Data Integration and Management

The Apptio platform provides a flexible, secure set of options for both top-down and bottom-up data integration and management. Apptio's data inference technology correlates data from various financial and operational systems, accelerating the creation of robust cost and performance models. It is easy to get started with a combination of assumptions and the data you have today. And the flexibility of the platform enables the allocation models to seamlessly adjust as you integrate more raw data, driving towards greater accuracy and automation over time.

A Flexible Combination of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Capabilities

In a typical customer deployment, the cost, asset and other data that is needed to support an Apptio deployment exists in a variety of formats and states of maturity. Commonly there is a well-defined source system for financial data such as the GL, asset information from an asset management or CMBD system, and perhaps support ticket information from the service desk. Other data sources including labor rates or time allocation, data center capacity, business unit ownership or budget forecasts and allocation strategies may exist in ad hoc spreadsheets or "within the heads" of individuals within IT or Finance.

Data like this can be entered and maintained within Apptio. Common rate cards or standard forms enable users to capture relevant cost, capacity, or usage data. Budgeting and forecasting that had been carried out in spreadsheets can instead be directly performed in Apptio. Data sets can be assigned owners and workflow within Apptio can be leveraged to ensure data is maintained and kept up to date by multiple people across the organization.

More structured data that is extracted from a source system or well maintained in a spreadsheet can be easily uploaded to the Apptio system to jumpstart a deployment. The most common sources are GL, asset databases, service desks, or project and portfolio management solutions. Over time, those data sources can be fully automated with Apptio Datalink.

Datalink: Secure, Reliable Automation of Financial and Operational Data

Apptio Datalink is a behind-the-firewall extension of Apptio's on-demand offering that reliably automates the secure collection and transmission of data from internal and cloud based systems back to Apptio. Apptio Datalink serves as a single integration point across a variety of systems, supports a flexible set of integration options at the file, database, and web services level, and includes a set of connectors for common IT and Financial systems. It provides a reliable framework for automating regular (i.e. daily, weekly, or monthly) extracts from those sources' systems and leverages encryption, a public/private key architecture and https transmission to ensure data security.

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Data Inference and Slowly Changing Schemas: Intelligent, Adaptive Data Management

The data that underpins most IT Financial Management efforts comes from disparate systems and is not well correlated. As data enters the Apptio system, sophisticated data inference algorithms help identify patterns and relationships to create a data concept map which represents those relationships and accelerates the ability to generate visual models. For example, if an asset list is uploaded with servers that are in a Boston data center, and there is a set of facilities charges in the financial data for a Boston data center, Apptio will identify that relationship, effectively inferring a schematic relationship between these otherwise uncorrelated data sets. Weights and filters can be defined and applied to cleanse data and that logic is automatically applied to ongoing data uploads.

In a typical customer deployment, assumptions will be replaced with source system data or new data sources are introduced over time to improve the accuracy of the model. Apptio natively supports slowly changing schemas to ensure that the model and reports easily adapt to these changes in underlying data over time. New data sources can be introduced and, unlike traditional reporting tools, there is no loss in the ability to compare reports over historical time periods.