Waltz
Waltz is an open-source enterprise architecture and technology landscape visualization platform focused on transparency of systems, data, and processes across large organizations.
- Enterprise architecture visualization and cataloging (enterprise architecture)
- Application and system inventory with metadata and lineage (IT asset management)
- Business capability mapping to applications and data (business-IT alignment)
- Data flow, lineage, and dependency mapping across systems (data governance)
- Collaboration and reporting on technology estate changes (IT governance)
More About Waltz
Waltz is an open-source platform under FINOS that focuses on capturing, visualizing, and analyzing the enterprise technology landscape for organizations, with an emphasis on financial services institutions. It addresses the problem of fragmented system knowledge by providing a unified view of applications, data, business capabilities, and their relationships. The platform is designed as a tool for architecture, operations, risk, and change teams that need consistent, queryable insight into a complex technology estate.
At its core, Waltz offers capabilities for application and system inventory management (IT asset management), allowing organizations to catalogue applications, owners, lifecycle status, technologies used, and related metadata. It connects these applications to business capabilities and organizational units (enterprise architecture), which supports impact analysis when business or technology changes are proposed. The platform also models data flows, dependencies, and integration points between systems (data governance), giving users a view of upstream and downstream impacts.
Waltz provides a set of visualization and analytical tools that support heatmaps, dependency graphs, and portfolio views (analytics and reporting). These views are used to identify concentrations of technology risk, redundancy, or legacy usage. The platform typically runs as a web application backed by a database that stores the enterprise model, with a service layer providing APIs and integration points (web application architecture). Organizations can populate Waltz either manually via the UI or through batch imports and interfaces to existing configuration or reference data sources (system integration).
Within large enterprises, Waltz is used by enterprise architects, solution architects, and technology management teams to support decision-making on remediation, modernization, and rationalization programs (IT governance). Risk, compliance, and regulatory reporting teams may use Waltz-generated views to evidence controls or to document system landscapes. Because Waltz is open source and hosted by FINOS, it is positioned for collaborative development and extensibility: firms can extend data models, build custom visualizations, and integrate with internal systems such as CMDBs, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, or reference data catalogs (extensibility and integration).
From a directory and taxonomy standpoint, Waltz fits within enterprise architecture tooling, IT asset management, and data governance visualization. It can also be categorized under portfolio management support for technology, given its use in assessing technology estates and tracking changes across an application and data landscape.