Unlock the Full Potential of Your Tech Investments
Innovations from Apptio, an IBM Company
We are in the midst of meteoric growth of enterprise data. Digital problems – the rapid adoption of AI, complex multi-cloud programs, and sustainability regulations – require digital solutions.
Technology spend has become increasingly difficult to manage, let alone optimize. Organizations need a way to intelligently process this spend data at scale. That requires bringing financial and operational data together, transforming it into insights, and then actioning on that data to improve efficiency, reduce waste, plan more accurately, and drive more business value from every technology investment dollar spent.
Featured Innovation:
AI AssistantBeta
The AI Assistant delivers 24/7 support for IBM Apptio and IBM Cloudability, offering instant guidance on TBM topics, including ITFM and FinOps, and product documentation to streamline user experience and accelerate issue resolution. Powered by IBM Watson, the AI Assistant enhances support with a generative AI chatbot that provides instant responses to “how-to” questions, quickly delivers relevant information, and helps users stay productive while driving better outcomes for their organizations.
News: Kubecost Acquisition
"With this acquisition, IBM is showcasing its commitment to the growth of FinOps, both by setting the pace for innovation, as well as strategically bringing leading technologies together."
Ajay Patel GM, Apptio and IT Automation
Bring data together
Apptio’s portfolio seamlessly integrates diverse data, providing a unified view of your organization’s technology spend, performance, and resource allocation. You get a holistic view of your tech landscape, streamlined collaboration across teams, and improved data accuracy and consistency.
- Sustainability
- FOCUS
- Turbonomic
- Planning Analytics
- Azure
- Commercial Billing
Cloud infrastructure carbon emissions reporting
Two new carbon emissions metrics added to Cloudability’s reporting enable customers to better measure the carbon emissions impact of their cloud consumption and track trends over time.
These metrics, Estimated Carbon Emissions (MTCO2e) and Power Consumed (KwH), can be used throughout Cloudability’s analytics, alongside all other cost and usage metrics, to measure the sustainability impact of cloud consumption. Calculations factor in the region, utilization of resources (key information), and CPU architecture and have been approved by IBM research labs. These metrics are available for popular services across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.
Native cost management support for FOCUS-compliant spend
IBM Cloudability now has native cost management support for popular non-CSP cloud vendors and FOCUS-compliant spend. We’ve simplified data ingestion and made this information available throughout the Cloudability platform. Users can now integrate Datadog, Databricks, Snowflake and FOCUS-compliant sources via Cloudability’s user-friendly credentialling interface and manage these costs via a single-pane-of-glass alongside all other cloud spend. This cost data is now available in dashboards, can be fully allocated through Business Mapping, and can be personalized with filtered views. It can also be included in budgets and forecasts. With this new capability, customers can increase financial accountability across their cloud footprint.
Leverage the power of IBM Apptio and IBM Turbonomic
IBM Apptio’s trusted costing framework combined with IBM Turbonomic’s world-class optimization recommendations deliver an enriched view of your hybrid IT. With seamless integration, get end-to-end visibility into your on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments, including both financial and operational data, to make fully informed decisions and maximize the value of your organization’s IT investments.
While IBM Apptio provides end-to-end financial visibility into your IT, performance-related metrics, such as application performance, efficiency, and compliance, must be considered, too. Having the data is not enough. Identifying actionable insights and cost-saving opportunities – and quantifying their impact – is necessary to improve results. Turbonomic identifies continuous infrastructure optimizations across on-premises and cloud environments. The integration automatically sends this data into Apptio, where it can be quantified and tracked to the Apptio TBM Unified Model, enabling users to easily view summarized recommendations.
Bridge technology, finance, and business with IBM Apptio and IBM Planning Analytics
Introducing the new integration between IBM Apptio and IBM Planning Analytics, designed to seamlessly connect financial planning and IT cost management. With this integration, IBM Apptio serves as the sub-ledger for IBM Planning Analytics, enabling you to effortlessly share budgets, forecasts, and IT financial insights across platforms.
Easily import reference data and baseline plans from IBM Planning Analytics into IBM Apptio, streamlining data consistency and empowering accurate financial and IT planning. This integration enhances visibility, optimizes planning cycles, and helps organizations make informed decisions by aligning IT investments with overall business strategy.
Targetprocess now available on Azure Marketplace
IBM Targetprocess, an Enterprise Agile Planning platform, aligns work, resources, and portfolios with business strategy in a unified cloud environment. It seamlessly integrates with Azure DevOps (ADO), enhancing ADO’s capabilities.
Now available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, business and technology planners at all levels are empowered to manage work, resources, investments, programs, and portfolios while ensuring continuous alignment to enterprise strategy in a unified Azure cloud environment. The seamless integration with Azure DevOps provides simplified management, potential cost savings through Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), and improved connectivity for organizations leveraging Azure infrastructure. The solution supports customers adopting SAFe and other scaled Agile frameworks, as well as hybrid program management, offering flexibility that aligns with each organization’s practices. As our first offering on Azure, it marks the beginning of a strategic partnership, extending choice to customers and leveraging their current cloud investment.
Federated cloud costs for enterprise
Commercial Billing is a new Cloudability package that brings MSP-level federation and chargeback to large enterprises. It addresses the challenge of managing cloud costs for large organizations that want to centrally procure and manage cloud spend while allowing business units or internal teams access to Cloudability to gain insight and manage cloud costs.
Cloudability Commercial Billing helps large organizations manage cloud costs centrally by re-rating for chargeback, optimizing costs, and distributing FinOps Capabilities across regions or business units to maximize business outcomes.
Interpret data
The Apptio portfolio enables organizations to turn financial, cloud, and Agile data into meaningful insights, providing a clear understanding of performance, cost drivers, and investment outcomes. After bringing data together, Apptio helps you analyze and make sense of it, providing increased visibility and optimization opportunities, as well as improved risk management.
- Cost Sharing
- Kubecost
- Apptio Essentials
- Hybrid Planning 2.0
Allocate “the last mile” of cloud spend
By adding flexible allocation rules and detailed reporting to Cloudability’s Cost Sharing feature, users can now allocate “the last mile” of cloud spend, enabling them to tie less-granular third-party spend to particular workloads as a shared percentage of the total, and hold teams financially accountable. This makes it easier to automate the entire chargeback, covering both direct mapping and cost sharing.
Typically, certain costs can’t be directly assigned to teams due to shared infrastructure, untagged resources, or lack of attributes in the billing data. Customers often manually share these costs out, which is time-consuming and prone to error. Cost Sharing can now be leveraged across multiple business dimensions like team, department, or business unit, instead of just one.
Other enhancements include the ability to apply multiple separate cost sharing rules and more options for each rule. Cost Sharing comes with an intuitive new UI for administration and an exploration tool to help users visualize how the rules are getting applied. Importantly, the post-allocated values are available within cost analytics for all users.
Kubernetes cost visibility and insights
Kubernetes use is growing, with over 84% of organizations actively using or evaluating the technology today. IBM’s acquisition of Kubecost, a leading Kubernetes cost management and optimization tool, strengthens our FinOps suite and reinforces our commitment to the growth of FinOps, as well as the OpenSource and developer community.
Kubecost provides real-time cost visibility and insights needed to not only understand infrastructure spend but also intelligently reduce spend and avoid over-provisioning within Kubernetes environments.
Streamlined tools for effective IT Financial Management
IBM Apptio Essentials Suite offers foundational, streamlined tools for Costing, Planning, Billing, and Benchmarking, providing a solid foundation for IT financial management.
It bridges the gap between IT and Finance, delivering a clear and actionable view of IT spending and offers granular insights into costs by service, department, project, and more. This visibility enables leaders and business units to understand where every dollar is going. The suite delivers clear financial insights and control, which is ideal for organizations looking to start or simplify their IT financial operations. Easily manage costs, improve financial planning, ensure accurate billing, and leverage industry benchmarks to make informed decisions and optimize IT investments — all while staying aligned with your business goals.
Balance Agile and waterfall support
Many organizations now must manage both Agile and waterfall approaches to meet evolving business needs. Traditional planning cycles often fall short, creating demand for hybrid solutions that offer visibility across different methodologies.
Hybrid Planning 2.0 enhancements allow organizations to better manage both waterfall and Agile methodologies in a unified platform. With enhanced waterfall entities, advanced reporting features, and new hybrid dashboards, teams can now visualize work more effectively and align with both short-term and long-term goals. The expanded flexibility in work and plan structures ensures that project managers can dynamically allocate resources, track progress, and make real-time adjustments. The hybrid capability caters to complex enterprise environments by enabling better control of dependencies, milestone tracking, and financial planning, ensuring that all projects align with overarching business strategies. It provides a unified framework for improving team collaboration, agility, and efficiency in mixed-methodology environments.
Use your data for action
Apptio not only allows you to bring data together and gain insights, but also enables you to take meaningful actions based on that data. Whether it’s optimizing cloud costs, adjusting project timelines, or replanning budgets, the Apptio portfolio enables organizations to make informed decisions and react quickly to changes and opportunities.
- CostGuard
- Containers
- Commitments 2.0
- Apptio Planning
Get your FinOps practice to shift left
Cost management and optimization have always been reactive processes, allowing waste and bad patterns to spread, accumulate, and then force teams into optimization fire drills.
With the new CostGuard GitHub app for Cloudability, engineers can better understand cost implications prior to deploying infrastructure. This proactive capability can prevent cost inefficiencies before they happen, enabling the FinOps practice to “shift left.”
CostGuard integrates seamlessly into GitOps pipelines, alerting engineers to the expected cost impact of new and changing cloud workloads. It also helps them comply with internal policies around tagging, infrastructure choices, and budgets.
Take Kubernetes cost management to the next level
Cloudability’s Container Insights 2.0 offers a new and enriched user experience that takes Kubernetes cost management to the next level. Highlights include customizable dashboards for tracking the most important KPIs and trends, treemap exploration, and new allocation constructs and efficiency metrics to improve cost visibility.
As part of our popular, class-leading Container Cost Allocation feature, users can create their own dashboards and explore container costs with intuitive treemap functionality. This launch makes container cost and usage data available for important additional constructs: workloads, containers, and nodes, and it offers two new efficiency metrics, helping customers identify and address waste.
End-to-end commitment and recommendation management
Commitment management has become more complex and cloud footprints have become more varied with the increasing options provided by CSPs. This makes it more challenging to expand coverage and savings while avoiding wasted commitment hours.
Our new capabilities set the bar for FinOps tools when it comes to end-to-end commitment management. For the commitment portfolio, this includes a standard approach for expiration alerts (with the addition of utilization alerts), detailed savings and utilization insights, and KPIs for measuring health. For recommendations, new flexible adjustment controls match your organization’s commitment goals and a comparison wizard allows you to quickly compare the financial impact of commitment options across all coverable spend.
Labor and contract planning
New enhancements to IBM Apptio Planning elevate labor planning and analysis capabilities, driving more informed and strategic decisions. These enhancements are designed to provide greater precision, flexibility, and control, ensuring your planning processes are more efficient and effective.
The Variable Labor Compensation Adjustments feature enables teams to model multi-year compensation changes by applying variable adjustment rates based on factors like employee type, role, or location. This flexibility supports proactive compensation planning, helping you address inflation, merit increases, and unexpected changes in labor needs.
The Variable Contract Extensions feature offers enhanced control over contract forecasting by allowing you to model compounding contract extensions with variable percent uplifts. This feature helps organizations plan for future expenses by accurately reflecting year-over-year cost increases and supporting adjustments for changing market conditions, inflation, or renegotiated terms.
Manage enterprise data across the TBM portfolio
The meteoric growth of enterprise data – dynamic cloud spend, container deployment, carbon emissions tracking, AI – touches all aspects of your tech spend. Make sure you are optimizing the business value of your technology across FinOps, ITFM, and EAP portfolios.
Take ITFM to the next level
From here to Agility
Transform tech spend to business value
Managing the complex landscape of technology investments isn’t easy. Expert insights can help you navigate the challenges.