The Apptio Enterprise SaaS Platform

The foundation for Apptio's Technology Business Management applications is a robust, enterprise SaaS platform that provides a broad set of core functionality in a scalable, secure manner.

Data Integration and Management

The Apptio platform provides a flexible, secure set of options for both top down and bottom up data integration and management and contains data inference technology that correlates data from various financial and operational systems, accelerating the creation of robust cost and performance models. It's easy to get started with a combination of actual and assumptive data. The system seamlessly adjusts as you drive towards greater accuracy and automation over time.

IT Modeling and Activity Based Costing

Apptio provides an easy to use, visual interface for describing the allocation and consumption relationships that govern the cost, utilization and operational metrics of IT services. Robust Activity Based Costing supports the allocation of General Ledger based costs by assumption or data driven strategies to calculate the true TCO of an IT Service, analyze core service cost drivers and govern the distribution of those costs back to business unit customers. To accelerate time to value, Apptio also includes a robust set of transparency accelerators for foundational domains such as servers, storage, data centers, network, support and labor that provide the building blocks for modeling the cost and performance of any IT service.

Collaborative Reporting and Analytics

The Apptio platform includes a rich reporting and analytics experience leveraging a high performance, in-memory architecture. Users can easily modify default reports or create custom reports that are automatically updated over time. Interactive reports enabling users to drill in from high level IT service costs all the way down to granular activity drivers, and "What If" analysis supports scenario planning across core IT cost, utilization and operational metrics. Integrated action tracking enables IT and Finance to orchestrate key financial management process around Apptio.

Data Confidence Index

The Apptio platform was built on the assumption that all enterprises suffer from data quality issues. The perception of poor data quality is one of the primary obstacles hindering many Technology Business Management initiatives. Apptio has introduced several new platform innovations designed to both help enterprises understand the quality of their data sources and continually improve their data quality.

Apptio’s Data Confidence Index analyzes data sources and applies statistical analysis to assign a whole number which is derived from a variety of data quality metrics, including inference matching, data freshness, “breakage” (i.e., costs that are not assigned to a product or service) and other key data indicator trends. This numerical index becomes an important baseline from which IT decision makers can begin to understand how reliable their data really is, allowing them to pinpoint areas for improving the quality of their data sources and support their recommendations with a greater degree of confidence. The Data Confidence Index supports rate cards and forms to capture assumptive data, manual allocation tables, and more. By supporting both sources of data (assumptive and actuals), Apptio enables users to simultaneously take a bottoms up (data rich) and a top down (data missing) approach for a rapid implementation that improves over time.

Role Based Access and Comprehensive Audit Log with Rollback

To support collaboration across many users spanning IT, Finance, and the Business, the Apptio platform supports fine-grained role based access and provides comprehensive journaling of all actions in a central audit log that had built-in roll back capability.

Users within Apptio can be mapped to a predefined set of roles that govern the users reporting, modeling, and data access experience across the platform. For example, a common role is the business unit user who does not require access to be able to manage data sources, edit the model, or create reports. They are instead consumers of a "Bill of IT" and thus the access for that role is really limited to a view only experience for the set of services and costs that are applicable to their Business Unit. Similar granularity of permissions can be extended to modeling and data management.

Role based access obviously helps to limit the number of users who have the rights to make changes to the underlying model and data, but when that responsibility is spread over multiple users it is critical to provide better governance of the model, reporting and associated data. Apptio offers a comprehensive journaling system that tracks all changes, who made them, and when they were made. In addition, any of those changes can easily be undone with the click of the mouse so unwanted changes can be quickly rolled back.