Apptio IT Benchmarking

The Apptio IT Benchmarking application offers a cost-effective and systematic approach to IT benchmarking that supports Continual Cost Optimization. Industry cost and performance metrics are provided side-by-side with internal benchmarks. Apptio’s benchmark data is gathered from over 3,400 companies across more than twenty major industry segments and is updated on a regular basis. It spans high level financial benchmarks, granular infrastructure and support unit cost metrics, and common IT service cost metrics. It also provides benchmarks per IT function and type.

IT Benchmarking

Benchmarking IT costs is a critical component to optimizing your IT cost structure. It is virtually impossible to know how efficiently you are running IT without comparing your services cost structure to your peers by industry and size of your IT organization. Additionally, internal benchmarks between business units are also important to reveal opportunities for performance improvement.

Benchmarking is also important as a vehicle for communication. Whether it is the CIO communicating the performance of IT to the board or IT communicating to the business units, benchmarks represent an objective evaluation of IT performance and a heat map of areas to improve IT performance and efficiency.

The most common method for benchmarking today is an expensive, point-in-time process that has limited long-term value for continuous improvement. Typically a consulting engagement requires considerable time to gather cost data, and results in a static spreadsheet model of costs vs. industry benchmarks. This method of analysis is brittle and becomes quickly stale, requiring a similar level of investment to repeat six to 12 months later.

Comprehensive IT Benchmarks Out of the Box

Apptio’s benchmark data is gathered from over 3,400 companies across more than twenty major industry segments. It includes high-level financial benchmarks, service level unit costs and granular unit cost metrics for IT support and infrastructure. These metrics include IT spend as a percentage of revenue, IT spend per employee, IT operational spend vs. IT Application and Development, cost per employee for SAP, cost per mailbox for email, cost per x86 server, cost per mainframe MIPs, cost per network port, and cost per SAN GB. Over time, Apptio will augment this industry collected data with aggregated and anonymized data from within the cloud, offering the most comprehensive and up to date collection of IT cost and performance metrics available.

Exponential Value when Combined with Apptio IT Service Costing & Bill of IT

Benchmark unit costs integrate seamlessly into Apptio IT Service Costing and Bill of IT. Within Apptio IT Service Costing, benchmark data represents targets against which actuals are continuously measured. This systematizes the process of moving toward cost objectives. When provided via a Bill of IT, benchmarks provide the business units opportunities to change their behavior to optimize their IT costs.

Systematize the Results of a Third Party Engagement within Apptio

Apptio’s IT Benchmarking solution is a great complement to third party benchmarking exercises and enables customers to get higher leverage from consultative expertise on an ongoing basis.  IT organizations can use the core Apptio solution jointly with the consultant to develop their IT service cost model as a part of the initial benchmarking effort.  They then can integrate the relevant data sources directly into Apptio to continuously track internal service and performance metrics against industry benchmarks.  Apples-to-apples benchmark data then sit side-by-side with their internal metrics and the industry data is updated on a regular basis, ensuring relevance.