ApptioOne from Apptio, an IBM Company, unifies financial and operational technology data into a unified model built on a taxonomy of cost categorization. Utilizing sophisticated allocation rules along with focused metrics and KPIs, the solution enables organizations to answer strategic questions about their technology investments and accelerate budgeting and forecasting processes.
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Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
Microsoft BI is a great tool when it comes to various integration with line of business applications and its own ecosystem which contains office applications widely used all over the world. Hence, it is well suited for organizations that are complex and have global foot-print. …
I would say for larger companies that don't have any sort of automation of their reporting today, so it's all done in Excel or it's all done in Power BI reports that are fed off of Excel documents, especially technology expense, it can be really helpful. I would also say companies that are early in their cloud journey, it can be helpful to start early. So that's a few that would be helpful. Not helpful, I would say companies that already have a really good handle of their technology spend via any tools they might have. So it can get to a point where they have multiple different tools. Apptio is one and multiple different sources of truth, and if you bring in Apptio later, people won't trust Apptio. So really if you already have a bunch of tools stood up, it's harder to bring in another.
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
The ATUM model and its configuration provide a trusted taxonomy for costs
The participative planning and budgeting process enabled by the product increases transparency into forecasted cost and allows for understanding service options prior to costs being incurred.
The loading of data through APIs eases data refresh processes
The CCM module does not always calculate cloud RI usage correctly.
Would like better functionality to switch between cloud usage metrics and cost data. Discount rate on cloud recently increased, resulting in lower cost, but with higher utilization.
Continue investing in the CCM product, we like it, feels like we are being pushed to cloudability.
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
It is hands down the most innovative SaaS on the market today. In my humble opinion it will be just as big or bigger than Salesforce, Workday and all of the greats. I would advise any big company to take advantage of Apptio and renew on an annual basis with their support team!
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
During the budget/forecast period this year I was very hands on in Apptio. This was really my first time. I did run into some hiccups of which have been reported to Support.
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
Both the support and the customer success teams have been very supportive and more than likely, if you call in for a support request, they do a really good job with calling you back and making sure that everything's taken care of.
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
Was awesome to have been taught by legendary Debbie Hagan for Cost Transparency in person. Her knowledge is extensive and she is an excellent trainer. Her years of experience really shined.
The all talented training organization crosses all the T's and dots all the I's. I am constantly learning and often refer to training documentation for post training real life issues.
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
Well, so far. Apptio Consulting covered specific model architecting areas particularly. Most of the heavy lifting is being done in-house with support from Apptio as it relates to tool impacts and needs. Some administrative tasks were redundant
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
ApptioOne has far exceeded our expectations when compared to the research we did into other products and tools. The offerings were different in many ways, but Apptio was the only one who successfully put together a suite of tools that satisfied all of our particular needs. We found the other products to be strong in particular areas, versus Apptio satisfying numerous areas of strength.
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
It's delivered on a lot of those, especially the relationship between IT and financing that relationship's been a bit of a rollercoaster on that journey. We've come out the other end of it, and we're all friends now, which is a good thing. So they've accepted the Apptio output and are much more involved in providing the data and helping to use the tool, which is excellent. I think one of the downsides that are probably not talked about enough is the fact that, um, once you have trained and delivered a TMB skillset within your organization, they become very good at that. So if you've got any high-performing members in that team, they become extremely valuable elsewhere. And we've unfortunately suffered the case whereby one of our highest performers was immediately then poached and went off elsewhere for a much better opportunity. So we applaud that for them, but it's really hard to train other people. It's really hard to take them up to speed, and you have to sort of go through those picks and troughs every time. So that's just life, you know.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
