Eliminate Currency Complexity in a Multi-Cloud World With Apptio Cloudability

Cloudability brings financial accountability to your cloud costs through providing single-pane-of-glass visibility across the major clouds. The new Multi Currency Service makes it easy to normalize your cloud costs to your preferred currency, thereby removing complexity and confusion that can result from organizations operating in multiple regions and the fact the major cloud vendors often bill in different currencies.

Single-pane-of-glass visibility and combining multiple currencies

A unique aspect to Cloudability is the way the platform can normalize important concepts across the three major cloud vendors so that cost and usage data can be understood in a single experience. This includes normalizing categories of usage, with reporting dimensions like usage family and lease type, and providing universal cost metrics like cost (amortized). Another concept which is becoming increasingly important to normalize is representing cost in a single currency given the variation in the cloud bills themselves.

There are two main scenarios where this occurs. The first scenario occurs for any non-US cloud customer who is running AWS and one of the other clouds. For example, an Australian-based business will receive their Azure billing data in the local currency (AUD) while AWS billing data is always in USD regardless of location. The second scenario will occur for any multi-national company who chooses to pay their cloud bills in the region. In this case, for example, Azure bills may be paid in multiple local currencies. Mixing billing data from these different sources without considering currency will clearly lead to meaningless reports and dashboards.

Simplify administration and remove ambiguity

These complications have long been managed through leveraging existing constructs within the Cloudability platform – either creating new cost metrics with the Business Metrics capability or including currency exchange rules in the cost (adjusted) metric. Today we are excited to announce new, purpose-built capabilities that simplify the administration of exchange rates and improve clarity for all Cloudability users. These capabilities allow administrators to manage two org-wide concerns. Firstly, the billing admin can set the default currency and formatting for cost metrics across the platform.

The second, and ongoing, admin task is to maintain the exchange rates back to this default currency. Usually, these figures need to be set each month after the invoices have been paid and therefore the actual exchange rates locked in. This is achieved using the new Apptio Multi Currency Service, accessible via the application settings menu (gear icon). Updating manually via the UI or programmatically via API, it’s straightforward to set date bounded exchange rates for each billed currency against your default currency. For example, for the month of June 2021, the admin might set their effective exchange rates for USD, AUD, and GBP back to EUR.

Every user of Cloudability within the organization will then experience accurate cost figures represented in the default currency throughout the platform. This applies to all cost metrics and across all features, whether a user is engaged in an optimization activity such as rightsizing or is leveraging one of the analytical tools. The most notable thing is that all cloud bills, from all cloud vendors, can be experienced in a single-page-of-glass with no currency complications.

Looking to the future

As cloud adoption continues to accelerate around the world successfully managing a combination of billed currencies is going to become more important. With this in mind, Apptio is continuing the investment in our multi-currency capabilities. This includes providing more flexibility for each user to switch seamlessly between currencies and extending support across the Apptio suite of products.

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