The IBM Apptio platform is a technology business management solution that enables organizations to make better decisions about technology investments. It connects technology spend to business value so organizations can adapt to changing market conditions.
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IBM Planning Analytics
Score 8.2 out of 10
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IBM Planning Analytics, powered by IBM TM1®, is an integrated planning solution designed to promote collaboration across the organization and help keep pace with the speed of modern business. With its calculation engine, this enterprise performance management solution is designed to help users move beyond the limits of spreadsheets, automating the planning process to drive faster, more accurate results. Use it to unify data sources into one single repository, enabling users to build…
IBM Apptio is well suited to help companies that do not have a clear IT cost structure and do not know how the IT cost is used internally throughout products and business units. ATUM model helps design a cost model that will show how the cost flows from financial systems to business units. One of the downsides of using Apptio is related to data source harmonization. To build a cost model, it is necessary to do tremendous work with your Finance team in order to harmonize data sources and to correctly map all items. It is not a trivial job, and it requires arduous effort.
IBM Planning Analytics is good for small to medium-size jobs or less complex projects. It can generate reasonably comfident results if input datasets are well prepared and cleaned. IBM Planning Analytics is not quite good when it comes to large-scale datasets, or datasets from various sources (for example data dumped from different databases.
Does very well at handling complex allocations and automation. Also great at bringing in data automatically, manipulating that data, and allowing you to feed that data into a complex model. So all the behind-the-scenes stuff works really well. It's also pretty good at visualization. It has some similar capabilities like a Power BI and Tableau, but generally provides most of the visualization technology that somebody would need with the tool.
IBM Planning Analytics was an upgrade from an older version of TM1 that is experiencing some growing pains, some functionality is harder to reach than it has been in the past
It is easy to learn as a surface user with created reports, but it does require some technical skills to make advanced calculations and reports if there is no reliable consultant available, much like Excel
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!
Since IBM Cognos Express is suitable only for medium data warehouse environment, we are not sure if this tool solves the long term need as the business keeps growing rapidly. So its a 50/50 ratio to renew Express license. But having said that, the components of IBM Cognos Express are also available in other Cognos BI suites like Cognos 10.x version. So we will probably upgrade our environment to IBM Cognos 10.x which comes with more new features.
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.
For developers, admins and end users looking for flexibility, IBM Planning Analytics would rate very highly on usability. For example, a developer has access to a highly performant built-in ETL (Extract Translate Load) tool and scripting language called Turbo Integrator that can (among other things) bring in data via flat file or direct connection from many data sources, move data around Planning Analytics, perform batch calculations, export to files or other data stores. In the rare situation where limitations are encountered there is a well documented REST API. Admins and end users benefit from the intuitive PAW (Workspace) interface as well as the rich Excel integration through Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE). Since flexibility inherently comes with a little more complexity, so an organization with simple and "cookie-cutter" requirements may rate Planning Analytics a little lower.
It has not been great, at the beginning, we would meet with them every other week and those meetings would last maybe 5 minutes and we did not gain any information from those meetings. We then asked that we do not meet that often and maybe just meet once a month. Even then we got nothing from those meetings. During these meetings we did not gain any knowledge about IBM Apptio and what other features were available or that would be beneficial to us. We eventually contracted with Maryville to have them work with us on a regular basis to help build reports and help with any troubleshooting that may be needed.
Although I find the IBM Planning analytics documentation quite time consuming, their support with email and call is something i can term as very considerate and patient, I have had few calls about the features and how i would want to implement them within my projects, and the teams have been super helpful to resolve my issues
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.
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
So we've used Proven Optics, which is an add-on to ServiceNow. Well at least use it with certain customers and Nicus. Nicus is probably the biggest competitor of Apptio. The trouble with Nicus is their SQL-based ingestion process. It's a little bit more difficult. So the reason why you'd go with Apptio is that it's very easy and very intuitive to bring in new data sources and being able to model a lot of the data once it's already in the system doesn't require a lot of coding experience.
Anaplan does not handle sparsity; this is very problematic for large volume data sets (many 0's). There also are limitations to the number of dimensions that can be used in a module. If more dimensions are required, then separate modules need to be built and intertwined. IBM PA does not have these limitations.
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.
