IBM Apptio
Updated November 12, 2025

IBM Apptio

Robert Krauss | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

ApptioOne Plus

Modules Used

  • Cost Analytics (formerly Cost Transparency)
  • Planning and Budgeting (formerly IT Planning)

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Apptio

IBM Apptio provides the ability to connect financial and operational data in a way that is reliable, repeatable, understandable, and accessible. We can ingest financial data and apply rules to logically allocate that money to labor, fixed assets, and vendor spend. The rules allow continued processes to give insight into applications and services consumed by business units.
We use Apptio to provide IT and Tech Finance managers with easy access to data which would otherwise require manual collation of spreadsheets and flat files.

Pros

  • Flexible data ingestion processes can accommodate many data structures
  • Customized report structures provide user flexibility
  • Easy and powerful data relationship customization

Cons

  • Flexibility and ease of use can lead to overly-complex models
  • Sample project is outdated and not following best practices, should not be used as a model approach
  • Apptio BI reports have a very different look and feel from out of the box report.
  • Identifying ownership gaps in technology and applications
  • Providing IT leaders with operational details tied to the financials - how much are we spending on projects vs what we think we're spending
  • "I'm in Apptio every day" - Global Director of Infrastructure
We ingest financial data every close cycle and match this up to monthly feeds of labor data. Our forecasts are updated with the latest data and we are able to report up to senior leadership on time. The ability to ingest multiple data streams and to be able to control outputs of the transformed data makes Apptio the flexible and reliable tool we need.
Support team is quite responsive and usually is in contact right away. We always get interim updates on longer-term issues.
Our team are always willing to go into more depth on questions or problem we have and will bring in additional resources to answer any questions which go beyond the norm.
  • IBM Cloudability
We are early in our adoption of Cloudability but the potential to integrate the data is something we are looking forward to implementing in depth.

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

Any situation where a dataset varies over time but is consistent in form can be ingested into IBM Apptio and modelled for reporting. I have used these functions for time reporting, project efforts, and budget allocations. I would caution against using IBM Apptio in a situation where nothing more than ETL is required.

Using IBM Apptio

40 - Tech Finance, Cloud DevOps, some IT leadership
2 - Primary skills are related to logical data flows and ability to translate between financial and technical teams.
  • Budgeting and Forecasting
  • Comparing Actual Expenses to plans
  • Applying business rules to cloud data for proper allocations
  • We are using Apptio to ingest time tracking data and providing multiple lenses to review project work by multiple hierarchies and surfacing insights for tech finance teams.
  • Enterprise-wide Total Cost of Ownership
Balancing value achieved against cost based on growth of our IT spend.

Comments

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