Apptio Cloudability Welcomes a Fresh, Fully Integrated User Experience

Apptio is dedicated to helping our customers make trusted technology investment decisions that deliver business outcomes. Public cloud consumption is an increasingly crucial part of this equation, so we are excited to announce product enhancements that facilitate seamless access to cloud financial data via Cloudability and single-pane-of-glass visibility across cloud and non-cloud technology spend to better deliver critical, actionable insights to our users.

Cloud spend – A unique IT Financial Management concern

While cloud costs represent just one category of expenditure amongst technology investments, they do present some unique management challenges. Often metered by the second, monthly cloud bills regularly reach hundreds of millions of rows, making this is a true big data concern.

With this in mind, Apptio acquired Cloudability in May 2019. Using this leading multi-cloud financial management solution, Apptio customers can establish cloud cost accountability across their organization, optimize their public cloud footprint, and improve the economics of running cloud.

Recently, we’ve been focused on surfacing relevant Cloudability insights to all business stakeholders to better support a holistic understanding of cloud costs within the context of the entire IT spend.

The art of finding things quickly

We started by looking at how to provide a seamless user experience between Apptio products and ensuring that users can access financial information in a consistent manner. With this in mind, Cloudability is now accessed via our primary domain at app.apptio.com/cloudability (or app-eu.apptio.com/cloudability, app-au.apptio.com/cloudability depending on your region), conforming to our standard URL pattern and providing predictability for users.

We know how important product documentation is to our customers, whether it be for guiding administration tasks or adopting features, and so we’ve also consolidated how this information is accessed. This content is now available within the Apptio Help Center, with a handy side-nav and search making it easy to locate Cloudability and other Apptio documents.

Last October we rolled out Apex, Apptio’s new user experience and design system, across a number of products, including IT Planning and Self-Service Reporting. Customers are already enjoying the modern and clean interface it brings and the common navigation elements.

While Cloudability already incorporated many of these visual aspects, today Apex has been fully rolled out across the platform. The most impactful addition is the availability of the App Launcher in the top left corner, making it frictionless to navigate between Cloudability and other Apptio products as you complete your daily tasks. A slightly re-organized top-menu helps users quickly find what they need regardless of their location.

Visualize all IT costs, including cloud

Another major milestone last year was when we rolled out a new capability called Self Service Reporting (SSR), enabling users to create rich and personalized visualizations spanning Cost Transparency, IT Planning, Cloudability SaaS, and Planability Agile data sources.

Apptio customers can now also include Cloudability’s enriched cost and usage data covering the three major cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP) within SSR. This makes it straightforward for all stakeholders to analyse public cloud costs alongside on-premises, SaaS and other technology costs for a total cost of ownership (TCO) rollup.

For those already familiar with Cloudability, it’s worth noting that SSR reports share many characteristics with Cloudability dashboards. Users will undoubtedly appreciate a number of additional capabilities within SSR, including being able to invite colleagues to a report subscription and set rolling date boundaries with day offsets. Of course, navigating to SSR from Cloudability is now seamless via the Apex App Launcher.

New and exciting shared capabilities

One final note regarding Apex – an exciting benefit of Cloudability being backed by Apex is the opportunity to leverage shared components. The first of these, Apptio Comments, has been made available within the Cloudability rightsizing tool.

Users can leave comments against individual recommendations helping engineers and delivery teams collaborate on rightsizing actions. Stay tuned as more shared Apex capabilities are launched in the months ahead.

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