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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Planisware
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Planisware is project portfolio management software for product development and R&D. The company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in San Francisco, with locations in Germany, France and Japan.
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.
While not expensive, it is better suited to larger organizations since the requirement for an administrator is not easily maintained at lower user counts. Although the more a site uses it "out of the box" without configuration, the less the requirement for a system administrator.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is always hard to gauge since we don't have metrics for "did nothing" to compare against. An old Business Roundtable white paper indicated that a 10% reduction in expense could be attained, but I don't think a general statement like that applies to any specific organization unless they can say their Project Management Maturity level is low.
