Apptio Claims Cloud Standards First

Technology Business Management (TBM) firm Apptio has announced what it claims is the cloud industry’s first ever standard IT operating model for managing the business of IT via the cloud.

The company’s Unified Model (ATUM) platform is said to standardises IT cost and data models, with the vendor integrating it into its main SaaS suite and applications.

“[We are] bringing cloud costs out of the sky and into the boardroom," said its CEO, Sunny Gupta.

"Apptio’s powerful costing applications empower CIOs to take action based on the true cost of the services they are providing the business,” he added.

“Today’s CIOs are at the heart of their organisations and it’s critical that we arm them with data and insights they need to support the success of their business.”

ATUM Powered

Some of the new features include Amazon Web Services billing data, third-party vendor spend management, analysis of labour and project costs, as well as automated peer benchmarking.

Apptio also says the TBM Council, comprised of over 1,300 CIOs and IT executives, voted back in May 2014 to endorse ATUM as the standard model for IT thus allowing every IT organisation to adopt a standard approach to manage the business of IT.

A large part of the solution is its Cost Transparency Foundation application that standardises the IT cost categories and automatically deals with the integration and mapping of invoices for public cloud providers such as AWS.

When it comes to managing cloud costs, it consolidates third-party vendor billing data to give customers insight into 100 per cent of their IT spend including cloud, traditional, on-premises and hosted costs.

Apptio’s IT Benchmarking app also now allows IT leaders to view ongoing, automated comparisons of IT costs against peer benchmarks that are tailored to a firm’s size, geography and industry.