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Apptio, with its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, offers Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions to enterprise customers. It helps enterprises run their IT more efficiently like a business. Their TBM solutions helps enterprises make ROI optimized decisions using various templates, to fine tune how they run their IT. Their SaaS based business intelligence tools will make IT fit their organizational needs while saving tons of money.
Technology Business Management is a new category of business management solutions that will help CIOs and IT managers take decisions on their IT environment based on the cost, quality and value using the industry’s best practices. CRM changed the way Sales teams operate and Technology Business Management has the potential to do the same thing to IT. In a way, enterprise IT is a blackbox for many of the businesses. TBM has the potential to change this situation and put IT managers in the drivers seat. Making proper decisions by analyzing the cost and benefits in IT is no easy task. Even in the traditional IT, where there is some amount of predictability in the costs, we have seen enterprises making bad financial decisions. With the proliferation of clouds in many different forms and with majority of expenditure moving from capital costs to operational costs, it gets more and more difficult to make good business decisions for IT. TBM is well poised to solve this hard problem and Apptio is emerging as one of the important players in this category. From the perspective of CIOs and IT decision manager, TBM is a must have kit while formalizing their cloud strategy.
Apptio today announced new capabilities that enable IT leaders to make cloud cost comparisons leveraging the intelligence contained in Apptio’s Cost Transparency Templates. With this insight, IT can quantify the fully-loaded in-house cost of supporting traditional IT services, like email, CRM or storage, and compare that to the cost of moving them to external cloud service providers or internal private cloud operations. This enables IT and business leaders make informed decisions on which services would be the best, most cost effective candidates to support in the cloud.
In the current cloud mania, there is so much confusion going on from both the cloud vendors and naysayers. The, sometimes, far reaching claims made by the vendors and the fear mongering adopted by companies who are on the verge of losing to cloud computing vendors, are confusing the IT managers in a big way. On one hand, we have “cloud naysayers” making claims that cloud computing will actually increase the enterprise spending and, on the other side, we have cloud evangelists making simplistic claims that cloud computing is a miracle cure for today’s terrible economy. Calculating the actual TCO is not an easy task. According to Lydia Leong, research director, Gartner, Inc., in an April 20, 2009 report entitled, “How to Select a Cloud Computing Infrastructure Provider, companies should “evaluate solutions on a total cost of ownership basis. Ensure that you capture the differences in employee time, licensing schemes and risk mitigation; don’t just compare the cloud with your hardware costs.”
Apptio is trying to solve this exact problem. With this release, Apptio delivers integrated cloud cost analysis for each of its out-of-the-box Cost Transparency Templates, allowing IT to compare baseline costs with cloud offerings. Apptio’s Cost Transparency Templates provide best practices in costing standard IT objects such as servers, storage and labor. This offering will fundamentally change how an enterprise will approach the migration to the clouds. With the access to Apptio in their hands, IT managers can make informed decisions on which workloads to move to the clouds and which ones can stay inside the firewall by tapping into the private cloud infrastructure in the enterprises’ own datacenters. I am pretty excited by the potential of TBM solutions and Apptio is trying to emerge strongly in the market with this powerful IT intelligence dashboard.
