Reduce Cost and Improve Transparency

Coming off of 2009's massive cost reduction efforts, Wall Street firms and financial services organizations worldwide are looking for better cost management, transparency, and cost reduction methodologies. Likewise, as the Financial Services tends to lead other industries in practical IT initiatives, many organizations are advanced in their thinking about being an IT Services Provider, and needing robust systems to track and allocate IT cost of IT Services to the business units. For these reasons, Financial Services companies are often on the forefront of Technology Business Management best practices.

"Apptio enabled us to move from cost allocation to cost transparency and understand the true unit cost drivers for our global data center infrastructure. Their activity based costing and analytics helped us prioritize our service standardization efforts, dramatically reduce operational costs and provided a payback on our initial investment within six months." Keith Goldstein, COO, Office of the Chief Technology Architect, Merrill Lynch

Managing the Cost of IT Services

Financial Services firms are leading other industries in transforming IT into Service Provider organizations, understanding the total cost to deliver and maintain an IT Service and understanding the value that service provides, in terms the business can understand (cost per head, cost per transaction, cost per loan processed, etc.) Apptio's Technology Business Management solution provides the robust enterprise platform to automate the cost allocation process specific to IT. Apptio provides five TBM applications designed to streamline specific IT Financial processes: IT Service Costing, Bill of IT, IT Benchmarking, IT Planning and IT Service Performance. These applications help IT and IT Finance managers manage the cost of IT, systematically reduce cost, streamline budgeting, forecasting and planning processes and better communicate the value of IT to all key business stakeholders.

A Better way for Cost Reduction

Financial Services companies understand better than most that when it comes to finances, you can't manage what you can't see... or can't track. Many IT organizations don't have the tools in place to track costs down to the unit level, and how those costs relate to an IT Service or business unit. With Apptio's TBM solution, IT managers can use data analytics to deeply understand key cost drivers and find opportunities for easy cost reduction. Domain managers (servers, data center facilities, storage, support) can better manage their costs at a grass roots level. And sophisticated What If analysis enables ROI-based project analysis and a pre-active approach to "cost savings project portfolio analysis." This leads to a culture of Continual Cost Optimization where IT managers across the board are challenged to take cost out of their departments each year and shift more of the IT budget to Change the Business initiatives.