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IBM Apptio

IBM Apptio
Formerly ApptioOne

Overview

What is IBM Apptio?

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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Recent Reviews

ApptioOne Review

7 out of 10
November 02, 2023
Incentivized
At the moment we are using it to create mostly reports for finance and technology, showing the CIOs and as well the CTOs, different ways …
Continue reading

ApptioOne Review

8 out of 10
November 02, 2023
Incentivized
We are consulting with various companies. One specific is we're working on value realization of applications and services.
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

3 videos

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Apptio Review: How does it stack up for an IT Finance Manager?
04:45
Apptio Review: It's all this Business Management Director uses
07:00
Apptio Review: How the Bank of Ireland found Apptio stacked up against the rest
08:47
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Product Details

What is IBM Apptio?

The IBM Apptio platform is a technology business management solution that enables organizations to make data-driven decisions about their technology investments by driving clarity on technology spend, connecting that spend to business value, and enabling organizations to quickly take action against rapidly changing market conditions.

IBM Apptio Costing

IBM Apptio Costing Essentials delivers a clear view of an organization's diverse and evolving tech costs, driving informed decisions in a rapidly changing tech landscape. Apptio’s allocation strategies tackle the difficult task of bringing together financial and operational data into a common, centralized framework, providing transparency on key spend drivers tied to business priorities, enabling leaders to focus on business outcomes and the value of each dollar spent, rather than chasing down data or constantly updating spreadsheets.

IBM Apptio Costing Standard builds on the foundation (of Apptio Costing Essentials) and provides a customizable platform that can ingest and structure data from almost any source system and deliver fully consumptive allocations – allowing organizations to understand Total Cost of Ownership and better manage overall tech consumption.

For CIOs, Tech leaders, and IT Finance leaders who need to make quick decisions to capitalize on market trends and drive business innovation. These decisions need to be based on a complete view of their IT and technology cost structure and its value to the business. Apptio Costing is financial management software that creates a shared understanding between technology leaders, finance, and the business of the fully burdened cost of technology and accelerates analysis, optimization, and investment in growth-based initiatives.

Unlike time-consuming and error-prone spreadsheets coming from multiple systems of record, Apptio Costing unites financial and operational data into an industry-standard taxonomy of cost categories and hierarchies. Coupled with Apptio’s proprietary allocation strategies, metrics, KPIs, and reporting structure, organizations can come together to optimize and align their current approach to technology and invest more deeply in growth initiatives.


  • Reduce the total cost of ownership associated with the largest applications in
    an organization

  • Provide a business-centric view of technology with insights that helps IT organizations unlock and shift resources

  • Understand the ‘root cause’ for any business unit expense from the app/product/service down to the general ledger

  • Allocate costs based on consumption metrics, enabling precise resource allocation and budget optimization


As a whole, Apptio Costing helps organizations classify, categorize, and consolidate technology spend ensuring investments are directed to the highest value-add opportunities.


Additional products in the IBM Apptio product family include:

IBM Apptio Billing

IBM Apptio Billing is for IT Finance professionals who want to explain the consumption of IT services by business unit, shape demand of services through strategic pricing, recover costs, and defensibly communicate the value of IT. Simply put, accurate and defensible IT costs are communicated in the language of business services and products. By facilitating showback and chargeback, Apptio creates accountability of IT consumption by extending cost transparency to business units, departments, and users. Unlike spreadsheets and manual processes, Apptio delivers a user-friendly bill via email with IT costs, allocations to business units, and easy ways to set rates to shape service demand, drive behavior change, and inform decision-making. Apptio Billing empowers consumers to dictate their IT consumption, reallocate time spent supporting manual consumption models, and ultimately helps build credibility by demonstrating IT’s value in the language the business understands.

For CIOs and IT Finance, a critical component of driving engagement and alignment with the business is by showing the value of IT, but many organizations are failing to consistently and successfully demonstrate this. Homegrown billing and recovery processes are often error-prone and difficult for the business to decipher, delaying decision-making and preventing frequent and defensible communication. They can also be time-consuming requiring the upkeep of multiple consumption models. In addition, there is no way to hold business units accountable for the IT services they are consuming.


  • Cost Recovery: Determines the proper billing amount from each business unit using business rules.

  • Consumptive Billing: Ensures the amount being billed is not only accurate but also explainable and defensible to business units.

  • Unit Rate Billing: Exposes the levers business units can use to mitigate costs and reinvest in higher-value IT activities.


IBM Apptio Planning

IBM Apptio Planning streamlines technology budgeting processes, enhancing accuracy and decision-making confidence through its collaborative workspace for cost budgeting, forecasting, and KPIs. Apptio Planning reduces the time spent on data aggregation and rationalization, allowing for more time on technology spend analysis and optimization. It bridges the gap between technology finance strategies and broader business objectives, allowing business leaders to tie their technology investments directly to business value ensuring you can cut costs in the right places while still preserving innovation. Apptio Planning creates a repeatable, accurate, and collaborative planning process with data ingestion automation, streamlined variance analysis, and cost categorization – enabling organizations to continually refocus, replan, and react quickly to changing market conditions.


  • As tech leaders across the globe are working to understand and justify technology investments and communicate value to the business, Apptio Planning becomes increasingly essential. This need is especially difficult in changing markets where budgeting and forecasting become more complex. Many CIOs remain under pressure to stabilize or even reduce IT costs, even as enterprise-wide technology investments increase and require additional funding for foundational and new IT capabilities. Organizations are also now changing their budgeting cycles from an annual basis to a more continuous basis. This makes it even more important to find a consistent, repeatable planning and reporting strategy that creates transparency for the business and encourages collaboration is crucial. Apptio Planning addresses these challenges by providing a unified source of data that enhances accountability and granularity, eliminating manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive processes to enable more effective and efficient planning.

  • Reduces the time spent forecasting, accelerate frequency, and offers variance analysis to redirect resources to higher-value activities.

  • Enables continuous planning/forecasting cycles, reduces manual workload, and expedites decision-making with real-time data insights.


IBM Apptio Benchmarking

IBM Apptio Benchmarking provides self-service peer comparisons of an organization's technology spend over time, enabling an ongoing process to track performance, validate decisions, and identify areas for improvement – ensuring the organization stays agile. Apptio Benchmarking offers automated and ongoing monthly comparisons against a set of user-defined peers, to compare technology costs side-by-side with regularly refreshed industry benchmarks for up-to-date comparisons to technology spend actuals. This interactive benchmark data set generates insights into how the technology spend stands.


Tech leaders across the globe are working to understand and justify technology investments and communicate value to the business, which can be a challenge for many organizations. With this, benchmarking is necessary as it builds the discipline of cost transparency and has the ability to segment tech budgets into multiple views for different audiences and ultimately better communicate the value of IT’s spend. Furthermore, Apptio Benchmarking allows organizations to assess their performance against industry standards, identifying areas of underperformance. This insight empowers companies to make strategic improvements.


Users can:

  • Validate spending levels with a view of actuals vs. self-selected benchmarks to know where the business stands relative to peers using trending comparisons.

  • Monitor progress by identifying areas of risk, setting targets, and evaluating improvement efforts.

  • Identify improvement areas and use relevant, credible peer benchmark data as objective reference points.

  • Set targets and track progress with trending comparisons.

  • Know where a business stands versus the best and worst in its class with box plot distributions for each data point

IBM Apptio Features

  • Supported: Automated data ingestion and modeling
  • Supported: Analytics and reporting
  • Supported: Budgeting and forecasting

IBM Apptio Screenshots

Screenshot of Industry BenchmarksScreenshot of Planning OverviewScreenshot of Billing - Main ViewScreenshot of Costing - Control OpEx and Cut CostsScreenshot of Improve Cost Transparency

IBM Apptio Integrations

IBM Apptio Competitors

IBM Apptio Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesCan be used by customers in any country
Supported LanguagesEnglish, Japanese

IBM Apptio Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Microsoft Excel, Serviceware Financial, and MagicOrange are common alternatives for IBM Apptio.

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 8.1.

The most common users of IBM Apptio are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(184)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 133)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 28, 2023

The best review

JS
Jake Sarver
TBM Analyst
UPMC (Hospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited in situations where you want to look at total cost of a particular application(s) and if we can potentially retire it or buy something that gives the business more value. By looking at value we are able to drive innovation and lower cost to give the best patient care.
November 02, 2023

ApptioOne Review

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Food & Beverages Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I think for terms of cost transparency, showback chargeback is a very useful tool and one of the opportunities that it might have is how they can show the dashboards to the users.
November 02, 2023

ApptioOne Review

RS
Reid Solomon
Business Systems Analyst
M&T bank (Banking, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
November 02, 2023

ApptioOne Review

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It's best suited for mid-size to enterprise companies that have a large IT spend, both cloud and applications and end-user services that need the help to be able to aggregate the information and be able to paint the picture of what it costs. Not suitable, maybe a smaller company.
October 26, 2023

Satisfied, but hoping to build it out further

SL
Stacy Lapierre
Director, Financial Analysis
Liberty Mutual Insurance Co (Insurance, 10,001+ employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
ITP gives the ability to plan at the detailed resource level and build internal labor cost pools. Level of detail we are tracking for cost transparency is pretty granular, but Apptio is a good tool for that. We do 3 year glidepaths and it is difficult to forecast out that far without performance issues
October 26, 2023

ApptioOne Journey

JR
Jennifer Robinson
Sr. Manager IT Finance
Lactalis USA (Information Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
ApptioOne is well suited to support your line items, however excel is still needed to perform the detailed calculations to input information into ApptioOne. I think Excel is easier to manipulate and move around in. Also, as we are working with our Cost Center Owners, we are finding that exporting data from ApptioOne is simpler than trying to input/move around directly in ApptioOne.
October 26, 2023

Enhanced Financial Reporting and Analysis

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Utilities Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
ApptioOne is well suited at creating a standard data model that works across the various entities in our company. We're able to track and trend our spend in meaningful ways and democratize our financial data, enabling better decision making.
October 26, 2023

ApptioOne provides various value streams that company's shouldn't operation without

AM
Audrey Mitch
Apptio Architect
Enbridge (Oil & Energy, 10,001+ employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I've implemented ApptioOne for 9 years, from R11 to R12. Would like to see more engineering work adding more functionality to the tool. IT Planning needs a way to add comments to actuals as many clients don't utilize the Variance Analysis functionality. Configuring in IT Planning would be great. Additional education on implementing IT Planning and Bill of IT would be very helpful.
October 26, 2023

ApptioOne - fortune favors the bold!

TM
Taylor Muir
Senior TBM Consultant
Rego Consulting (Professional Training & Coaching, 51-200 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
ApptioOne is fantastic for large organizations who are just beginning to view IT as an Investment in the business and supporting the entire enterprise. ApptioOne may not make sense for smaller organizations, where IT costs aren't a big enough driver in the overall spend picture, or in companies that generally don't view IT as the focus of their cost drivers. Culture plays a big part in the perspective that an ApptioOne end user will have, where a culture that invites more transparency and subsequent scrutiny usually does well with Apptio's offerings.
October 26, 2023

Fun Learning Experience!

SR
Samuel Renner
TBM Analyst
Aflac (Insurance, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
ApptioOne is great at flexibility of data ingress and configuration. Reports are highly customizable, and Apptio provides many great out of the box options. Learning curve is steep for users responsible with configuration. Understanding relationships and mappings can be a challenge initially.
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