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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 …
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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

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 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

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).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(184)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 26, 2023

ApptioOne Journey

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
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.
Customer Support has been pretty good. We have a ticket open right now which is very business critical due to our upcoming budget deadline. I am anxiously awaiting a response. Our Premier Resource is extremely responsive, and I feel confident she will see us through.
  • 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
I am seeing the value Apptio can drive. We have some much potential and room to grow. I am excited to lead us into the future.
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.
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.
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use CT and ITP for IT financial planning, budgeting, forecast, and var. analysis.
  • Drill down capability
  • Dashboard
  • By IT tower
  • How to consolidate and align actuals with budget/forecast line items to easily identify areas for under/over budget
  • Excel upload capability is not good and need to improve
  • Need to integrate IT planning and Cost Transparency data and produce meaningful reports to help analyze data instead of toggle through two separate CT and ITP to try to figure out actuals vs. budget line items
Our struggle with using ApptioOne for planning, forecast, or var. analysis is:
1. When looking at thousands of actual line items posted in SAP, how to consolidate them into our budget line items which are more consolidated basis by vendor initiatives
2. End-user adoption has been challenging due to users being overwhelmed with too much data
We don't use this.
  • We can now able to compare actual vs budget by vendor details
  • We need one dedicated person to support ApptioOne, currently using 3rd party support
  • Eventually we plan to use our internal resource to support ApptioOne
We used a few times, it was good.
  • Targetprocess
We currently do not use these products.
Yes
excel file
  • Cloud Solutions
nothing.
November 09, 2022

Honest Review

Thomas Fitzpatrick, CTBME | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Allows sr. management in IT and Finance to each understand tech spend.
Project reporting. The integration with ServiceNow is terrific.
  • Resources by location.
  • Total vendor spend by criticality.
We had a concern regarding an update, and we received a very quick answer.
  • 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
It is a great product
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
Have good data.
No. Costs were high
No
There was an error in an update and the customer service was very helpful and explained what happened.
It's very easy to use.
  • Project spend
  • Apptio BI
  • No mobile app.
No
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