Apptio Helps Global Insurance Company Manage Its Technology Spend
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Apptio
We use Apptio for global IT budgets and forecasts, expense and variance analysis, show back bills for business areas, Application TCO, service costing reports, project and supplier spend reporting, headcount monitoring, and monitoring public cloud spend. Using Apptio has significantly streamlined our global IT budgeting and forecasting timeline and improved its accuracy and credibility. What used to take several weeks is now accomplished in a few days. Apptio has also reduced the time and effort required to roll up global technology costs from multiple general ledgers in multiple currencies. Accomplishing these basic financial tasks now with minimal effort has allowed us to focus on things that are more meaningful to our technology consumers (e.g. application TCO, services TCO, showback bills, supporting Cloud FinOps). Our TBM maturity continues to grow with Apptio.
Pros
- Budgeting and forecasting global costs in a single tool with multiple currencies
- Very easy to load data from multiple sources
- Constructed well enough that we can support a large global company with only two TBM Office resources
- Has good out-of-the-box reports that can be easily modified if necessary
- Easily managed security between SSO roles and cost object permissions
- Intuitive, interactive reports for users that are fairly easy to build
Cons
- Apptio BI is not robust enough yet to handle all the reporting we currently have in Cost Transparency
- Periodically experience long duration for processing and moving changes from development to production environment
- Cannot setup custom automatic report distributions in CT or ITP
- Would prefer to define cost model allocation rules on the way out of a cost object as we did with Digital Fuel; currently, with Apptio this must be defined on the way into the object (e.g. the way out of its predecessor)
- Report limitations within CT since only 2 tables may be used per report (although you can add filters from additional tables)
- Using Apptio has significantly streamlined our global IT budgeting and forecasting timelines and improved its accuracy and credibility. What used to take several weeks and was not always trusted is now accomplished in a few days and is credible with management.
- Our application TCO coupled with technical services TCO has improved the communication and understanding between our infrastructure and application teams. Its helped everyone better understand which costs are truly variable versus allocations of longer-term variable, and fixed costs.
- Our application TCO reports have helped our application owners become application undertakers when applications are decommissioned. Without our reports, no longer used databases and servers were often kept in place.
- Our showback bills have helped us price services for transition services agreements (TSAs) as we've sold off certain books of business.
- Coupled with a report distribution tool from Rego Consulting (RegoEngage), we are able to distribute useful monthly reports to nearly 500 stakeholders.
We currently use Datalinks to automatically bring into Apptio our MS Azure public cloud spend and consumption. We are the primary tool for our newly formed Cloud FinOps team. We also continue to refine our cost model, which supports application TCO, services TCO, showback bills, etc. We have built reports that allow us to analyze consumption and expenses at any point of our cost model.
- None
We are currently using only Cost Transparency, IT Planning, and basic ApptioOne tools. We are evaluating our need for Cloudability and may use it in the future. We also leverage RegoEngage to support our report distribution needs.
We formerly used Digital Fuel until it was purchased by Apptio. We transitioned to Apptio because Digital Fuel did not have adequate budgeting and forecasting tools. We always could see that Apptio investment would be prioritized to its base product over Digital Fuel. We evaluated many competing products in 2012 when we first searched for a toolset to meet our IT Finance needs.
Do you think IBM Apptio delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with IBM Apptio's feature set?
Yes
Did IBM Apptio live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of IBM Apptio go as expected?
No
Would you buy IBM Apptio again?
Yes
Using IBM Apptio
200 - IT cost center managers; application owners; infrastructure engineering managers; primary IT liaisons to business areas; IT senior leaders; IT Finance; Finance Business Partners; public cloud consumers; IT Procurement
2 - Blend of financial knowledge with technical knowledge and good data management skills.
- Streamlining budgeting and forecasting processes and improving quality and traceability
- IT expense management via variance analysis and the ability to drill into expenses
- Cost modeling in order to produce TCO for technical services and business services including applications
- Cost modeling in order to produce showback bills and to determine cost center chargeback rates to business lines for upcoming year
- Supporting Cloud FinOps reporting needs
- Supporting Cloud FinOps reporting needs without using Cloudability
- Monitoring and reporting vendor spend
- Possibly expanding our footprint to include business change costs along with IT costs.
Evaluating IBM Apptio and Competitors
Yes - We initially used Digital Fuel beginning in 2013. It did not have adequate budgeting and forecasting capabilities, so we reached out to explore what Apptio had to offer. We converted from Digital Fuel to Apptio in 2019-2020 and have used Apptio since.
- Scalability
- Integration with Other Systems
- Ease of Use
- Other
The budgeting and forecasting capabilities inherent in Apptio and because Apptio purchased Digital Fuel (which we were previously using) and was likely not going to invest much into it.
I'm generally happy with Apptio and its capabilities. It is a better toolset than what we previously had. The training material, customer support, and other intangibles provided by Apptio are very good.
IBM Apptio Support
No - We are self sufficient and have years of TBM experience internally.
Yes - Yes, it was resolved within a few releases of product upgrades.
Our account manager and customer support manager are both excellent. They help us navigate to the right Apptio support person whenever we have questions or need help.
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved | None |
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