Data Driven Expansion of Virtualization

Server, storage, and desktop hardware are huge drivers of the fixed costs of most IT organizations. It is no wonder that organizations are turning to virtualization of all of these assets to drive up utilization, drive down unit costs and get a greater return on assets. Complete and ongoing cost visibility is vital for virtualization and consolidation strategies designed to save money while aligning with business goals.

By leveraging Apptio's Technology Business Management (TBM) solution, IT organizations can decide which servers and storage devices are the best candidates for virtualization, calculate and track the ROI over time and maintain accurate Service costing in a virtualized world.

"Establishing Cost Transparency into our data center operations was a critical first step towards helping us improve the ROI of our IT infrastructure. Apptio's activity based costing, IT best practices, and rich reporting enabled us to understand IT costs, improve utilization, and identify cost savings within six months that will justify our investment in the solution." Jeff Shipley, Director IT Infrastructure and Operations, Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas City

Identifying Targets for Virtualization

Server virtualization and "private cloud" projects are great ways to reduce cost, free up data center space and reduce overall power consumption. Recent server virtualization projects have proven 6x to 12x reduction in physical servers and their associated costs (data center real estate, power, cooling and networking). That's a potential 90% cost savings in infrastructure.

However, once a virtualization project has been identified, the problem becomes "How do I analyze the potential cost savings, the ROI and how do I sell that to management?" And after the project is completed, "How do I allocate the cost of the physical servers, the virtualization software and associated facilities to the virtual machines, services and/or desktops?"

Apptio helps customers answer the questions of where to apply virtualization technology for the highest ROI and how much to expect in savings. By tracking server utilization rates along with application usage characteristics, IT managers can plan how to expand virtualization optimizing consolidation ratios and virtual machine (VM) configurations.

Maintaining IT Cost Transparency in a Virtualized World

Once virtualization is deployed more widely, Apptio TBM tracks the cost of the underlying physical infrastructure along with VM costs for a total cost of an IT Service. In this way, shared service providers can implement a chargeback (cost recovery) process while accurately tracking the true cost of IT Services even within a virtualized environment.

A Complete Suite for Managing the Business of IT

Apptio's TBM solution provides the robust enterprise platform to track the cost of IT at a very granular level, provide the analysis and What If tools to find and justify cost reduction projects and the reporting capabilities to track long-term project success. Apptio provides five TBM applications designed to help Manage the Business of IT: IT Service Costing, Bill of IT, IT Benchmarking, IT Planning and IT Service Performance. These applications help IT and IT Finance managers systematically reduce cost, track the fully loaded cost and quality of IT Services, improve budgeting and planning processes and better communicate the value of IT to all key business stakeholders.