Published on the 25/03/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Software has been developed to support enterprise HR, finance, marketing and manufacturing functions but CIOs have tended to rely on spreadsheets to manage IT; the cobbler’s children are shoeless…
Although the IT department is a critical service provider within most enterprises it’s a department largely run by spreadsheet according to Apptio founder and CEO Sunny Gupta. In Australia this week to launch the company’s new local office Gupta said; “This really is the cobbler’s children having no shoes.”
He said that this was in spite of the mounting complexity of the role, with CIOs charged with managing legacy systems, a range of outsourcers and third party cloud solutions, as well as grappling with consumer technology brought into the enterprise by employees and other functional heads who increasingly bought cloud solutions with little or no involvement from IT.
Apptio’s technology business management system is a suite of five cloud-based applications which seeks to tackle the issue. The company boasts 200 global users, and the system is now available locally with the company setting up shop in Australia. Intended as an Asia Pacific springboard Apptio’s Sydney office, led by general manager Richard Outten, will also support sales into New Zealand.
Apptio which takes data feeds from a number of systems such as BMC, ServiceNow and VMware can act as a form of IT dashboard and deliver CIOs with much greater cost transparency about the services they run themselves, or buy from third parties. Gupta said it could support companies seeking to benchmark their performance and also be used to produce a “bill of IT” for the business, allowing other executives to clearly understand how much IT was costing and what it was delivering.
Cris Nicolli, CEO of the UXC Group which is partnering with Apptio in the local market, said that “at the moment the CIO is lost”. He said that Apptio’s solution would provide important support in terms of managing IT, but also deliver greater value to the CIO role by providing what amounted to an IT dashboard that could deliver more meaningful information that would make sense to other C-level executives.
He said that UXC would itself be installing Apptio. “We need to figure out our costs of IT and work out the root causes of some of my problems.”
One of the other early local users of Apptio is Orica, which went live with the system in January. According to the company the tool allows it to see the costs of technology across the group, broken down server by server providing much greater understanding both of the costs and benefits of computing.
