Innovative Approaches to Drive Tech Spend Management with AI, Analytics, and Automation

The world is moving into a new era of “intelligent” applications—tools that incorporate AI, scale independently, and rely on cloud-native foundations. While these capabilities push businesses forward, they also create greater complexity within a company’s technology estate and exponentially increase the amount of data generated. As these factors multiply, traditional ways of working—like spreadsheets, manual analyses, and homegrown solutions—can’t keep pace. To address this challenge, companies need automated, intelligent approaches that can quickly digest and analyze data and respond to emerging issues—because digital challenges call for digital solutions. As pioneers and leaders in ITFM, FinOps, and SPM, Apptio’s solutions bring unique, domain-specific insights derived from our extensive experience working with over 1,800 clients over the past 17 years. Now, as part of the IBM family, Apptio’s solutions can leverage IBM Research Labs to accelerate the innovation we deliver to our clients.

Technology spend is one of the most difficult areas to manage and optimize, as it is directly impacted by the rate of innovation. There are constant changes within cloud cost structures, hybrid and multi-cloud setups, and increasingly decentralized technology consumption across organizations. Technology Business Management (TBM) is the connective tissue between the practice areas of IT Financial Management (ITFM), FinOps, and Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), giving leaders a way to maximize their investments across the entire technology estate. Maximizing investments does not just mean “saving on costs”; it means delivering the greatest value to your customers while minimizing necessary expenditures. Easier typed than done.

No matter where your TBM journey starts, Apptio solutions are designed for modern enterprises, driving better outcomes through best practices and making intelligent use of automation, advanced analytics, and AI. By merging financial and operational data to surface key insights, companies can increase agility, accelerate innovation, and turn their technology investments into a competitive advantage.

Automation: Accelerating processes and insights

Efficiency equals speed, and our TBM solutions automate those cumbersome, time-intensive, and error-prone processes inherent to analyzing technology spend. Homegrown applications and a litany of spreadsheets simply can’t keep up with the expansion of investments, data sources, and integrations contained within a modern enterprise’s technology estate. Moreover, through seamless integration with various enterprise systems of record, our TBM solutions help break down data silos while enabling tech leaders to find accurate, near real-time answers to their most important and urgent technology investment questions. Spend less time exporting data and aggregating spreadsheets and more time focused on the insights and actions that deliver business results.

With a suite of TBM solutions purpose-built for managing and optimizing tech spend and strategy, you’re able to take immediate advantage of advancements in ITFM, FinOps, and SPM best practices. Here are a few ways we’re making it easier and faster to get to the insights you need:

• Our IBM Apptio Essentials suite has made it easier than ever to get started with IT Financial Management. Completely reimagined for organizations trying to move beyond spreadsheets, our Essentials suite gets organizations up and running quickly with full visibility into IT costs and investments, streamlined planning, and simplified chargeback processes.
• Managing and optimizing costs is incredibly important, but getting ahead of costs can provide greater relief to straining budgets. IBM Cloudability’s new Governance feature enables FinOps teams to automatically get cost insights in front of engineers, helping to “shift left” and address waste and bad resource management earlier in the process—before they accumulate. Through integration of Cloudabiltiy data into developer tools such as Terraform and GitHub, developers can now take proactive action to contain costs and optimize infrastructure.
• Our newly enhanced Scenario Planning capability within our SPM solution, IBM Targetprocess, streamlines the annual planning process through intelligent automation. Create, compare, and optimize multiple planning scenarios without altering the underlying data—empowering you to choose the ideal path forward more quickly.

Intelligence: Leveraging domain-specific insights

Our deep expertise in ITFM, FinOps, and SPM enable us to go deeper than others. We leverage extensive R&D investments and a close connection to IBM Research to deliver enterprise-ready solutions to our clients. By integrating financial and operational data, we provide an accurate, defensible view of the total cost of ownership (TCO) and unit rates of technology investments. This allows organizations to gain relevant insights and make better data-driven decisions:

• Our knowledge of cloud service providers (CSPs) has enabled us to develop a Cloud Infrastructure Sustainability Reporting solution from the ground up that gives you much greater insight into the environmental impact of your cloud programs. Our proprietary calculations—developed in partnership with IBM Research—provide granular insights across multi-cloud environments for Estimated Carbon Emissions (MTCO2e) and Power Consumed (KwH).
• Since IBM Cloudability leverages the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS format for data, it’s able to ingest more than just cloud billing data. Enable advanced FinOps use cases with our Telemetry-based Unit Economics capability, capturing data such as database transactions and API calls as a way to track activity and allocate it to specific groups or users withing an organization. Furthermore, you can better measure the cost of AI by token mapping, gaining enhanced granularity into cost allocation while better understanding AI-related expenses.
• As a key member of IBM’s software family, Apptio always strives to provide greater detail into all aspects of technology spend. IBM’s acquisition of Kubecost has enabled greater container visibility, optimization, and governance, supporting customers that increasingly use Kubernetes to streamline application deployment and management, both on-premises and in the cloud.
• We’ve also used our deep understanding of infrastructure costs to develop Hybrid IT TCO and Mainframe TCO solutions so customers can better understand and manage the full cost of their infrastructure environments. This improved visibility enables customers to make data-driven decisions about cost control, optimization of workloads, and modernization strategies.

AI-insights: Solving digital problems with digital solutions

Organizations are increasingly investing in AI on two main fronts: AI-infused third-party applications and internal AI projects. Both aspects are driving up complexity, spending, and data proliferation. As AI becomes more embedded in business operations, managing these technologies becomes more challenging. Financial investments are rising, with resources allocated to acquiring technology, hiring skilled personnel, and ongoing upgrades. Additionally, AI systems demand large amounts of data, leading to increased data generation and collection, which companies must manage effectively to ensure quality and derive meaningful insights. Amid these developments, organizations face difficulties in tracking and maximizing the value of their AI initiatives, necessitating robust governance and continuous evaluation to ensure alignment with strategic goals and tangible business benefits.

We’ve reached a point where manual processes and legacy methods cannot keep up. That’s why we’ve committed to building the best AI-infused tools to help organizations manage their technology estate. Our solutions incorporate machine learning (ML) and generative AI to help you spend more time on items of strategic importance—and we’ve partnered with IBM Research, a longtime leader in AI, to ensure our offerings are on the cutting edge.

• To help ensure ITFM and FinOps practitioners are always up to date on best practices, we’ve developed an AI assistant for IBM Apptio and IBM Cloudability, now available for Beta testing. Trained on a wealth of domain expertise, our genAI-powered assistant provides expert guidance and “how-tos” on practice area questions and help documentation, providing accurate, 24/7 self-service support. Onboard employees quicker and get more out of our solutions with instant product support.
• Tracking the value of your AI initiatives is also imperative due to the technology’s resource-intensive nature. IBM Apptio AI Investment TCO is a purpose-built solution for tracking and optimizing AI investments (available end of May 2025), providing full transparency into ongoing AI costs, consumption, and value. Continuously monitor TCO and measure outcomes across AI use cases to drive smarter scaling decisions and maximize AI’s impact across your organization.

Innovation that Drives Optimal Tech Spend

In the era of intelligent applications, managing technology spend requires innovative solutions. Apptio’s TBM suite empowers organizations to optimize costs, enhance efficiency, and drive strategic decisions through automation, advanced analytics, and AI. Embrace the future of tech spend management with Apptio and turn your technology investments into a competitive advantage. Learn more about all our latest releases, updates, and improvements at our Innovation Hub.