible with SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance and automatically synched with dates from the reference catalog:

  • Active (Vendor): The vendor-defined date from when the IT component is active.

  • End of Life (Vendor): The vendor-defined date when the IT component reached or will reach its end of life. Empty if no date has been defined by the vendor.

  • The lifecycle information from the reference catalog will no longer be synced into the existing fact sheet lifecycle but into this new vendor lifecycle.

All lifecycles on fact sheets will be aggregated to calculate and visualize the obsolescence risks from underlying IT components to applications. The details of this calculation will be published with the release.

Admins of workspaces who are not interested in obsolescence risk management can move the vendor lifecycle field into the 'Unused Fields and Relations' section to hide it on the fact sheets. Doing so will remove the ability for users to see up-to-date lifecycle information from the reference catalog or manage them manually, separate from the fact sheet lifecycle.