Technology Business Management Pioneer Completes the Supply and Demand Value Chain With Release of its Demand & Resource Planning and Vendor Management Modules
Las Vegas, Nevada. – May 25, 2011 – Apptio, the leading provider of on-demand Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions, today announced the launch of its Spring Release 2011, which includes several major new capabilities designed to help CIOs and IT leaders transform their IT organization and effectively manage both the supply and demand of IT services. Apptio’s Spring Release 2011 represents more than six months of intensive development efforts in close collaboration with several customers who were instrumental in helping Apptio bring these key innovations to market. With two entirely new modules and several important platform enhancements, Apptio has delivered the industry’s most comprehensive Technology Business Management solution, enabling CIOs to transform their organization from a cost center to become a strategic enabler of the business. Apptio will be providing demonstrations of its Spring 2011 Release at the Forrester IT Forum in Las Vegas (Booth #203).
“The Spring 2011 Edition release represents an important evolution of the Apptio platform from a cost transparency solution to a full-scale holistic supply and demand oriented model of IT services,” said Sunny Gupta, co-founder, president and CEO of Apptio. “As mature IT organizations transform themselves into a services delivery framework, it will become essential that they incorporate a supply chain methodology that not only allows them to understand their cost of goods sold but also accurately manage and forecast demand for IT services. Our latest release is pushing the envelope with this vision, empowering CIOs to deliver on the vision of ‘Just In Time’ IT planning to their business units.”
The Spring 2011 Release of Apptio includes several major new capabilities and dozens of enhancements designed to help IT leaders get started faster using the Apptio platform to make smarter, fact-based decisions about their IT spend. Some of these new features include:
- Demand & Resource Planning: Demand & Resource Planning application facilitates both the business user demand and supply side of the IT service equation. Business users can select from a catalog of IT services and enter their projected demand over a specified period of time. Once demand has been entered (e.g., anticipated headcount, expected web traffic, etc.), the user can then immediately view their planned bill for those services so that they can make informed decisions about how to adjust their planned usage to reduce costs. This enables IT decision makers to dramatically reduce their budgeting and forecasting cycle times, align future IT spend to IT services and priorities, and provide deeper insight into the expected IT services demand volumes so services can by provisioned according to real-time business requirements.
- Vendor Management: Purpose-built for IT, the Apptio Vendor Management module leverages source IT operational data to track SLAs, measure performance and assess satisfaction with vendors and the services they provide. Users can see all of their IT vendors in a unified view, including vendor, contract and detailed usage data. This integrated intelligence enables service managers to more effectively analyze vendor contracts to ensure compliance, determine adherence to SLAs, and improve ongoing contract negotiations.
- Data Confidence Index: One of the primary obstacles hindering many TBM initiatives is a lack of confidence in the source data. In fact, every enterprise suffers from data quality issues to some degree. However, Apptio is mitigating many of these concerns with the roll-out of its Data Confidence Index which automatically highlights gaps in customer data across multiple vectors of data quality, including inference matching, data freshness, “breakage” (i.e., costs that are not assigned to a product or service) and other key data indicator trends. The Apptio platform then assigns the Data Confidence Index as an aggregate number to provide users with a baseline understanding of how reliable their data really is, allowing them to pinpoint areas for improving the quality of their data sources and support their recommendations with a greater degree of confidence.
- Transparency Accelerators: Getting started with Apptio is now faster and easier with the introduction of Apptio Transparency Accelerators. These accelerators provide prescriptive guidance based on proven methodologies and customer best practices, enabling customers to realize value from day one. For example, the Server Costing Transparency Accelerator includes best practices on which cost elements to include in the model, recommended allocation methods, “what-if” scenarios on server virtualization, and suggested reports and analytical views.
- Powerful User Interface Enhancements: To ensure that TBM can be made pervasive across the enterprise, Apptio has streamlined its platform user interface so that even novice users can derive value and drive more powerful insights from all five Apptio applications. With these improvements, users of the Apptio system will spend significantly less time making their reports “pixel perfect” and more of their valuable time analyzing the data.
About Apptio
Apptio is the leading independent provider of on-demand Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions for managing the business of IT. Apptio enables IT leaders to manage the cost, quality and value of IT Services by providing deep visibility into the total cost of IT services, communicating the value of IT to the business through an interactive Bill of IT™, and strategically aligning the planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. Apptio’s TBM solutions play a critical role in helping companies understand and drive chargeback, virtualization, cloud and other key technology initiatives. Global enterprise customers such as Bank of America, Boeing, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, St. Luke’s Health System, and Swiss Re rely on Apptio® products and services to reduce costs and align IT with business priorities. For more information, visit the Apptio website or the Apptio blog.
Contact:
Karli Overmier
Barokas PR for Apptio
apptio@barokas.com
206-264-8220