ApptioOne

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. By explaining investments and variance to plan more quickly to constituencies and executive management, organizations can uncover opportunities to optimize cost structures, reduce risk, and accelerate growth. The higher tier ApptioOne Plus also unlocks the resources to accelerate business strategies by streamlining applications and operations and deepening business unit partnerships with a collaborative approach to investments.

For CIOs and IT Finance Leaders in organizations with $75M+ in IT spend 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 cost structure and its value to the business. ApptioOne 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, funding allocations, and planning cycles.

Unlike spreadsheets coming from multiple systems of record, ApptioOne unifies financial and operational data into an industry-standard taxonomy of cost categories and allocation rules and provides a standard set of metrics and KPIs to ensure organizations can answer the most strategic questions about investments faster and reduce time spent budgeting and forecasting.

• Financial Management is the fastest Apptio solution to deploy and utilize. It requires one person with no advanced programming or DB skills needed, and data sets that are already in place.
• Customers don't have to start with the annual budgeting process, but can purchase and deploy within the first quarter of their new year. Starting with a monthly variance analysis and/or first quarter forecast, user can get up and running with a budget that is already built, to eliminate the annual budgeting process when moving into rolling forecasts.
• Through insights and analytics into their labor, vendor, cloud, asset and project spend, customers can find discretionary spending as a percentage of their IT budget.
• Customers can reduce budget variance via increased budget accountability and accuracy, to save money that was tied up in contingency.
• Custom reports and data visualizations can be created, or users can select from a broad menu of out-of-the-box content for rapid distribution of executive ready, actionable insights.

ApptioOne Demand

Budgeting for demand is a challenging process, as spreadsheets and other customer solutions do not provide enough fidelity to generate accurate forecasts. Without specific insights into demand from business units, IT orgs do not know how much to budget and how to forecast costs.

ApptioOne Demand provides collaborative demand capture, planning and management tool that aggregates demand for IT services from the business units who consumer them to help organizations plan for the demand of the resources they provide to inform their overall IT spend, with integrated collaboration tools to communicate cross-organizationally and build plans as teams.

ApptioOne Demand enables users to cohesively structure their demand planning processes to more accurately and efficiently manage demand and reduce budget inaccuracies caused by limited oversight.

Why is this important? Inaccurate projections of future demand encourage budget padding and undercut investments in growth opportunities, which undermines partnership cross-organizationally. Chasing down demand estimates from business units slows down the planning process and makes it almost impossible to deliver timely, accurate unit rates and project costs.

From a supplier perspective, users can capture business service demand on internal IT services/resources to help owners understand their incoming demand needs and its variance to previous years. From a consumption perspective, Demand users can capture technical service demand from internal IT services to help owners understand aggregated demand needs for the upcoming period and variance from previous periods.

ApptioOne Demand helps users to:

Source and aggregate demand for services with a standardized, shared framework to streamline, and reduce time taken to complete, the planning process.

Plan, track, and manage consumption to lower overall IT spend or redirect investments by reducing waste, eliminating duplications, and aligning investments to strategic priorities thanks to collaboration, active management and analysis tools.

Improve unit rate accuracy to reduce the time spent forecasting, increase Showback clarity, and utilize variance analysis to redirect resources to higher-value activities.

Influence Demand: Strategically price services to shape Demand and recover costs with transparency and accuracy from the business.

ApptioOne Billing

Mature IT organizations with Costing and Planning incorporated need a proper chargeback process for their organization. ApptioOne Billing aims to provide a defensible and predictable bill to business consumers that communicates IT costs in the language the business understands - providing increased transparency around the cost of delivering IT services and have shifting conversations with the business from cost to value. This leads to better partnerships with business stakeholders and more time for value-driven activities.

Homegrown systems are unwieldy and time consuming, delaying decision making and prevent defensible communication, Apptio delivers an automated cost recovery system for monitoring consumption by business units, delivering a bill with accurate IT costs and defensive allocations and setting pricing strategies that influence behavior. It also allows users to reallocate the time spent supporting manual consumption cost models (salary and effort costs) to higher value uses.

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

ApptioOne Benchmarking

The value of on-demand, self-service benchmarking is that it allows users to look at their actual data against benchmarks in order to understand where they stand, as well as to use as objective data points in communication with the business to justify or defend spend decisions, demonstrate efficiency, or recommend optimizations. Benchmarking allows users to do their own discovery to find opportunities to improve based upon variances they find from benchmark data. It is not like traditional consulting in that it does not provide recommendations for improvement.

In addition, Apptio Benchmarking provides self-service peer comparisons of IT spend over time, enabling an ongoing process for tracking performance, validating decisions, and identifying areas for improvement. Users can compare actual IT costs to benchmarks side-by-side to create demand plans and budgets, conduct scenario analysis and explore variance drivers with access to underlying actuals. Access to a full benchmark data set helps IT organizations understand how each metric is calculated.

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