Commitment to Innovation

Innovation is at the core of who we are at Apptio. When we innovate, it enables our customers to meet their evolving technology investment challenges.

In-person events are back, and I was happy to see so many of you at Apptio’s EMEA User Conference, Americas User Conference, and TBM Council Board of Directors Invitational this summer. Being together was a great reminder of the power of connection and of how we all have similar challenges we are tackling as the economy deals with inflation, the war in Ukraine continues, and supply chain issues cause broader economic headwinds.

When Apptio was founded during the Great Recession 15 years ago, our customers sought to optimize data center spending and reduce application and service costs. But technology organizations have changed significantly over the last decade with rapid adoption of public cloud and SaaS and a shift to product-driven vs. project-driven development. Our Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions have evolved to meet these needs as decision-makers need more granular and rapid visibility and insights into their technology spending and the ability to rapidly prioritize and adjust investments to deliver the most value (I shared more about this in my presentation at the Americas User Conference).

A common theme that all of you emphasized was how this is a critical time for your businesses to ensure they are getting value out of every dollar spent on technology investments as you continue to become more efficient, become more digital-first, and embrace the public cloud. At Apptio, we have been focusing on our commitment to customer-driven innovation to ensure you get more value from our products.

Here are some key areas we are focused on:

Cloud growth and scale

Many of you know that we have been going through our own journey of cloud migration out of five data centers globally, which we started over 2.5 years ago and completed in June 2022. This migration echoed the needs that many of you have talked to me about: the ability to effectively communicate the progress of cloud growth initiatives to your board and C-suite counterparts and to be able to quantify progress financially and operationally.

Being able to transition from on-prem to cloud smoothly and without overspending is critical. As on-prem CapEx-driven spending shifts to a variable OpEx-driven cloud spending model, you need to stay on top of cloud growth costs and minimize duplicative infrastructure spending. ApptioOne and Apptio Cloudability help baseline and track your spend, define your growth plans, set your budgets, and optimize workloads both on-premises and in the cloud. This ensures you have an up-to-date view into OpEx and CapEx spending and effectively manage your cloud transformation.

Migrating and growing in the cloud and becoming a cloud-first organization has helped us scale our infrastructure to handle more data, representing billions of dollars of customer spend across hundreds of disparate systems, including general ledger, cloud billing data, service management, vendor data, and utilization data in our solutions. We have also been able to drastically improve performance, reducing the time for calculations so our customers can make real-time decisions around their technology investments.

FinOps

Visibility, optimization, and driving accountability are key FinOps principles. In order to do this while keeping up with the ever-growing services from cloud providers, we are innovating in Apptio Cloudability with over 100 features delivered last year to optimize containers and multi-cloud spend across GCP, Azure, and AWS.

With cloud bills containing millions of rows of data, optimization opportunities to rightsize cloud resources and identify orphaned cloud resources are hidden in inscrutable bills. Cloudability helps our customers identify rightsizing opportunities across their multi-cloud environment, including new capabilities to optimize EC2 usage with rightsizing recommendations for Auto Scaling groups (ASG) and GPU-backed accelerated computing instances. We have also invested in providing a complete unit-economics view that includes labor and third-party software spend, allowing you to get a complete picture of product profitability for your products and services powered by cloud services.

Integrated data and analytics

Exploring data, creating custom analytics and dashboards to show the cost of services or actuals versus a plan, and combining consumption with costs can be a time-consuming process that holds up action on improving technology investments. To address this challenge, we’ve invested in providing an integrated data experience across all our products. First, with the release of our Automated Data Management service, which makes data from all Apptio products automatically available for the creation of plans across the product portfolio without the need for manual data transfer. This means that updating actuals in one product is instantly reflected in plans in another.

Second, we’ve released Apptio BI Out-of-the-Box Reports, which provide a platform for publishing Apptio-authored reports and insights directly in Apptio BI. These reports can be used as is or as a starting point to customize and build your own reports tailored to the needs of your business. They span the entire Apptio portfolio, and with real-time connection to Apptio data sources and system-generated alerting, it reduces the time spent creating and analyzing reports and allows teams to focus on uncovering and actioning cost-saving opportunities.

Value stream, resource, and capacity management

Large organizations struggle to coordinate autonomous teams as they expand Agile adoption. What’s more, they question if they are resourcing their highest priorities. As the number of Agile teams grow, they need a solution that coordinates efforts, efficiently maps resources, and ensures alignment to the overall business objectives, whether using SAFe, LeSS, or other custom enterprise Agile frameworks.

By connecting strategy to execution and being the only solution that integrates directly with ApptioOne, the industry-leading financial management platform Apptio Targetprocess helps to optimize your processes by measuring performance and waste, enables an uninterrupted and highly visible flow of value across the whole organization, and allows you to measure and optimize delivered value.

Apptio, TBM, and innovation

Technology Business Management (TBM) is the key discipline to help you manage and govern your technology investments to further innovation. In challenging times, this means reducing financial risk while investing in technology solutions that allow you to continue to grow your business in a systematic and data-driven manner. Apptio’s first customers used our products to do this during the Great Recession and after 15 years and many iterations of this operating model, they are still relying on our products to do the same.

Solving today’s challenges will take a combination of people, processes, and technology. This triad, while not new, can be successfully applied to the ongoing journey of digital transformation. Innovation is at the core of who we are because it enables our customers to meet their evolving technology investment challenges.

I invite you to attend our next big event in partnership with the TBM Council, the 10th annual TBM Conference, in Austin, TX, November 7-10. It’s a great opportunity to connect, share TBM successes, and hear what’s next on our customer-driven roadmap. Register today.

Additional Resources