Apptio improves technology investment decision-making

Apptio has introduced several enhancements to its product portfolio that support organizations adopting a digital-first strategy and improving technology investment decision-making. New features provide key decision-makers with improved visibility and insights into their technology spending and the ability to prioritise investments that deliver the most value to the organization.

The demand for digital and cloud-based services has increased in the last year, but many organizations are still struggling to deliver these services on time and on budget. While a report by PwC found that 60% of C-suite executives identified digital transformation as their most critical growth driver in 2022, a disconnect between team efforts and fragmented technology spend data make it hard for businesses to prioritize investments for a digital-first strategy. A study by Apptio and Harvard Business Review revealed that while 92% of leaders agreed insights into the business value of technology to be of high importance, only 62% had confidence in their data.

The latest updates from Apptio enable organizations to accelerate their journeys by improving the ability to act upon data insights, connecting investments to strategy and linking data across an organization’s technology footprint.

Driving Actions Through Data Insights

Modern businesses generate vast amounts of data on their technology infrastructure but driving actions to generate more value from this data poses a challenge for leaders due to time pressures and the complexity of the data. To address this, Apptio has launched a number of new features which empower teams to rapidly uncover and take action on cost-saving opportunities.

•        Apptio BI Reports

Creating custom reports and dashboards to show the cost of particular services or actuals versus a plan can be a time-consuming process which holds up action on improving technology investments. To address this challenge, Apptio BI Reports have recently been released as a new feature of Apptio BI. These out-of-the-box reports are created by the Apptio product team and span the entire Apptio portfolio with new reports being released every month. Real-time connection to Apptio data sources and system-generated alerting reduces the time spent on creating and analysing reports and allows IT teams to focus on uncovering and actioning cost-saving opportunities.

•        EC2 rightsizing in AWS for ASG and GPU-backed cloud instances

New EC2 rightsizing recommendations give cloud leaders the power to reduce overprovisioning and unnecessary costs due for Auto Scaling Groups and GPU-backed instances in AWS. Automated recommendations cut through the time-consuming process of tracking down and evaluating individual instances, allowing AWS customers to take immediate action on cloud cost saving opportunities.

•        Japanese localisation for Apptio Cloudability

In addition to existing multi-currency capabilities, Apptio Cloudability will now be available in Japanese, supporting users in the market in applying FinOps practices to their cloud investment strategy.

Connecting Investments to Strategy

To optimize technology investments, IT leaders need a full understanding of where their technology spending is fulfilling the needs of the business. To assist with bridging the gap between investment and value, Apptio’s latest improvements to ApptioOne, Cloudability and Targetprocess offer unique insights for key decision-makers that traditional financing tools are not designed to address.

•        Integrated Investment Planning

As a new feature in ApptioOne, Integrated Investment Planning (IIP) helps organizations understand the multiyear financial plan associated with their technology investments. This feature covers all investments, both waterfall and agile, and is able to isolate the ‘build’ costs from the ‘run’ costs of these investments. Direct connections to source project portfolio management (PPM) or enterprise agile planning (EAP) systems provide an automated stream of resource allocation and utilization information which can then be compared to the plan for variance analysis and adjustment.

•        Cloudability TotalCost

To reap the full benefits of a cloud-first strategy, IT leaders must be able calculate cloud’s fully burdened cost. Cloudability TotalCost connects public cloud spend with direct, indirect and shared cloud costs in areas such as labor, observability tools and third-party services to link cloud spend more accurately to value. Chargeback tools allow IT teams to then fully allocate these costs to users, while alerts can be created to flag when costs exceed budgeted thresholds.

•        Enhanced team-level tool integration for Apptio Targetprocess

Strengthening the native integration for Apptio Targetprocess with popular team-level agile management tools such as Jira enables portfolio managers (PMs) and business leaders to gain more visibility across multiple teams without impacting existing processes. Seamless data synchronisation across multiple Jira instances allows Apptio Targetprocess to align strategy to agile work across the enterprise, freeing up more time for PMs to improve output at a program, portfolio and enterprise level.

•        Apptio Targetprocess validation rules

Validation rules in Targetprocess can be created to automatically enforce checkpoints within automated workflows, helping organizations improve data integrity and ensure alignment to company-specific requirements. These rules can be used to verify prerequisites or prevent objects from changing states, supporting the unique governance requirements of complex organizations that can span hundreds of teams.

Improving Investment Decisions with Connected Data

Authoritative, real-time data is vital for empowering teams to make smarter technology investment decisions. Customers using multiple Apptio products will now enjoy a more unified data experience thanks to new features which simplify and accelerate the sharing of data between products.

•        Apptio Automated Data Management

Apptio’s new Automated Data Management service facilitates the sharing of data between Apptio applications. As a traditional publish/subscribe service, all products are able to publish new data sets to the service as they become available. At the same time, products can subscribe to the service to be made aware of important data sets for them in real-time. This will first be implanted for the Cost and Plan sides of ApptioOne, where new actuals are ingested by the Plan side as soon as they’re available for quick variance analysis or new plan creation.

•        Targetprocess Integration to Automated Data Management

Bringing Apptio Targetprocess data into Automated Data Management simplifies the process of factoring labour demand and capacity decisions made in Targetprocess to ApptioOne’s overall planning and budget tools. This integration will enable near real-time updates on accurate labour capitalization data and the ability to reflect the current demand and capacity. This improves decision-making and helps organizations to accurately plan from sprint to sprint.

“As a digital-first approach is top-of-mind for enterprises globally, it is crucial that key decision-makers are equipped with the best tools to ensure their technology investments are driving business value,” said Jeremy Ung, Chief Engineering Officer at Apptio. “Traditional financial management tools are not suited to the distributed nature of technology across teams that we are seeing in organizations today. Apptio’s latest enhancements to its products offer unique solutions for enabling the shift from a project to product organization by connecting data from all parts of the business, giving full financial visibility into the entire technology footprint and the insights to steer funding based on value delivered. These capabilities give decision-makers the blueprint to accelerate product innovation in a digital-first world.”