IT Modeling and Activity Based Costing

Apptio provides an easy-to-use, visual interface for describing the allocation and consumption relationships that govern the cost, utilization and operational metrics of IT services. Robust Activity Based Costing supports the allocation of General Ledger based costs by assumption or data driven strategies to calculate the true TCO of an IT Service, analyze core service cost drivers and govern the distribution of those costs back to business unit customers. To accelerate time to value Apptio also includes a robust set of transparency accelerators for such building blocks as servers, storage, data centers, network, support and labor that provide the building blocks for modeling the cost and performance of any IT service.

Intuitive Visual Modeling and Activity Based Costing

Apptio's IT Financial Management modeler provides an easy to use, visual interface for describing relationships and allocations of the costs, utilization and operational metrics of IT services.

Users can enter data manually or easily import data from multiple sources including the general ledger, spreadsheets, asset databases and service desk systems. Cost objects can be easily dragged, dropped and wired together, and estimates or formulas that govern allocations can be easily annotated. A robust activity based costing engine can be applied to drive towards the calculation of the fully loaded unit cost for each IT service. Budgets can be modeled so users can compare actual results to budgets and forecasts. The activity based costing engine can also be leveraged to model consumption by -- and allocation of IT service costs -- to Business Units.

The flexible modeling environment has a simple, Microsoft Outlook like rules-based allocation interface that enables users to quickly and easily map a large number of cost centers to a variety of IT infrastructure or services and easily maintain those mappings over time. In addition allocations can be managed via a data driven mapping table that leverages the data inference technology to suggest potential allocation relationships that are supported by underlying data.

In addition to cost, users can model utilization and operational metrics for IT services. Server CPU utilization, data center capacity and storage capacity can be modeled to enable the analysis of cost combined with asset utilization and capacity to identify optimization targets across the IT infrastructure. Operational metrics such as ticket resolution times and server-to-admin ratio can also be modeled and tracked over time and, when combined with the cost and utilization data, enable the Apptio offering to provide a single destination for IT performance management.

Transparency Accelerators

Transparency accelerators capture the best practices associated with costing, benchmarking, reporting, and analyzing the financial and operational performance of IT services. The pre-defined templates accelerate the evaluation and deployment of the Apptio solution and they ensure that a consistent approach is used by finance and IT professionals to manage the cost and performance of IT services across an organization.

Apptio includes a robust set of domain accelerators that span the fundamental components of any IT service. Accelerators for such building blocks as servers, client PCs, storage, data centers, network, support & labor, and software, provide the foundation for costing out any IT service.

Each accelerator starts with a list of potential cost drivers to provide users with the best practices for capturing true TCO. For example, the server accelerator recommended cost drivers include aspects such as OS and application software, hardware depreciation, facilities and hosting, and support/labor. Associated with these cost drivers, each accelerator is matched to the relevant cost or performance benchmark from broad industry data to enable simple comparison of your performance to the industry. For the server accelerator a few example benchmarks include cost/server/month and server/admin ratio.

For the server template a set of key metrics are also included such as server count, rack unit size, memory, CPU, vendor, and the template will automatically calculate relevant metrics such as cost/server once the relevant data or assumptions are captured in Apptio.

As the financial and operational data is populated within the server accelerator, a set of default reports are generated to visualize key cost and performance aspects of the server inventory. Reports include cost/server type, a comparison of physical vs virtual server statistics (count, cost, utilization), cost breakdowns by cost type, server count by location or data center, and CPU utilization by type or location.

Apptio's transparency accelerators capture a broad range of financial and operational management best practices that span the cost and performance of your IT environment and are linked to relevant high level and unit cost benchmarks from broadly representative industry data. Combined with the Apptio on-demand delivery model they ensure the fastest time to value, and highest level of cross-organizational consistency possible for your IT financial management needs.