Apptio Introduces New Products to Elevate Technology Value

New capabilities enable technology leaders to unlock increased business value while maximizing return on investment

More data, more intelligence, more insights! Apptio, an IBM Company, is excited to announce new products at IBM Think 2024. We are highlighting several important new features and cloud services across our portfolio that were made available in the first half of 2024.  These capabilities help Technology Business Management (TBM), FinOps, and Enterprise Agile practitioners gain more insight to make better operational, technical, and financial decisions.

Focus areas for this announcement included a new integrated IBM FinOps offering, increased FinOps insights with robust integrations of specialty cloud data, a new FinOps solution for MSPs, native integration between Apptio TBM products and IBM Turbonomic, new built-in support for Apptio TBM products within ServiceNow Application Performance Management (APM), and enterprise scalability enhancements for our Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) solution.

These announcements are important for those organizations maturing their TBM and FinOps practices to help create and streamline more robust financial and operational processes throughout their organizations and further drive meaningful business outcomes with concise, data-driven decisions. And with the migration to hybrid and multi-cloud well underway for a vast majority of organizations, the discipline to tightly manage the financial and budget processes critical to running the business has never been more important. The need for more sophisticated tools with greater granularity and flexibility to help with this journey is critical to making smarter business decisions.

IBM Cloudability

Cloudability – now called IBM Cloudability – is at the forefront of delivering leading-edge FinOps solutions to the marketplace. It consistently exceeds market expectations for increasing capabilities to delight cloud practitioners and help them with increased insights to return more business value to their organizations. In the first half of 2024, we introduced a number of new, exciting capabilities.

IBM FinOps

The IBM FinOps suite brings IBM Cloudability and IBM Turbonomic together in a common UX. It offers a complete FinOps solution for all practitioners at all maturity levels and is unified into one cohesive experience within the market-leading IBM Cloudability product.

Whether you are focused on the Inform, Optimize, or Operate phase of your FinOps journey, IBM FinOps is designed to advance your practice with leading-edge capabilities that help make cloud a competitive advantage for your business. We provide the ability to maximize the value for every dollar spent while ensuring that applications get the resources they need to operate at peak performance in any cloud environment — private, public, and containers. As your FinOps practice matures and you adopt more cloud-native applications, our solutions are designed to grow with you by offering advanced insights, planning, and automation.

Cloudability MSP

Managed Service Providers (MSP) are an important technology partner for many organizations, helping them as they move along their cloud journey. Cloudability MSP is a new offering specifically designed for MSPs to help scale their business and better support their customers while streamlining internal operations to drive profitable growth. With the right tools, it’s possible to drive FinOps adoption across an MSP’s customer base while harnessing the power of their cloud vendor partnerships to benefit customers and increase their margins. Unique challenges for MSPs include managing consolidated billing data, incorporating agreed markups for customers, and negotiating pricing and planning commitments across cloud service partners (CSPs).

Cloudability MSP has been built to solve these specific challenges, with a comprehensive set of capabilities designed to give MSPs a competitive edge. It starts with billing and administration tools that streamline customer invoicing processes, saving innumerable hours of manual processing. The platform is unique in offering MSPs single-pane-of-glass visibility across all managed cloud spend, for all vendors. Exploring combined data or filtering to a specific customer, the platform is backed by a huge set of reporting measures that represent all key billing attributes. Using these with resource-level analytics enables MSPs to stay on top of spend drivers, supports contract conversations with cloud vendors, and leads to superior commitment coverage. Finally, MSPs can maximize the reach of their FinOps expertise, rolling out FinOps best practices to all their customers. Each customer can access their own isolated instance of Cloudability, with a curated experience across features spanning the Inform, Optimize, and Operate phases.

Enhanced third-party cloud cost management (private beta)

We’ve enhanced the management of non-CSP cloud spend by simplifying data ingestion and making this information available throughout the Cloudability platform. Users can now integrate popular vendors — such as Datadog, Databricks, MongoDB, and Snowflake — via Cloudability’s user-friendly credentialling interface and manage these costs via a single-pane-of-glass alongside all other cloud spend. Not only is this important information available in dashboards, but business mapping can now be applied for a full cost allocation; it can also be personalized with filtered views and included in regular budgeting and forecasts. With this new capability, customers can increase financial accountability across their cloud footprint, helping maximize the value of this investment.

ApptioOne/Apptio

There were several new product enhancements to IBM Apptio in the first half of 2024.

ApptioOne is now IBM Apptio

Our flagship Technology Business Management offering, ApptioOne, has been consolidated and repackaged to simplify the portfolio and better align with your needs. The new product portfolio is IBM Apptio and focuses on four key pillars to help drive success for our customers: Costing, Planning, Billing, and Benchmarking. In order to provide flexibility, IBM Apptio products will be offered as a-la-carte offerings or bundled suites with additional packages becoming available this year. Our IBM Apptio products and suites will be available as tiered offerings, with both foundational and advanced capabilities, that are tailored to your business needs.

With these changes, IBM Apptio remains the single source of truth for all your technology costing, planning, billing, and benchmarking needs and ensures that we can meet you wherever you are in your IT financial management journey and scale as your business grows.

Native integration between Apptio Costing and Turbonomic

Most enterprise organizations are now embracing a ‘hybrid by design’ strategy which combines on-premises infrastructure and private and public clouds. As part of IBM, we have the ability to address our customers’ challenges with managing a hybrid cloud by combining best-in-class performance management tools and best-in-class cost management tools. IBM Turbonomic is announcing the availability of Apptio Costing as a new, fully-supported Target type. Conversely, Apptio will soon be releasing a new component for Apptio Costing to support Turbonomic. Building this integration will give organizations the power to identify, quantify, and action on continuous cost and performance optimizations for their hybrid cloud investments.

IBM Apptio ServiceNow integration

Apptio has deepened its partnership with ServiceNow by launching new application portfolio management capabilities that help organizations manage risks, reduce costs, and provide better alignment of investments in applications with the needs of the business. As an IBM Apptio user, you are now able to seamlessly transfer your application Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) data into ServiceNow’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) framework and populate ServiceNow’s native dashboards with critical TCO data to help enterprise architects and other users easily reference this data in the current APM environment they rely on. This also makes it simple to get more consumptive data and analytics to drive informed cost optimization decisions.

This new ServiceNow integration allows enterprise application owners and architects to drive meaningful decisions leveraging best-in-class TCO and a trusted source of costing truth from Apptio. Apptio’s role extends beyond cost calculations. It provides organizations with holistic insights into the entire IT landscape, enabling them to make informed decisions that align with strategic goals. It further allows better application management and streamlines operations by leveraging critical costing data and empowering and informing users with seamless bidirectional flow of data. The integration of ServiceNow’s EA with Apptio isn’t just a technological feat; it’s a strategic imperative. Apptio emerges as the single source of truth, propelling organizations towards quicker time-to-value and fostering trusted decision-making through a symbiotic relationship with ServiceNow.

IBM Apptio enhanced user experience

IBM Apptio is continuing to invest in our products and evolving to meet your needs. Our newest updates are a direct response to your feedback, focusing on what matters most to you: efficiency, ease of use, and personalized user experience. We’re investing heavily in Apptio TBM products, enhancing their appearance, usability, and functionality, aiming to make your tasks easier and our product more intuitive. We have created a simplified and modernized platform that’s easier to learn and use, and allows you to deliver value quicker. It is your trusted source of truth for all costing, planning, and billing activities. It is easier to find key insights, save the location of critical data, and access it with ease — whenever you need to. And with the Apptio Value Framework, understanding and achieving value with our solutions has never been easier. These enhancements are carefully curated to streamline your experience and interaction with IBM Apptio.

Sustainability Reporting solution

Apptio is announcing the availability of a services engagement package to support Apptio Costing customers who wish to calculate IT carbon metrics leveraging the existing Apptio data models. The engagement supports the enhancement of existing data from other solutions like Cloudability and Apptio Costing supplemented with Apptio’s own carbon data, with additional modeling to offer a set of custom reports that provide actionable data.

With this solution, organizations can partner with the business and demonstrate the correlation between overall carbon footprint and applications and services. This extends IT sustainability discussions beyond just IT, fostering meaningful business level conversations. Sustainability Reporting enables organizations to view their entire IT carbon estate (cloud and on-premises), meet internal sustainability needs, and feed this data into regulatory reporting requirements.

Targetprocess

Enhanced enterprise performance and scalability

Over the years, there’s been swift adoption and growth of IBM Apptio Targetprocess. This explosive growth in usage and adoption is being met head-on. To address growing customer and user needs, we have enhanced the scalability and performance of the platform. As business requirements have expanded, Targetprocess has grown in capability and performability. Specifically, we have increased the integration performance with third-party applications, like Jira or Azure DevOps, by up to three times and the performance of reporting has been enhanced by eight times. With this new standard of performance, Targetprocess is setting the standard in Enterprise Agile Planning to support the most demanding large enterprise environments.

Apptio AI Assistant (Preview)

Apptio is enabling natural language processing and learning by leveraging IBM’s watsonx AI platform across its family of products.  This new AI Assistant will leverage data and insights to make automated recommendations that help support FinOps and TBM practitioners. Apptio’s AI Assistant will provide them with relevant information and answers to questions directly from within our products. The tool answer questions about product features, TBM and FinOps industry best practices, and other helpful tips and tricks.

A preview of Apptio’s AI Assistant was demoed at IBM’s Think conference and will be available as a beta product in the second half of 2024. Our investment in AI across the Apptio product portfolio will provide you with the right data you need at the right time to deliver better business outcomes.

For a comprehensive view of all our recent cloud, Agile, and IT finance innovations announced at IBM Think, please visit our virtual booth.