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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.

Exciting times at box.net headquarters. Yesterday I had a briefing with Aaron Levie, Co-founder and CEO, Michael Smith, Product Manager, Mobile and Sean Lindo, Marketing Communications Manager. That’s a lot of heavyweights for a simple briefing and especially something so apparently subtle as a new mobile app.

Yes, box.net were demoing their new iPad application and it’s no overstatement to say that it’s an example of the long promised benefit of the combination of both the cloud and mobile computing finally being realized. The application itself does pretty much what one would expect of it – allowing users to access, share and interact with business content stored on Box.net. But at last it does so in a form factor that is really viable – one which realistically works with the use case that Smith gave me, that of an office worker commuting by train and working on collaborative files en route.

The Box.net crew were quick to acknowledge the visual cues they’d taken from Apple in the design of the iPad application UI, namely the left hand navigation – I’m not so sure about that – kind of reminds me of Windows Explorer to be honest – but either way you can see a nice flow between a view of all of your files and honing in on specific detail within a particular file.

The next version of that app (due soon) will even further expand on this cloud/local combination by including the ability to download files from box.net to the iPad and edit them within a third party application. The reverse will also be possible – allowing users to launch the box.net app from within a third party application and then have file uploaded back to the box.net account in the clouds.

As Aaron Levie said when I spoke to him:

This application drives home the power and the potential of the cloud and shows the utility of cross device integrations

It seems we’re reaching a world that, ironically enough, delivers Microsoft’s previous vision of software plus services. Semantics aside – it’s a great thing that’s happening.

On another note (what date was it again?), box.net has announced that it’ll be implementing a space computing program including:

• Interplanetary file redundancy – Geographic redundancy is great, but what happens when a meteor hits Earth and destroys it? Box has that solved with interplanetary redundancy. Your files will be stored on a minimum of 3 planets with at least one in another galaxy, reducing the risk of black holes, alien invasions and yet-undiscovered space things.
• WarpTravel CDN – To decrease file loading times with our new system, we have implemented a WarpTravel content distribution network using an Alcubierre drive, which serves files to the planet closest to you, at any time.
• Secure file deletion – Rest assured, when a file is removed from our service, its gone forever. Using our patented black hole algorithm, we ensure your file is sent through a black hole of at least 4 million solar masses.

As Levie says:

It became abundantly clear that cloud computing is on its way out when Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft is ‘all in’, fortunately, Box.net is already light years ahead, pursuing the next great technology frontier with our space computing initiative.

Live long and prosper…

I posted late last year about how Zendesk (more on them here) had crowdsourced the translation of their application into different languages. At the time CEO Mikkel Svane commented that;

Within just a few weeks of releasing the Zendesk internationalization tool we had support for more than 25 languages, and hundreds of customers had already enabled the new languages on their support portals. We see this as a trend that clearly shows companies are amenable to living with minor inaccuracies in favor of agility and speed

Well the other day I was having a noodle around inside my box.net account and I discovered that it’s not only bootstrapping startups who find crowdsourcing attractive. Yes, down the bottom of my account page in box was this text:

As I mentioned in my post about Zendesk – their translation cost them the paltry sum of a Zendesk T shirt per translator. Box too have some cool shirts – I wonder if their rate for translation services is the same as Zendesk’s. Care to comment Aaron?

On another, but somewhat related – note, I have a couple of gift cards for a one year, 5GB box.net accoutn that are left over from a conference schwag bag – first two people to either leave a comment here or otherwise contact me get the gift card. Nice.

This was meant to be a happy post. Unfortunately OggSync gets to bear the brunt of my frustrations over standards and portability. But first some background:

I run a pretty busy schedule – to give you an idea of what that means in real terms I have 12 separate calendars – my manufacturing business alone has half a dozen calendars I need to keep an eye on (marketing, production, board stuff and operations). Add in my personal calendar and that of my wife, the calendar feeds from both myself and my wife generated by my favorite little web app of all time, TripIt, school term dates and the like and you see that my calendar feed gets kind of busy.

Add to this the fact that I’m travelling more and more (half a dozen international trips before May) and have to work mobile and you have a recipe for disaster. Until now I’ve made do with the single calendar sync that Google provides for in its Google cal to win mobile sync. That’s fine… until I need to check on the time for a flight that is trapped within TripIt.

Roll up my lifesaver, OggSync. OggSync provides a lovely little synchronization service that allows users of the pro version to sync multiple calendars with multiple clients, both desktop and mobile. It’s a full, two-way synchronization and backup application that also performs these tasks on contact data.

Or so I thought….

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Sydney, looking at eight or so Google calendars that have become almost completely useless. You see it happened like this…

I installed OggSync and set it up and was stoked to see all the events from my different calendars appear on my Windows Mobile device. So far so good… Yesterday however I flew to Sydney which is in a different timezone from home. I turned my device on at the airport and saw that Windows Mobile, as it’s designed to do, picked up the new timezone from the mobile carrier I was roaming on.

OggSync sprang into life and synchronized all my events… but… Unfortunately OggSync doesn’t know that Windows Mobile changed my timezones – so every single event in every single calendar I synch now appears two hours early – great if you’re anally retentive, terrible if you’re busy.

OggSync were really supportive, I need to point out this isn’t a failing of theirs per se, they told me it was a new issue with the latest version of WinMob and that they’d help me restore from backup once I got back to my home timezone – but this isn’t really the issue. Fundamentally this is an example of why using a third party to integrate different applications is a dangerous and fraught thing. Roll on open standards and open data…