Apptio, an IBM company, is the leading technology spend and value management software provider. Its platform empowers leaders to make smarter financial and operational decisions. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Ajay Patel, General Manager of Apptio & IBM IT Automation.
Ajay Patel’s Background
What is Ajay Patel’s background? Patel said:
“I joined Apptio about 18 months prior to the IBM acquisition to serve as Apptio’s Chief Operating Officer, responsible for Product, Customer Success, Partner, and Corporate Strategy. Prior to that, I spent nine years at VMWare as the SVP and GM of its Modern Applications and Management business group. In addition to Apptio and VMWare, my 30 years of enterprise software experience includes Oracle, Apigee, BEA Systems, PwC and AT&T.”
“As General Manager of Apptio and the IT Automation group, I oversee the overall business and product strategy across the Automation portfolio, which includes: Apptio, Turbonomic, AIOps and Instana.”
Addressing Market Challenges
What market challenge is Apptio addressing? Patel noted:
“According to our recent survey around technology investment decision-making, 85% of organizations say they face some level of technology budget constraints. Yet, enterprise technology spending is often inadequately managed—business units lack alignment over resource allocation and demand full visibility into where their investments are going. Not to mention, cloud costs continue to skyrocket, with AI adoption only accelerating costs. Before there was Apptio, teams relied on manual processes using spreadsheets, to track their spending. Manual financial tracking is not only error-prone, hard to keep current, and incredibly inefficient in the context of today’s fast-paced innovation and rapidly changing environment.”
“Technology Business Management (TBM) and FinOps frameworks were designed to address these challenges. TBM facilitates data-driven decision making among CIOs, CFOs, CTOs, and their teams so they can effectively manage, plan, and optimize their technology investments. FinOps is a set of best practices and principles that center on the financial management of enterprise cloud services. In addition, we uniquely enable agile teams and finance to effectively collaborate and manage resources, labor financials and alignment to business outcomes. Our SaaS solutions, coupled with these frameworks, provide a single source of truth for all enterprise technology and cloud spend. Organizations can better understand where every dollar is being spent and quickly identify areas to reduce waste and increase efficiencies. This enables them to stay on budget, make effective use of resources, maintain continuous alignment with different business units, and better tie technology spend to business impact and revenue.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Patel cited:
“Apptio has seen incredible growth over the past five years and is the undisputed leader in Technology Business Management, FinOps and Labor Financial Management. Apptio’s biggest milestone has been the $4.6 billion acquisition by IBM last year. With Apptio’s core SaaS offerings coupled with the IBM IT Automation software and watsonx AI platform, we’ve effectively equipped collective clients with the industry’s most comprehensive offering to manage application health and optimize technology spend.”
Integration Of Apptio
IBM had completed the acquisition of Apptio in August 2023. How are Apptio and IBM integrating post-acquisition? Patel concluded:
“The integration process is ongoing. Most recently at this year’s annual IBM Think Conference, we introduced a series of new offerings and updates to our comprehensive and increasingly combined Apptio and IBM portfolio. Some of these include:
— IBM FinOps brings together Apptio Cloudability and IBM Turbonomic into a common user experience. Our users now get a comprehensive FinOps solution that helps them cut cloud costs and get the best return on their cloud spend.
— IBM Apptio is our newly consolidated flagship TBM offering, formerly known as ApptioOne. IBM Apptio gives finance, technology, and business units visibility into their tech spend and helps get maximum value out of their investments.
— Apptio AI Assistant uses IBM’s watsonx AI platform across the Apptio product suite and makes automated recommendations in natural language for our FinOps and TBM users.
