How Wizz Air Uses SAMU to Build a Clearer View of Its Technology Landscape

In a fast-growing company, technology rarely stays simple for long.

New applications are introduced. More integrations are created. Cloud services, infrastructure components, internal tools and vendor systems all become part of the daily operating environment. Over time, this technology landscape can become difficult to understand, even for the teams working inside it.

For Wizz Air, having a clear view of this landscape is not just about documentation. It is about making better decisions, preparing changes more safely and helping IT and business teams work from the same information.

As Wizz Air’s Digital Engineering and Architecture lead explains, part of the role is to connect technology strategy with business priorities. This includes modernizing platforms, improving engineering practices, supporting delivery teams and making sure that architecture decisions create long-term value.

To support this work, Wizz Air uses SAMU as an enterprise architecture tool.

SAMU helps capture architecture components and their relationships, visualize complexity, share knowledge and provide targeted information for decision-making.

Why technology landscape matters in a large IT environment

In a large and rapidly changing organization, the IT environment can become complex very quickly.

Applications, integrations, cloud services, databases and infrastructure elements are constantly changing. Without transparency, it becomes harder to answer basic but important questions:

Which systems do we have?
Who owns them?
What business areas do they support?
How are they connected?
What could be affected if something changes?

These questions matter because technology decisions are rarely isolated. A change in one system can affect another application, a business process, an integration, a database or an operational responsibility.

For Wizz Air, transparency is therefore much more than an administrative task.

As Wizz Air’s Digital Engineering and Architecture lead puts it:

“Transparency is not an administrative exercise. It is the foundation for better decision-making, risk management, planning, and operational stability.”

This is the core idea behind enterprise architecture and application portfolio management. The goal is not to create documentation for its own sake. The goal is to give the organization a shared, reliable view of its technology environment.

From scattered information to a shared view

In many large organizations, the problem is not that information does not exist. The problem is that it is often spread across different teams, tools, spreadsheets and documents.

One team may know who owns an application. Another team may understand the technical dependencies. A third team may be aware of operational risks. But if these details are not connected, the organization does not have one clear view of the truth.

This can slow down decisions and make changes harder to plan.

It may lead to duplicated solutions, unclear ownership, hidden dependencies and longer impact assessments. It can also make transformation projects more difficult, because before teams can safely change something, they first need to understand what it is connected to.

This is where a structured application portfolio management approach becomes valuable.

A company can make better technology decisions when it clearly sees which applications it uses, who owns them, how they are connected and which business areas they support.

How SAMU supports Wizz Air

Wizz Air uses SAMU to create a more structured view of its IT landscape.

SAMU helps bring important architecture and application information into one place. This can include applications, owners, integrations, infrastructure, technology status, business relevance and lifecycle information.

In practice, this means teams can move away from assumptions and work with a more reliable source of information.

Instead of asking around manually or relying on outdated spreadsheets, stakeholders can use a common view of the technology landscape. This helps architecture teams, delivery teams, operations, security and business areas work with a more shared understanding.

For Wizz Air, SAMU was selected as an enterprise architecture tool to support a flexible repository, analysis and reporting, visualization of complexity, transparency and dependency identification.

This matters because the value is not only in listing applications. The value is in understanding how those applications fit into the wider enterprise environment.

Supporting everyday work and better decisions

The practical value of SAMU appears in everyday work.

If a team needs to understand which application supports a business area, who owns it, what infrastructure it uses or which systems it integrates with, SAMU can help provide that view.

This is especially important before making changes.

Before approving a change, planning a migration, assessing a risk or prioritizing modernization, teams need to understand the current state. A clearer application portfolio gives them a better starting point.

SAMU supports this by helping identify dependencies, visualize relationships, improve collaboration and support governance. It can provide both high-level views for decision-makers and more detailed views for technical teams.

This flexibility is important because different people need different views of the same technology environment.

A senior stakeholder may need a clear overview of the application landscape. A technical team may need to understand integrations or infrastructure dependencies. A business area may need to know which systems support a specific capability.

SAMU helps connect these perspectives.

Useful for IT, business and leadership

Technology transparency is useful for many groups across the organization.

For IT teams, it supports impact analysis, operations, application lifecycle management, architecture decisions and delivery planning.

For business areas, it helps explain which systems support which capabilities and where dependencies or risks may exist.

For senior decision-makers, it can support investment decisions, prioritization, risk reduction and transformation planning.

The real value appears when these groups are no longer looking at technology from separate perspectives. Instead, they can use one shared view of the landscape.

That shared view helps turn enterprise architecture into a common language between IT and the business.

Understanding the application lifecycle

A clearer view of the application lifecycle also helps large organizations manage their technology portfolio more intentionally.

Not every system needs the same level of attention or investment at the same time.

Some applications are strategic. Some are stable and reliable. Some are under active development. Some may be technically aging. Others may eventually become candidates for consolidation, replacement or retirement.

When this lifecycle information is visible, decisions become more structured.

It becomes easier to understand where modernization may be needed, where risk may be increasing and where investment can create the most value.

This helps avoid hidden technical debt and supports better long-term planning.

For enterprise architecture teams, this is one of the key benefits of application portfolio management. The purpose is not simply to collect information, but to help the organization decide what to maintain, improve, modernize or phase out.

Preparing changes more safely

A transparent IT landscape is especially useful when larger technology changes are planned.

In a complex enterprise, even a small change can have wider effects if an application is connected to several systems, databases, infrastructure components or business processes.

With better visibility, teams can ask the right questions earlier:

Which systems are involved?
Who needs to be included?
Which business processes may be affected?
Are there operational, security or compliance considerations?
Which dependencies need to be understood before the change is made?

This reduces surprises and supports more controlled delivery.

At Wizz Air, SAMU reporting and visualization have supported transparency across cloud, application and infrastructure layers. This includes areas such as Azure application mapping, Azure network layer reporting, ownership strategy reporting and server hosting environment views.

These examples show why dependency visibility is important. The more connected the technology landscape becomes, the more important it is to understand relationships before decisions are made.

The key lesson: transparency must be maintained

One of the most important lessons from Wizz Air’s experience is that transparency is not created once.

It has to be maintained.

A tool can provide structure, but the quality of the outcome depends on ownership, governance and regular updates. If the data is not maintained, its value decreases over time.

This means application owners, architects, operations, security and delivery teams all have a role in keeping information accurate.

For any organization starting an enterprise architecture or application portfolio management initiative, this is an important point. The repository should not become a static database. It needs to become part of how the organization works.

If the tool is used only as documentation, adoption may remain limited. But if it helps teams make better decisions, it becomes part of daily work.

Advice for other large enterprises

For companies that are just starting to manage their application portfolio in a more structured way, Wizz Air’s advice is practical: start practical, not perfect.

There is no need to model the entire enterprise in extreme detail from day one.

It is better to start with the most important applications, the most critical information and the most valuable use cases. Ownership should be defined early, so that the data remains reliable over time.

The application portfolio view should also be connected to real decision-making processes.

This helps avoid a common problem in enterprise architecture initiatives: creating a detailed repository that is technically impressive but not used in everyday decisions.

The real value comes when architecture information supports decisions that teams already need to make.

The future role of enterprise architecture

Enterprise architecture is becoming more important, but it also needs to become more practical.

In a large enterprise, it cannot be an isolated function. It needs to stay close to delivery, operations, security, data and business strategy.

In the coming years, large organizations will continue to face more cloud adoption, more automation, more AI-enabled capabilities, more integrations and stronger regulatory expectations.

All of this increases complexity.

Enterprise architecture can help organizations manage that complexity by providing structure, standards, visibility and guidance. At the same time, it must support speed and innovation.

The goal is not to slow the organization down with process. The goal is to help teams move faster and safer, with better information.

Turning complexity into structured knowledge

For Wizz Air, SAMU helps create a clearer and more connected view of the technology landscape.

It supports the documentation of architecture components and their relationships, helps visualize complexity, supports decision preparation and gives IT, business and leadership stakeholders a more shared source of information.

In a complex enterprise environment, this kind of transparency is not just a technical benefit. It is part of how better technology and business decisions are made.

As Wizz Air’s Digital Engineering and Architecture lead summarizes:

“A transparent application portfolio management solution turns complexity into structured knowledge, helping the organization make faster, safer, and more informed technology and business decisions. It gives the organization one shared view of its technology landscape, so decisions are based less on assumptions and more on facts.”

That is the real value of application portfolio management and enterprise architecture: not documentation for its own sake, but clarity that supports action.

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