Collaboration, Reporting and Analytics

The Apptio platform includes a rich reporting experience and powerful data analytics engine that leverages a high performance, in-memory architecture. Users can easily modify default reports or create custom reports that are automatically updated over time. Interactive reports enable users to drill in from high level IT service costs all the way down to granular activity drivers for a deep understanding of fundamental cost drivers. And "What If" analysis supports scenario planning across core IT cost, utilization and operational metrics. Leveraging Apptio as an ITFM system of record, IT and Finance can build out the key financial management process needed to improve cost efficiency, streamline the budgeting and forecasting process and enable greater financial agility to react to dynamic business cycles.

Interactive Reporting and What If Analysis

Apptio offers a rich reporting and analytics experience, leveraging a high performance, in-memory architecture that is tightly integrated with the core modeling environment. As a model is created, a set of reports are automatically generated that offer interactive drill downs from high level IT services to key underlying metrics and cost drivers. Apptio's Transparency Templates include a standard set of context sensitive reports and users can easily modify those default reports or create custom reports that are automatically updated as the model is refreshed. Support for historical reporting enables trending on costs and drivers such as comparing actual unit costs to committed rates for various IT services on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Apptio also offers powerful "What If" analytics to support scenario planning across core IT cost, utilization and operational metrics such as servers, power, facilities, and labor or underlying drivers such as allocation methodologies. By simulating changes in the values of these key metrics or allocation schemes, users can help identify cost reduction opportunities, quantify the impact of new investment decisions and make better decisions that can improve the overall effectiveness of IT.

How do costs change if 500 servers are added next year? What happens to total cost if low utilization, high cost servers are consolidated using virtual machines? What happens if power costs increase by 10% next year? Is it more cost effective to outsource support? Apptio's What If Analysis enables users to get answers to these kinds of questions and also measure the actual impact of their resulting IT decisions over time.

Workflow to Enable Collaboration

IT Cost Transparency is a collaborative effort that involves participation from IT, Finance, and the Business Units. To enable that collaboration, the Apptio platform supports the workflow necessary to manage and maintain relevant data as well as assign and track action items associated with managing the cost and performance of IT services.

For data that is entered and managed directly into Apptio, administrators can easily assign an owner and then, via the Apptio platform, generate regular email reminders to those data set owners that include a link back to Apptio so the data can be easily maintained.

In order to manage an ongoing financial management process within the Apptio platform, users are enabled to create actions and track them over time. For example, an IT executive who oversees a broader portfolio of IT services can log into Apptio on a monthly basis to understand how his IT service costs are tracking relative to the committed budgets. If actual costs for a particular service are exceeding the budget set for that service he or she can easily create an action for the associated service manager to analyze what is causing the variance and report back with a proposed resolution. Those actions can also be monitored and closed out over time within Apptio once they are completed.