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

Deployment Types	Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No
Supported Countries	Can be used by customers in any country
Supported Languages	English, Japanese

Apptio Cloudability

Anaplan

IBM Turbonomic

Microsoft BI (MSBI)

IBM Planning Analytics

Zoho One

Alteryx

Tableau Desktop

IBM Cognos Analytics

Workday Adaptive Planning