Apptio Improves Cloud Spend Forecasting For Digital-First Businesses With New Planning Solution

Apptio, the leading provider of technology business management (TBM) applications, today announced Cloud Financial Planning, a leading-edge solution that empowers cloud leaders to create accurate, driver-based forecasts by accounting for planned future spend, priorities shifts, and other cost drivers, resulting in more dependable and defensible cloud spend forecasts. Apptio welcomes interested parties to register for the beta today.

The 2022 State of FinOps Report states that the vast majority of FinOps practitioners currently face disjointed processes to build their cloud forecasts, leaving them to rely on ad-hoc collaborative planning methods, siloed information, and ill-fitted tooling – resulting in a lack of team ownership, visibility, and flexibility in their planning. A long-established leader in IT planning, Apptio has built its expertise by partnering with over 1,800 global customers to solve complex investment-planning challenges over the past 15 years. With this announcement, Apptio is extending their market-leading capabilities to address the unique challenges of cloud financial planning, blazing a new trail with a planning solution that enhances forecasting with business rationale, incorporates priorities across multiple stakeholder groups, and provides the flexibility to accommodate changes as they occur.

This is what makes Apptio Cloud Financial Planning truly unique: rather than simply relying on past data to predict future needs, Cloud Financial Planning captures and analyses team inputs — including detailed cost drivers, new investments and mid-stream changes of plan — to more accurately forecast and track spend for accountability. It also provides a first-of-its-kind collaborative workspace for engaging stakeholders throughout the planning process.

“With Cloud Financial Planning, we’re taking Apptio’s unique expertise and understanding of financial management processes and marrying that with our ability to ingest, interpret, and model cloud usage data,” said Jeremy Ung, Chief Technology Officer at Apptio. “It’s significant not only because we’re driving innovation in this category, but also because we’re equipping our customers with much-needed tools to support and scale with new technology paradigms. These capabilities will be instrumental in helping decision-makers engage stakeholders in the planning process and automate the consolidation of budget inputs to create accurate financial plans.”

Improving long-term planning through data analysis

Most companies that ingest cloud usage reports are under-equipped to implement effective cloud financial management processes. Even companies with a deep understanding of the planning process for this type of technology cannot consume or effectively process the millions of rows of data that come from a standard cloud-usage report. While there are many methods for estimating the costs of individual cloud resources, until now there has been a lack of tools that equip customers with the ability to create actionable and defensible plans for future cloud deployments.

Cloud Financial Planning will enable Apptio customers to:

• Plan for the future. Cloud Financial Planning is the industry’s first tool to recognise that cloud-based workloads behave fundamentally differently than servers and storage. It delivers a comprehensive planning tool for the unique features of these workloads.
• Run what/if scenario analyses in the cloud. Unlike solutions that rely on simple inputs or past consumption to generate a linear forecast, now customers can account for expected growth or net-new costs and incorporate scenario analysis and cost optimisation at the planning phase.
• Adapt to changing parameters of cloud initiatives. Cloud Financial Planning builds on Apptio’s deep experience and best-in-class financial algorithms to automatically consolidate budget inputs and calculate cloud costs — even in rapidly changing environments.

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