Apptio extends ServiceNow integration, empowers smarter IT decision making

Apptio has announced its first certified solution available in the ServiceNow Store, designed to help accelerate IT decision making. This integration with ServiceNow provides users with a near real-time view into their organisation's actual technology cost structure.

By combining best-in-class operational data from ServiceNow with IT cost modelling software from Apptio, technology leaders are now able to make smarter investment decisions more quickly, the company states.

On the need for such an offering, Apptio states, in today's fast-moving marketplace decision makers and teams need to make smart bets and maximise investments.

However, many are discovering a significant gap between the importance of data in making budget decisions and their confidence in the data they have. This finding is supported by recent research from Harvard Business Review, the company states.

Making quick decisions based on data requires navigating complicated challenges in IT financial management - that is, understanding the complete topology and costs of IT investments and measuring the return on those investments.

Apptio has solved this problem by leveraging ServiceNow's ability to auto-discover changes in IT assets and their interconnected relationships. This information allows Apptio to create detailed, accurate cost models which automatically update at the speed of business changes.

This is the level of speed, confidence, and fidelity Apptio and ServiceNow's joint customers have been asking for, the company states.

Apptio's ServiceNow integration includes seven connectors to bring information into Apptio and a new connector publishing data back to ServiceNow dashboards, now available as a certified solution in the ServiceNow Store.

The ingress connectors map ServiceNow data sets directly into ApptioOne, which allows costs to be modelled based on consumptive data. This helps to create a trustworthy, timely and accurate total cost of ownership, the company states.

The egress connector then pushes this defensible application TCO data from Apptio back into native ServiceNow dashboards, providing visibility to stakeholders across the business.

This new level of bi-directional integration enables users to not only see their operational data and metrics for top applications, but also the fully burdened cost structure with continuous updates, Apptio states.

Apptio chief product and technology officer Scott Chancellor says, "Apptio's mission is to help our customers tackle the mounting challenges they face by empowering them with trusted information to make decisions at the pace that modern business demands.

"This new integration with ServiceNow is a natural extension of that mission and delivers unprecedented transparency into organisations' IT costs.

Customer Oshkosh commented on the announcement. Senior director of digital technology strategy, Jared Petersen, says, "Apptio and ServiceNow are both key partners to Oshkosh Corporation in forwarding our digital transformation journey and helping us to make trusted technology investment decisions.

"This deepening level of integration is a big win for organisations like ours looking to better understand actual IT costs from a business lens.