Apptio: Government Agencies around the World Working with Apptio to Fuel Digital Transformation

Sunny Gupta, CEO

With Apptio, CIOs can align their technology investments with business priorities, and engage business stakeholders to drive accountability and value. As a market and product innovator, Gupta has driven the company to become the market leader in a disruptive industry with significant scale. Apptio supports customers in every industry—from healthcare to financial services, retail to oil & gas—with more than 600 customers around the world, including 50 per cent of the Fortune 500. Apptio also works with agencies across the public sector like General Services Administration (GSA), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and more, and has assisted other government departments in the U.K., U.S., and across Europe.

In the following conversation with Sunny Gupta, the founder and CEO of Apptio, he shares how the company is helping organisations to manage their technology investments.

Can you shed some light on how your cloud-based platform helps optimise technology costs and highlight its capabilities?

Through our cloud-based platform, we help technology and finance leaders make smart decisions as they plan, analyse and optimise technology investments in pursuit of digital transformation. Our software uses machine learning to translate technology costs and utilisation across on-premises systems, vendors, projects, agile and cloud systems into a holistic, business-centric view.

We provide SaaS applications for CIOs, IT Finance and infrastructure and operations professionals to help increase the value of the entire IT portfolio, provide proactive insights and analysis on opportunities for cost savings across the hybrid supply chain, and achieve predictable sending with an informed cloud migration strategy. Although we provide multiple application families on this platform, customers can opt for one or two at the onset to get started with quick value.

Our platform ingests, aggregates and analyses technology costs from readily-available sources across IT, finance and vendors from structured or semi-structured formats. Machine learning capabilities automatically maps and translates these data sources to an IT view. This shows clients how much they are spending on storage servers, cloud platforms, applications and end-user computing. We create a cost model and offer predefined analytics reports and benchmarks inside the organisation. Usually, after a customer implements our offering, they see at least 3 to 5 per cent technology expense optimisation within 6 to 9 months. Customers can begin to see value with Apptio in as little as 5 hours with our cloud-specific product.

ATUM has been a game changer for the industry. The standard framework was developed in 2012 when we realised that companies were struggling to relate financial information to IT budget owners so they could understand the cost of services and applications, and make more informed decisions about servers, storage, networks and projects. IT and finance leaders wanted to translate the general ledger into four layers— financial (or cost pools), resources (IT towers), applications and services, and business units. Every company was reinventing definitions of even the most common processes like storage or server. Hence, we studied different translation catalogues and created a non-profit organisation called Technology Business Management Council or TBM Council to help drive the first-ever industry standardisation model called Apptio TBM Unified Model or ATUM. It provides a standard benchmark for companies to compare their costs at the different layers of the ATUM model. Apptio is the only company that incorporates this taxonomy inside its software with hundreds of predefined rules to help companies build a standard product.

Our software uses machine learning to translate technology costs and utilisation across on-premises systems, vendors, projects, agile and cloud systems into a holistic, business-centric view.

In the public sector especially, we’ve seen some incredible traction over the last several years. We have been driving the evolution of TBM in government.

The White House approached the TBM Council a few years back under President Obama’s administration. The U.S. Federal Government’s technology expenditure was $80 to $200 Bn, and they required a common taxonomy in a framework to report their expenditure and optimise it. Hence, Apptio started working with the federal government to streamline their expenses, mostly pertaining to digitalisation and cloud. We were successful in achieving quick, positive results, and now the White House has mandated the TBM taxonomy for all U.S. federal agencies.

We work with the VA, which is one of the largest agencies in the US, with $4 bn in IT spend. We’re helping them bring accountability to shift millions of dollars into innovation initiatives like cloud.

Similarly, over 44 government agencies in the State of Washington use ATUM to map their spend through the Office of the CIO. Apptio has become the way they aggregate all the spend across agencies to deliver transparency and optimisation of resources to the citizens of the State of Washington.

In addition to public sector agencies, we work with the private sector, including customers such as Unilever, Mastercard, Cisco, FedEx, Nike, Stanley Black & Decker, AIG, and more.

How do you envision the future of Apptio?

Our focus at Apptio is always to make our customers wildly successful, so we’re focusing on three big drivers of growth to help customers realise the value of their tech investments.

First, we noticed that customers require more modules specifically designed to manage the challenges modern technology and processes are posing for their business, and for their unique use case for TBM, so we have developed a vendor-specific expenditure module for public cloud (including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud), in our Cloud Business Management product. We are also heavily investing in Agile offerings to help IT leaders better align application, service, and business capability investments to business outcomes.

Second, we are leveraging machine learning coupled with artificial intelligence to bring more ways to automate the mapping of general ledgers into cost models and a planning model. With predictive insights, IT leaders can gain strategic and data-driven recommendations on cost optimisation and value realisation without human intervention.

Lastly, we are offering the Apptio cost model to other primary shared services like HR, legal, finance, and more.

We are innovating on all three fronts and have some exciting times ahead of us.

Our software uses machine learning to translate technology costs and utilisation across on-premises systems, vendors, projects, agile and cloud systems into a holistic, business-centric view.