To succeed in 2025, companies must achieve two seemingly contradictory goals: drive innovation while also reducing operating expenses. A recent Forrester report illustrates this reality, stating that 90% of organizations expect to increase their technology spend in 2025, despite tightening budgets.
This puts CFOs and CIOs in the hot seat, forced to answer tough questions like:
To navigate these competing demands, many leaders feel boxed into one of three unappealing choices:
Praecipio recently released an ebook—Profit by Design: How to Master Cost Optimization—that takes a deep dive into these challenges. This article offers a more focused, technical look at how Apptio can help solve them.
Apptio, an IBM company, empowers CFOs to move beyond traditional, often manual and time-consuming financial processes and embrace a more data-driven, strategic approach to managing technology investments. Combined with Praecipio's VISTA methodology, this approach leads to greater efficiency, cost savings, and ultimately, better business outcomes.
Organizations are overwhelmed by fragmented data across disconnected tools, from strategy platforms like Planview to finance systems like Oracle. CIOs and CFOs struggle to manually aggregate this data, often using spreadsheets to connect costs to work. This process is time-consuming, error-prone, and leads to outdated insights.
As a result, decision-makers are left with limited visibility—clear on costs but unclear on the strategic value of spend. Apptio offers a solution to streamline this process and provide real-time, actionable insights that drive more informed decision-making.
Organizations are undergoing a fundamental shift in how they manage and optimize technology spend, moving away from traditional cost center models and toward value stream-based approaches.
| Traditional Cost Center Model | Modern Value Stream Model |
| Project-based funding with multi0year capital planning cycles | Capacity-based funding with persistent, self-organizing teams |
| Waterfall model with all planning and strategy defined up front | Dynamic adjustment based on backlog size, priority, and strategic alignment |
| Rigid employee performance process | Focus on products, solutions, and customer empathy |
| Focus on work breakdown and detailed plans | Cuntinuous measurement and feedback loops |
| Siloed organizations with limited cross-functional visibility | Teams are organized around value delivery rather than departments |
This transition is essential as companies move from a project to a product-based mindset.
At the current rate of disruption and decline, half of S&P 500 companies will be replaced in the next ten years.
Mik Kurston, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework, 2018
Apptio, now part of IBM, is a leader in technology spend and value management, serving over 1,800 customers, including 60%+ of the Fortune 100, and managing $650B in spend. It is a founding member of the TBM Council and FinOps Foundation.
Apptio's cloud-based platform translates unstructured and structured data from thousands of sources into intelligence, recommendations, and actions that bring cross-functional alignment and positive financial impact. The platform enables complete Value Stream Management by integrating people, process, and technology to map, optimize, visualize, measure, and oversee the flow of business value. This applies across diverse software delivery pipelines, from initial idea through development and into production.
The platform provides a range of capabilities across the entire value stream:
These capabilities are delivered through three core SaaS solutions:
ApptioOne is the foundation of Apptio's Technology Business Management suite, providing hybrid/multi-cloud cost transparency and planning. Key capabilities include:
Organizations typically achieve:
Cloudability is Apptio's pioneering FinOps solution designed for maximum cost visibility and savings across cloud environments:
Organizations using Cloudability typically achieve:
Targetprocess is Apptio's Enterprise Agile Planning platform with comprehensive, granular financial data integration:
Organizations implementing Targetprocess typically achieve:
Getting to the point where a business can make swift, informed, and confident data-driven decisions about cost and investments can be accomplished in five steps, leveraging both Praecipio's VISTA methodology and Apptio's powerful solutions. Organizations can choose to stop after one or two steps, or complete all of them. Every step has a measurable impact, so wherever your business is now, it will realize benefits.
Here’s what that journey looks like for most companies:
The Visibility pillar of VISTA starts by identifying where project data is entered and stored. Praecipio's data experts help define common terms and add identifiers to ensure systems communicate effectively, with minimal effort and time.
ApptioOne acts as the 'Rosetta Stone,' using the TBM taxonomy to unify data across systems. Key components include:
The next step is to automate key system-to-system connections to streamline data flow.
The Integration pillar focuses on linking previously siloed systems, identifying valuable connections while ensuring minimal disruption to existing processes.
ApptioOne's Data Fabric automates these connections with:
Cloudability's Integration Framework provides:
Targetprocess Connections enable:
The image below shows the typical connections at this phase using the Apptio platform.
ApptioOne integrates financial data from systems like Oracle with project data from tools like Targetprocess, eliminating the need for manual spreadsheet aggregation and improving reporting accuracy. This step enhances data confidence and helps CIOs and CFOs reduce manual work. Some clients stop here, while others move on to invest in reporting and AI-supported dashboards.
Once the systems are integrated, the next step is to create accessible reports and dashboards, essential for leveraging AI insights.
The Visibility pillar fully matures here, providing clear visibility into costs, resources, and progress. Praecipio works with organizations to define key metrics and develop visualizations for decision-making.
With basic data visualization, CIOs and CFOs gain near-real time access to project costs, eliminating the delays of traditional cost accounting processes. ApptioOne provides dashboards and reports for instant visibility into costs and progress, while Cloudability and Targetprocess offer cloud and project-level insights.
Creating reliable reports and dashboards hinges on support from the CFO and Finance team. When Finance comes in to verify and validate the automated results, ApptioOne's auditability features provide the transparency and reconciliation capabilities Finance needs to trust the data, building confidence for the next step.
Bringing Finance in early builds essential buy-in by showing how faster access to information supports better, timely investment decisions without compromising established processes.
The Strategy pillar aligns financial governance with organizational objectives. Praecipio helps organizations document and automate cost allocation rules that reflect strategic priorities, providing a framework for consistent financial decision-making.
ApptioOne Cost Engine provides:
Cloudability Financial Governance features:
Targetprocess Financial Integration capabilities:
By applying cost rules and leveraging ApptioOne's capitalization engine, organizations gain real-time visibility into OpEx vs. CapEx, enabling finance teams to capitalize sooner with audit-ready accuracy. When combined with Targetprocess, it also helps facilitate agile adoption by translating development activities into finance-friendly terms. The result is daily insight from estimates to actuals—empowering smarter tax decisions, clearer progress tracking, and faster value delivery.
The Technology pillar focuses on closing the loop between project execution and financial systems. Praecipio helps organizations build bidirectional integrations that create real-time feedback for smarter planning.
By this stage, CIOs and CFOs are aligned, with trusted data flowing across systems. The final integration into core financial tools ensures faster reporting, audit readiness, and clear visibility into which projects deliver the most value. This enables better funding decisions starting immediately and moving forward.
No matter where an organization starts, each step delivers real, measurable impact.
Organizations implementing Apptio's solutions have seen amazing results. From cutting IT expenses to fast-tracking innovation, these success stories show how companies are doing more with less:
Financial Services Leader
Technology Company
Fortune 500 Enterprise
Global Retail Organization
Multinational Corporation
Organizations can improve data visibility and connectivity without halting day-to-day operations. With the right experts, much of the work happens behind the scenes—minimizing disruption while ensuring steady progress.
That said, success depends on a few key principles:
You get the most out of Apptio when its tools work with platforms like Atlassian. Together, they create an integrated system that provides complete cost visibility. This unified approach connects project, cloud, and financial data to show the true cost of delivering technology across the enterprise.
By integrating ApptioOne, Targetprocess, Cloudability, ERP systems, and tools like Jira, organizations gain a holistic view of value streams and their costs, broken down into clear components:
Value Stream + (Labor + Infrastructure + Facilities + Charge Back) = Total Cost of Ownership
This insight allows for better internal benchmarking, unit cost metrics, performance visibility, and P&L alignment, empowering CIOs and CFOs to make smarter, data-informed investment decisions across their entire tech portfolio.
When every investment matters, speed to insight is everything. Connecting data across the enterprise helps organizations reduce operational spend and reinvest in innovation that drives real growth.
Praecipio’s VISTA methodology, combined with Apptio’s financial visibility tools, offers a practical, step-by-step path to better decision-making. This isn’t a sweeping transformation; it’s a focused, incremental approach that delivers measurable value at every stage.
With Apptio powering transparency into costs and performance, CIOs and CFOs gain the clarity to act with confidence and drive innovation while keeping expenses in check.