4 Ways to Strengthen Your Business Amid Budget Cuts
With economic uncertainty, tightening budgets, and shifting priorities, business and technology leaders are being challenged to do more with less – without stifling innovation.
To keep up with these changes, get comprehensive visibility into your organization-wide tech spend to see what’s driving up costs and what’s bringing the most value. This will help you continuously make smart cost-cutting decisions and redirect technology spend to higher-value initiatives.
The 2022 Gartner Midyear Recession Survey results reveal that 78% of {CIO & IT leader respondents} are looking for ways to cut costs.*
Adapt Quickly
Here are four ways to adapt quickly during uncertain economic times and capitalize on opportunities with data-driven insights.
1. Scrutinize tech spend and investment commitments
Set reduction targets, ensure continuous alignment, and continually reforecast as conditions change.
Leverage technology financial management
Minimize or postpone addressable spend and investment commitments and shift resources to business-critical priorities.
Typical customer outcomes:
Reduction in planning effort and cycle time
Budget variance relative to actuals
Micron used Apptio to eliminate Excel inputs, improve productivity, and increase accountability with a single source of truth.
Costs freed up
Budget variance maintained with daily updates to quarterly budgets
2. Eliminate cloud waste
Address orphaned volumes, over-provisioned virtual machines and databases, and unused commitments.
Employ disciplined cloud financial management
Gartner estimates that “through 2023, in the absence of rightsizing discipline, over 30% of the growing expenditure on software and cloud services will be unused.” The scope for unnecessarily wasted spend is massive.
Identify opportunities to reduce cloud waste and ensure funds are available for critical tech investments.
Koch Business Solutions used Apptio to gain better visibility across their multi-cloud spend, improving cost efficiency by increasing their commitment coverage and rightsizing their provisioned resources.
in cost savings that can be reinvested in product innovation
3. Measure application and services TCO to drive full unit costing
By calculating total cost of ownership (TCO) and leveraging unit economics, you can shift from passive to active spend management, doubling down on applications that drive value while deprioritizing those that don’t.
Implement a purpose-built solution
Minimize or postpone addressable spend and investment commitments and shift resources to business-critical priorities.
Typical customer outcomes:
Reduction in App TCO
Decrease in multi-cloud costs
Accurate allocation of cloud spend
With Apptio, MassMutual was able to better understand and analyze their complete technology cost structure and accelerate planning cycles, providing the level of financial transparency and consumption-driven allocations that the business leaders needed.
in stranded and direct costs eliminated
time to value
4. Ruthlessly prioritize every budget, resource, and work priority
Understanding what’s being used, how much it costs, and its performance over time prevents the business from consuming tech like it’s a free, unlimited resource and helps to create a tech strategy designed to meet their business objectives.
Monitor consumption and usage by business unit
Organizations need a single-pane-of-glass solution that allows them to deliver a user-friendly bill with accurate tech costs and provide defensible allocations in order to set pricing strategies that influence behavior.
Typical Apptio customer outcomes:
Improvement in forecasting accuracy
Faster time to value
Make Smarter Decisions to Cut Costs — Not Business Value
Economic uncertainty is upon us, and tech leaders are under pressure to significantly reduce technology costs. But this doesn’t have to mean endless hours in complex spreadsheets or terminating key initiatives that deliver real business value.
Apptio solutions can help you review and update your budgets, identify waste for removal, and learn where investment adjustments can be made to maximize business value and opportunities for innovation from a reduced cost base.
*Gartner®, 2023 Planning Guide for IT Operations and Cloud Management, Oct 2022
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