IBM Apptio Costing and Planning

Apptio Costing's main use case for our customers is FinOps, for example, for those using Azure. The idea is to help them better monitor any costs related to cloud consumption and see everything related to cloud shadow IT while reflecting all invoices and explaining FinOps best practices.

I start by providing a FinOps discovery workshop and then, depending on the annual consumption, I decide whether it would make sense for that specific customer to offer them managed services. If they agree, then I use Apptio Costing for it. As a specific use case, when a customer has at least 100K euros in annual consumption, I use Apptio Costing.

When a large organization looks to improve transparency and control over their IT cost, which includes financial and operational data, I notice that the organization lacks a consolidated view of how IT spending is allocated across infrastructure, applications, services, business units, and end users. By using Apptio Costing, the organization establishes a structured IT cost model by consolidating data from finance, procurement, cloud platform, infrastructure, application, and organizational sources. The customer was able to allocate IT costs to the appropriate services, applications, business units, and cost centers by using defined allocation rules and cost drivers. Additionally, they understood the complete cost structure of IT services from the underlying infrastructure and software costs to shared services and operational resources. By the end, they were able to compare actual spending against budget and forecast, while also identifying areas where costs were increasing unexpectedly.

Apptio Costing offers many good features. One of the main ones is having a single pane, a unique dashboard where you see everything related to cloud consumption. Another important one that I have seen is IT Cost Modeling, because you can map financial data into IT services and applications. I would also say that Cost Allocation is essential to distribute shared IT costs using allocation rules and consumption drivers.

Beyond cost modeling and allocation, I would highlight a few features that make Apptio Costing particularly useful. You have application and service total cost of ownership, which allows you to calculate the full cost of an application or IT service, including infrastructure, software, labor, and shared costs. You also have variance analysis, which helps compare actual, budget, and forecast and understand what drives the difference.

Apptio Costing has positively impacted our organization mainly by improving transparency around IT spending, giving us a much clearer understanding of where our IT costs come from, how they are allocated, and which application services or business units are driving those costs.

I have seen it improve collaboration between IT and finance because both departments now have a common cost model and more consistent data to support discussions and decisions. Apptio Costing has helped us by saving time, improving decision-making, automating cost allocation, and consolidating financial and operational data into a single model. I notice that we spend less time manually collecting, reconciling, and analyzing data from different sources.

I see some areas where Apptio Costing could be improved. For the initial setup and configuration, while the platform is very powerful, building and maintaining a complex cost model always requires significant expertise and a good understanding of the underlying data. I think we can bring more from the user experience because the solution is quite intuitive for occasional users, but the configuration could be made much simpler.

Regarding integration, data integration could also be made easier with more out-of-the-box connectors and simpler ways to map and validate data from ERP, cloud, HR, or IT management systems.

I have been using Apptio Costing for three years.

Apptio Costing is quite stable.

Our experience with Apptio Costing has been positive because the platform is suited to our large and complex enterprise environment. As the organization grows, the cost model can also evolve by adding new data sources, allocation rules, and reporting requirements, making it one of its strengths.

Customer support is great from the vendor side. We are our own partner for that product, and they are very responsive, knowledgeable, and know how to deal with technical questions or configuration-related issues.

I would rate customer support as an eight out of ten. I hesitate between eight or nine, but I keep it at eight because there is still some room for improvement in the response time and handling of more complex cases.

As far as I recall, we did not have an equivalent dedicated technology business management and FinOps solution previously. It was more through Excel and financial reports, which made it quite hard to manage.

The mechanism of setting up Apptio Costing is quite approachable. The hardest part is usually designing a cost model that the business trusts. Apptio always provides out-of-the-box cost transparency components, default allocation, data relationships, and standard reports. The typical implementation flow includes finance data, which gives you the cost pool, IT towers, services, and applications, leading to the business units.

We have seen a positive return on investment. Although I cannot share specific financial figures, the return on investment comes mainly from improved IT cost transparency, reduced manual effort in financial analysis and cost allocation, faster reporting, and better identification of optimization opportunities. We have also improved our decision-making process by giving IT and finance a common view of application, infrastructure, and service costs.

It is a great experience regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing. Apptio's sales team was amazing with us, very straightforward and concise with all details. It is quite reasonable for an enterprise-grade solution, although it can represent a significant investment. The license cost is only one part of the overall cost, but organizations also need to consider initial implementation efforts, including data integration, cost model design, configuration, testing, and potential external consulting services, which we relied on. All of this setup cost can be significant but was quite manageable.

We evaluated Cloudtamer, which is a US startup, before choosing Apptio Costing.

I would tell others looking into using Apptio Costing to initially prepare their data and define the right objectives before implementing it. The technology is very powerful, but the quality of the results depends heavily on the quality of financial and operational data and having clearly defined allocation rules.

The governance and security aspects of Apptio Costing are great. The platform is quite well monitored for data and security, especially with the connectors handling sensitive financial and IT data. There is the ability to control access based on user roles and responsibilities, and I would like to see continued improvement around security monitoring, auditability, and data governance.

Apptio Costing's AI capabilities are useful, but I would not rely on the output without validation because the accuracy and reliability depend heavily on the quality, completeness, and structure of the underlying data. I gave this review an overall rating of eight out of ten.