Absolutely recommend using ApptioOne
We use ApptioOne as our primary source for costing out applications, projects, and services. It allows us to much more accurately …
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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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
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 Planning
IBM Apptio Benchmarking
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 organizationProvide 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
IBM Apptio Integrations
- Amazon Web Services
- SAP Business One
- Oracle PeopleSoft ERP
- VMware vCenter
- ServiceNow IT Service Management
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Oracle Database (legacy)
- BMC Helix Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
- Microsoft Azure
- Oracle E-Business Suite
- Oracle Hyperion
- Microsoft Excel
- Coupa
- Google Cloud Platform
- Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
- Jira Software
- BMC Helix Discovery
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Microsoft 365
- Digital.ai TeamForge
- Broadcom Clarity
- Windows File Share
- IBM Softlayer
- CGI Momentum Data
- FTP Server Connector
- SOAP Server Connector
- REST Server Connector
- SFTP Server Connector
IBM Apptio Competitors
- Microsoft Excel
- MagicOrange
- Serviceware
IBM Apptio Technical Details
| 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 |
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 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).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(184)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 29, 2023
Saves time and avoids complex Excel workbooks.
We implemented Apptio One, an IT Planning module, to address the challenges of using Excel to maintain a Budget, Forecast, and Actuals to help in planning and variance analysis.
- Replace complex, linked Excel worksheets and workbooks.
- Help with forecasting and changing expenses on a month-by-month basis.
- Provides total net expenses for the month, and for the 12 month period.
- We don't begin from "zero" in our fiscal year, and it's challenging to consider a beginning balance in calculations.
- Out of the box reporting reflects configuration to the ATUM data model, not changes to it.
Being able to upload Actual expenses from the ledgers allow us to update forecast based on actuals, offering a more accurate view of financial results and reporting of the same for executives. In addition, this helps with understanding how to reallocate funding to take advantage of emerging opportunities in our environments, both one-time expenses and entirely allocating ongoing funding to a new activity.
- Resources allocated to emerging services.
- Savings for one full FTE to maintain and develop excel tools.
- Forecasting accuracy has increased.
8
This is the internal finance team, using ApptioOne for daily forecast management and updates, and for reporting purposes.
2
TBM Administrator training from Apptio; deep knowledge and understanding of internal financial processes and practices as well as the chart of accounts.
- Forecast Updates
- Reporting
- Variance analysis
- Easily change labor rates and allocation mid-year
- Automatica calculation of benefits rates
- Better reporting
October 26, 2023
ApptioOne Journey
As the Financial Manager for IT, we use ApptioOne to plan & manage our IT spend. Vendor contracts comprise a significant portion of our spend. IT Planning allows us to amortize current contracts, project increases and manage expirations. ApptioOne helps our team translate our SAP financials into IT financials. We are currently working on building out our Capex project reporting and developing a metric dashboard for our IT Leadership Team.
- Vendor Contract Tracking
- Reporting
- Support
- IT Planning - lining up the contract tab to the summary tab when you are doing a forecast & actuals are involved
- New Customer Support - today we are working with a Premier Resource who is fabulous! We had worked with TAS, and I do not feel that it was nearly as beneficial.
We have not worked with modeling and are just starting to actively use ApptioOne for budgeting & forecasting.
- Strengthened our relationship with the IT Team
- I believe we will be doing forecasting quarterly next year with ApptioOne's help.
- Cloudability
- Targetprocess
We are not using either.
We looked at Upland at the same time as Apptio. We were much more impressed with the Apptio Team and the time they took to show us the product.
5
IT Finance Team & VP of IT
1
In Finance, we have our TBMA. He wears multiple hats today between day to day and Apptio Support/Development.
- Vendor Spend Analysis
- Customer Showback
- Identifying New Data Sources & Insights
- Consumption Based Analysis
- Consolidating Shadow IT
- Vendor Contract Tracking for Renewals
- Company Phone Usage
- Business Unit Conversation - Understanding the Cost of IT
- One Source of Information
- Metrics - Reporting Opex & Capex Trends
- Project Scorecards
No
- Ease of Use
We evaluated another tool at the same time as Apptio. We were impressed with the Apptio Team and their willingness to work with us. Work with what we had today as far as data with the potential to improve in the future. Crawl, Walk, Run.
I wouldn't change it - Apptio & TBM is where we need to be. The only part of our adoption that I would change would not to have tried to incorporate Bill of IT at our inception. We were not ready for it at all, and I feel that we paid for it for 2 years before it really drove any value.
- Vendor Contracts
- Reporting
- Fixed Assets
- Forecasting 6 months into the year. I need to forecast quarterly to make it easier.
- Concept of perspectives - we did not know about this at all.
October 25, 2023
Helpful with Yearly Budgeting and Forecasting
We use ApptioOne for IT planning and cost transparency modules. We do use some cloud. However, I don't work with that so I won't speak on that one. For me, we do the IT planning quite frequently - daily. It helps us do our yearly budgeting cycle, and it helps us with a day-to-day, monthly forecasting process.
So we meet with our service owners every month, and we talk through any forecast updates. So this could be headcount, any new products or services they want, et cetera. So that's how we use the product.
- What I like about the product is it's a great consolidation. In the past, we tried to use Excel, and we would have to do a lot of manual work to get some of the results that ApptioOne drives. So, one of my favorite parts about ApptioOne is quickly comparing previous budgeting cycles or plans to our current plan and see how we're trending, if we're meeting the plan, and if we're off or on, it makes it simple. It gives a great high-level overview regarding headcount dollars or travel dollars across the entire organization. We can quickly drill down into the detail we need, which is helpful.
- Yeah, so one of the things that I've talked to our ApptioOne consultant, is once the actuals are imported into our planning system, we're not able to add comments or adjust the actuals without going back into the data and doing a lot of manual work. So it'd be nice to have a blank text field where we could write any comments into the actuals. That'd be really helpful and, to be able to adjust, not the dollars in the actuals, but kind of leave comments and group the actuals in a more detailed manner.
We use budgeting and forecasting. One of the big things I like to use personally is the waterfall diagram. It gives you a really nice view of upper management because a lot of times upper management doesn't want that to excel. It's a really beautiful, nice, consolidated version, of the data, which really helps our service owners and upper management. So I really like that.
- I will say it's helped us decrease the manual labor hours and helped us automate a lot of work that we used to do manually like we used to type in every single number that would be posted in our GL. And we've been able to automate that. So that's been a huge one.
- Cloudability
We use Cloudability but I'm not personally a user of that.
20
IT Finance
TBM
VP of ITBMO
TBM
VP of ITBMO
3
2 from Apptio
1 from Maryville
1 from Maryville
- being able to be agile with requests and not have to request maryville to help everytime a new request comes from leadership
- not having to wait too long in CT to push from development to production
- being able to compare forecasts to previous plans easily
- not having any outages
- being able to export cost pool data into excel and filter in pivot tables (sorry, we have a hard time getting out of excel)
- being able to group data based on different filter criteria easily
- being able to speak to our dollars clearly without wasted time manually typing in actuals or creating mistakes in excel
- editable tables
- benchmarking (just got this and starting on it)
- having more demo training for our service owners to really understand for those who aren't finance people!
June 12, 2023
ApptioOne - Our Saving Grace
ApptioOne has been extremely beneficial for our company. It helps us manage our costs in a very efficient manner. We are able to publish costs on a cost center level which has been quintessential for our chargeback cases. In addition, we use ApptioOne and CT to help manage current demand and forecast future demand. This allows us to help manage growth on a fluid basis.
- Help our company manage new and future demand
- Report on company costs on a much-needed granular level
- Budget and planning
- Implementing features similar to Excel, i.e. more charts and more formulas
- I've found there are a number of unplanned outages
- Better exporting features such as email
We use it on a daily basis. We bring in data from multiple sources and model it for senior executives. Personally, I am responsible for managing demand and modeling the demand in a way for executives that is easy to ingest. Forecasting is very important to our organization, and we continue to do so on a monthly basis to help manage the budget and get a true estimate of our yearly outlook.
- Positive: Tremendously helped our forecasting
- Positive: Has helped us report application costs on a new basis
- Negative: Out of the box reports/ standard items are not always useful
- Targetprocess
It's awesome. It's always good to know that there is usually an Apptio product for a problem we are trying to address.
None. I have only used ApptioOne.
200
All aspects of our organization use Apptio
3
We have TBM analysts that help support Apptio.
- Forecasting
- Managing costs
- Bill of IT
- Monthly forecasting
- Saving money
- Bill of IT
- New reporting
- Helping manage costs
- Managing people
Yes, we use the customer success team. They are awesome and help use whenever we have questions or concerns. They are definitely worth the money!
Yes
Yes, the support team is excellent.
Whenever our environment was down, we put a critical ticket and they were very helpful and resolved the issue very quickly.
November 09, 2022
Honest Review
We used Apptio one for cost transparency of our actuals, planning and resource analysis. The problems addressed were which department was over plan and why.
- Provides context to financials.
- Enables data driven decisions.
- Easy for everyone to understand.
- Could be faster.
Project reporting. The integration with ServiceNow is terrific.
- Resources by location.
- Total vendor spend by criticality.
- Cloudability
- Targetprocess
I thought the demo was quicker than Apptio, better graphs.
2
Myself and the Apptio Admin
1
The Admin
- Cost Transparency
- Resource allocation
- location by resource review
- Allocations
- TCO
- Project reporting
No
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
It is a market leader that can help solve IT finance issues
I wouldn't.
- Third-party professional services
minimal implementation was required
No
Change management was minimal
better communication
No. Costs were high
No
There was an error in an update and the customer service was very helpful and explained what happened.
- Project spend
- Apptio BI
- No mobile app.
No