Apptio Helps Global Insurance Company Manage Its Technology Spend
January 20, 2022
Apptio Helps Global Insurance Company Manage Its Technology Spend
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
ApptioOne
Modules Used
- Cost Analytics (formerly Cost Transparency)
- Planning and Budgeting (formerly IT Planning)
- IT Financial Management Foundation
Overall Satisfaction with ApptioOne
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, show back bills, supporting Cloud FinOps). Our TBM maturity continues to grow with Apptio.
- 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
- Apptio BI is not robust enough yet to handle all the reporting we currently have in Cost Transparency
- Recent upgrades altered how our "user pick" reports behave and also broke all our reports using drivers
- Cannot setup 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 2-3 tables may be used per report
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.
- 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 business lines.
- Cloudability
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 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.
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 ApptioOne
200 - IT cost center managers; application owners; infrastructure engineering managers; primary IT liaisons to business areas; IT senior leaders; IT Finance.
2 - Blend of financial knowledge with technical knowledge and good data management skills.