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“We need to be efficient in our spend from a unit cost perspective, at the same time delivering world-class performance for our customers. And our solutions help us do just that.”
Apptio’s Product and Engineering (P&E) group uses IBM Cloudability to drive massive gains in cloud efficiency and financial operations.
For nearly two decades, Apptio, an IBM company, has been helping organizations in every industry deliver more value from technology spending through a unique combination of software solutions, governance, and accountability. These same guiding principles shape how Apptio manages its own operations, helping the company tackle some of the same challenges that every organization faces when operating in the cloud.
As a global SaaS leader, Apptio has a long history of using its own solutions to manage and optimize cloud spend. With annual double-digit business growth, this discipline is key to the company’s business operations and its strategic investments.
Apptio supports some of the largest public cloud consumers in the world. Starting in late 2023 through 2024, the company experienced explosive growth in its customer base, far exceeding previous annual totals, requiring its solutions to scale to unprecedented levels. To address this growth, Apptio revolutionized our data ingestion pipelines to process and enrich trillions of rows of records in mere minutes, supporting hundreds of thousands of active users across its portfolio.
Apptio’s leaders in the Product and Engineering (P&E) group—the team responsible for designing, developing, and supporting Apptio’s solutions—continuously plan for resource capacity. As a result of rapid growth, the P&E team expected a large increase in cloud costs. With 2024 coming to an end, however, they realized growth-related costs were exceeding their predictions, so they sharpened their focus on cost management while improving performance to meet the needs of customers.
With a mature FinOps program built on Apptio solutions, Apptio’s P&E leaders concentrated their efforts on data analysis, targeted and automated optimization, governance, and awareness.
Across the company’s solution portfolio, IBM Cloudability is used as the single source of truth for cloud costs. Cost allocation and tagging is automated, with near real-time cost monitoring and reporting. This gives every team the ability to see their costs and track spend against budget, enabling them to make informed decisions to optimize resources. P&E’s leaders used this visibility to isolate key unit cost drivers behind the rapid growth and formed action plans to optimize resource usage. Weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly review sessions (led by the FinOps leader) enabled the team to review findings, refine action plans, and track progress.
The team also capitalized on automation. Using Apptio, over 1,400 actions are taken per month with no human touch, ranging from convertible RI conversions to dynamic parking of resources and optimization of distributed compute.
From a reporting standpoint, the P&E group uses the advanced dashboard features in Apptio to report status and progress to executives and to keep all stakeholders aware and informed. Dashboards highlighting per-customer spend, data reprocessing costs, and other key metrics help track unit economics and simplify decision-making. This helped the company optimize unit costs by 30%, gaining cost efficiencies that were reinvested into innovation.
Once the P&E team focused in and took action, results came quickly. To reduce the impact of growth-related costs, more than 77 savings initiatives were launched—from cutting unnecessary data reprocessing to identifying AWS Config and KMS services that were quietly consuming hundreds of dollars a day. Within a month, cloud costs were brought back to budget baseline with no degradation in performance. Between January and February 2025 alone, the P&E group saved millions, largely through reservations, rightsizing, decommissioning unused resources, and tightening governance around spend.
This experience serves as a classic example of Apptio’s commitment to service excellence and FinOps discipline. Weekly operations reviews include FinOps dashboards as a standard practice. Engineers are aware of the costs of their decisions, whether spinning up a new service or reprocessing data. Strategic decisions are made to optimize unit costs, so the company can scale to support customer needs while removing waste and optimizing spend at the same time.
Though Apptio’s products were already the most scalable solutions in their respective markets, explosive growth demanded intense focus. A mature FinOps program built on Apptio solutions gave the P&E group the capability it needed to adapt quickly and strategically while maintaining excellent service performance for its customers.
Casey Doran, Vice President of Product for Cloudability & FinOps at Apptio, says this is just one example of how Apptio uses its own solutions to deliver superior service and business outcomes. “We are continuously growing, bringing on new customers, investing in new innovations, features, and functionality, and managing more and more data through our solutions,” he said. “We need to be efficient in our spend from a unit cost perspective, at the same time delivering world-class performance for our customers. And our solutions help us do just that.”
To explore how IBM Cloudability solutions can support your FinOps journey, contact us or request a free trial.
