Apptio launches Business-Agility Tools

Apptio has introduced several product updates designed to support organizations looking to take tighter control of their costs in the face of challenging economic conditions. New features provide key decision-makers with improved visibility and insights into their technology spending, allowing them to better understand and communicate key business metrics and build operational agility to respond to changing requirements.

Inflation, labor shortages, and the threat of a recession are adding more pressure on businesses to determine their optimal strategies. In periods of market growth, organizations find it easier to invest in multiple growth strategies or continue to support legacy products. However, in periods of pullback, it becomes essential to weigh how much value each of these options brings.

A recent report from Gartner® found that “…78% of CFOs will increase or maintain enterprise digital investments through 2023 even if inflation persists.” [1] Organizations are not reevaluating their commitment to digital transformation; instead, they are being more targeted in their spending to increase efficiency and innovation in the long run.

Deeper insights

In response, Apptio is launching new updates to enable organizations to accelerate this journey while simultaneously delivering the unit-cost reductions the present moment demands. Modern technology projects and investments consist of so many different expenses, such as labor, hardware, and services, that it can be difficult to make sense of their true costs and value through the use of complex data and reports.

Apptio provides true transparency and flexibility into technology spend by giving organizations multiple ways to view, understand, and analyze their data – from looking at high-level insights into projects and products to drilling down to the resource level for in-depth cost analysis. The result is more accurate decision-making and faster troubleshooting.

•       Cloudability: Rightsizing Explorer

Cloud rightsizing is the process of matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost. Apptio’s Rightsizing Explorer adds a powerful interactive launching pad to easily digest rightsizing recommendations. This makes it faster not only to implement more recommendations, but also to potentially increase returns from a variety of approaches to rightsizing.

•       Cloudability: Container cost amortization

Kubernetes provides businesses with unparalleled flexibility and scale. However, the cost to run Kubernetes is spread out and can be difficult to track. Amortization techniques allow businesses to plan the cost of an asset over a set period. Apptio’s addition of the cost (amortized) metric to Cloudability’s container cost allocation feature will allow users to apply the full cost of consumed reserved instances (RI) and savings plans (SP) to Kubernetes clusters. This solves challenges related to costs appearing excessively reduced (RIs) or inflated (SPs).

•       Apptio BI: Storytelling & customizations

Apptio Business Intelligence (BI) has improved user capabilities to organize, personalize, and provide context to reports. Businesses need to be able to tell a story with their reports, whether that is visually, organizationally, or with the right data, to ensure that essential information is communicated across the organization and key stakeholders are aligned.

•       Apptio BI: Interactivity enhancements

Further enhancing interactivity and engagement improvements, Apptio BI is adding a variety of features including enhanced drilling capabilities, alternative measure pickers, and global time filtering, expanding the potential for analysis and creating a fully interactive report experience.

•       ApptioOne: Integrated Investment Planning

Customers looking to understand their project and investment costs face issues arising from disconnected planning and management systems. Integrated Investment Planning (IIP) enables IT organizations to gain a deeper understanding of project/investment costs and their impact on current and future budgets, such as internal and external labor, infrastructure, vendor, and other expenses.

Surfacing business value

Apptio’s new launch features help to connect project investments to the value being delivered by breaking down data siloes among business, finance, and IT – presenting insights in real terms that improves collaboration and alignment.

•       Data integration of ApptioOne and Targetprocess

The integration of ApptioOne and Targetprocess connects CFOs and financial teams to each level of Agile business functions, including portfolio managers, product teams, and Agile development teams. This eliminates financial blind spots commonly created by Agile practices at scale. This integration enables Agile product teams to gain visibility into non-labor costs such as support contracts, capitalized asset investments, or cloud services consumption. At the same time, CFOs and financial teams gain a more accurate view of Agile program costs by capturing and capitalizing actuals for capacity and labor costs.

•       Cloudability: ROI tracking for rightsizing recommendations

Cloudability’s Rightsizing ROI feature is now available to all customers with no requirement to integrate with Jira. This means that individual rightsizing recommendations can be tracked automatically entirely within Cloudability. This provides engineers with a clear list of savings actions to prioritize.

•       Apptio BI: Content library expansion

An expanded library of pre-created reports will help users to create meaningful reports and save time, providing an easy starting point for report creation. This larger out-of-the-box library caters to a wider variety of specific use cases across various industries and means that users can spend less time creating reports and more time analyzing.

Accelerating business agility

Apptio’s innovations help businesses build operational agility and respond more rapidly to changing market conditions. During economic uncertainty, Apptio is supporting businesses to improve time to value, accelerate the planning process, direct funding to the most important projects, and provide actionable direction for teams regardless of their chosen operating model.

•       Targetprocess: Solutions Library improvements

Continued enhancements to the Targetprocess Solutions Library allows customers to rapidly deploy a mix of Agile solutions, meaning that businesses can increase their agility and realize value faster through the accelerated deployment of a mix of industry standards, frameworks, and methodologies.

•       Targetprocess: Lean budgeting solution

One set of solutions being added to the library supports portfolio-management capabilities. These solutions include a full set of lean budgeting mechanisms, including participatory budgeting, designation of guardrails, and horizon planning. This addresses businesses’ need to adapt strategies and conduct planning faster and more frequently than ever before while controlling the levels of unoptimized resource and budget allocations that can continue to grow at the portfolio level as Agile practices continue to scale throughout the business.

•       Targetprocess: Azure DevOps native integration

Apptio is delivering a native integration solution for Targetprocess and Azure DevOps, one of the most leveraged Agile team tools in the industry. By investing in native integrations, Targetprocess allows teams to keep their preferred methodologies and stay connected to programs, portfolios, and the rapidly evolving priorities of the business.

“Businesses are facing increased pressure on their budgets from the challenges posed by the difficult economic conditions. 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 Technology Officer at Apptio. “Traditional financial management tools cannot compete with the demands of today’s rapidly changing technology environment, and as Gartner has highlighted, the winners on the other side of this cycle will have continued to accelerate the right digital initiatives across their organization even as they face mounting pressures on their profits.”

Organizations that build operational agility and visibility will be best placed to meet this challenge. “By driving visibility and accountability across our organization with Apptio, we have been able to increase our agility, reduce costs in areas that do not drive business value, and accurately measure our return on strategic investments,” said Ronan Hughes, Principal Architect for Core Banking and Group Manufacturing at Bank of Ireland. “Having undertaken a large and complex core transformation program in 2020, Bank of Ireland has continued to make significant progress in partnership with Apptio. We recently went from an initial four-week proof of concept to delivering our first full-scale total cost of ownership model for the entire bank in just five months through the power of TBM.”