What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Apptio Cloudability was for a project called Project Apollo that had a target of saving a million Australian dollars by April 2026. It had a lot to do with contract renewals, and we needed to save a certain amount of money for the budget so that we could get a better negotiation price on our contract renewals. We were able to achieve this through the use of detection of rogue spending through Apptio Cloudability.
There was a lot of rogue spending we detected through Apptio Cloudability. We found out there were multiple Direct Connects that we were using and we did not need as many. We were able to find those through Apptio Cloudability and rationalize those Direct Connects, which saved us a lot of money. We also found wasted, very old EBS snapshots that were costing us a lot of money. They could be anywhere between seven to ten years old and had never been cleaned up before. They were costing us a lot of money. Additionally, we identified opportunities for EC2 right-sizing, RDS right-sizing, and OpenShift right-sizing. Right-sizing across all the different platforms was something we were able to utilize and detect through Apptio Cloudability to find out what the cost efficiencies were and the savings going forward. These were the harder projects to complete and take to fruition because there was a lot of communication needed with application owners. There was also a lot of agreement needed on timings and windows when these things could be done. Nonetheless, we were able to keep pushing the project, keep on top of it, and continue following up. The hardest part was keeping the communications open and ensuring that the people involved understood why we were doing what we were doing and why it needed to be done. If it ain't broke, do not fix it is very much a mantra across industry and life in general. Many of these production loads were not broken, but they were costing us a fortune. Communication was absolutely one of the biggest things here.
What is most valuable?
The best features Apptio Cloudability offers are the advanced right-sizing capabilities after Turbonomic was integrated into Apptio Cloudability Premium, which is a fantastic feature. You get really good savings outcomes, and you are able to see quickly by changing generations and EC instance types. Recently, they changed the default on the costing when you go into these windows, whether it is right-sizing or reporting or whatever. The default for costing has changed, and that default is what we use all the time, which has benefited us from that perspective.
I like the new dark layout. It is much better on your eyes. Recently, I have been pushing for information about the MCP for Apptio Cloudability and the AI integration that is coming extremely soon. I have seen some private preview on that, so I am very excited about those coming forward. The core business mappings and the dimension side of Apptio Cloudability is really good to set up ownership and chargeback and showback. We are sorely lacking in chargeback and showback at the moment. We have created a center of excellence that includes cyber and different teams in CloudOps to ensure that we have a FinOps lens across everything we do going forward. Apptio Cloudability is a huge part of that because it also means that it is really easy to give RBAC control, that is, view access to different teams so that they can see what is happening with their costing really clearly. They can see from a granular point of view exactly what they are spending on and how they can fix it going forward and what they can improve and change from a different instance type or a different way of turning on and off machines and all these different things. Apptio Cloudability was really good from that perspective, being able to help us with those detections.
The support that we have had throughout has been exemplary. The consultation when we set up Apptio Cloudability was excellent. I worked one-on-one with the consultants for quite a few weeks. I then took over the project to onboarding Apptio Cloudability into the company. The one-to-one relationship I had with the engineers and the project managers from IBM/Apptio Cloudability was second to none. It was always a matter of going out of the way to help us make sure that we had everything set up as we needed so that we could use the product as fast as we could and in the best way that we could. I want to give a shout out to support and the professional services.
I would put support and EC2 right-sizing right up with each other because without the support, it would not have been as easy to understand how to leverage these capabilities and get the most out of Apptio Cloudability. I would be able to use the EC2 right-sizing ability of Apptio Cloudability and to understand the reporting and the view side. I would definitely be putting the onboarding experience and the consultation experience right up there.
What needs improvement?
I think Apptio Cloudability is a really very good platform for costing. I do understand it can be cost-prohibitive to buy the license to use Apptio Cloudability because of the way it charges. If you are not a big enough company, I can understand that. Apptio Cloudability might want to look at costing models for smaller businesses that cannot afford Apptio Cloudability or Apptio Cloudability Premium. I believe Premium is about one hundred thousand dollars or so in US dollars, and Apptio Cloudability I believe is a little bit less than that. However, there are small businesses out there that will not be able to afford either option. I wonder if that is a market to target, to look at a smaller model of Apptio Cloudability or at least a smaller costing model that could help those businesses as well.
The other thing is that there are just a few anomalies inside Apptio Cloudability that I think can definitely be improved. It seems a really small thing, but when you are using it, it can actually be quite a big thing. Since Turbonomic has been integrated with Apptio Cloudability, as good as that is to be able to get those different costing figures and larger savings, it does not give the ability to have an instant Jira ticket integration with the Turbonomic costings or the advanced costing, if you would call it, inside Apptio Cloudability Premium. In the basic costings, you can use Jira and you can open up a Jira ticket and you can have all this information straight from Apptio Cloudability straight in the Jira ticket, assign it to someone, and then someone is working on it. You cannot do that in Turbonomic at the moment. I am not really sure why. Obviously, there is some sort of development issue behind the scenes, I imagine, with the way that Turbonomic works compared to the basic costing. It would be a huge advantage to be able to do that, to just open a Jira ticket, have someone assigned to it, and then proceed forward. I definitely think they should look at that.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Apptio Cloudability for about a year and a half or just under a year and a half.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not experienced any stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not experienced any scalability issues. It absorbs our new accounts quite easily. As for completely new resources, time will tell. We have only had Apptio Cloudability for about seven to eight months, and many people still do not know about it. They know of it, but they have not really used it, and they have not used it in its entirety. It is early days.
How are customer service and support?
The support that we have had throughout has been exemplary. The consultation when we set up Apptio Cloudability was excellent. I worked one-on-one with the consultants for quite a few weeks. I then took over the project to onboarding Apptio Cloudability into the company. The one-to-one relationship I had with the engineers and the project managers from IBM/Apptio Cloudability was second to none. It was always a matter of going out of the way to help us make sure that we had everything set up as we needed so that we could use the product as fast as we could and in the best way that we could. I want to give a shout out to support and the professional services.
I would put support and EC2 right-sizing right up with each other because without the support, it would not have been as easy to understand how to leverage these capabilities and get the most out of Apptio Cloudability to be able to use the EC2 right-sizing ability of Apptio Cloudability and to understand the reporting and the view side. I would definitely be putting the onboarding experience and the consultation experience right up there.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not have any other platform doing proper FinOps. We did have a platform that probably could do some FinOps, but it was not being leveraged properly, and it was not socialized properly. People did not really get it. When you have new leadership that comes into the company that has a preference for a certain product, they normally push that product, especially if they have had favorable and particularly good experiences with that product.
How was the initial setup?
It was fine. It absorbs our new accounts quite easily. As for completely new resources, time will tell. We have only had Apptio Cloudability for about seven to eight months, and many people still do not know about it. They know of it, but they have not really used it, and they have not used it in its entirety. It is early days.
What about the implementation team?
I have been one-on-one with Apptio professional services for a while and I have been pushing a few things and they are coming to fruition. The MCP server for Apptio Cloudability was one that I thought was sorely lacking, but obviously they were working on that in the background and it is in private preview now. It is going to be really interesting to see how we can leverage that and utilize that. I have used an MCP server but I do not think it is necessarily the absolute official MCP of Apptio Cloudability, but it is one that is being used widely. I used it for documentation and it was particularly good.
What was our ROI?
Apptio Cloudability helped us save a million dollars up until the contract renewal. It was a large catalyst to why we were able to get a really good contract renewal with AWS going forward. We needed to save a certain amount of money so that we had it in the budget to have leverage in the CloudOps area.
We reduced our waste by at least twenty percent really quickly because we were able to jump onto EBS snapshots straight away for these sort of things. That saved us anywhere between one hundred fifty and two hundred thousand dollars really fast because we had a lot of snapshots in a lot of accounts. It was just wasted storage. We also had some accounts that were sitting there and needed to be decommissioned. They were non-production accounts but they were taking up a lot of project dollars. Apptio Cloudability helped us ensure that because we could see the cost so clearly, we got these accounts decommissioned as soon as possible, rather than saying we would get to that. It was made a priority because we could see what it was costing us so clearly.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I was consulted on pricing and setup cost because we already had a governance tool that was costing us about seventy thousand dollars a year. I knew that tool had the ability to do pricing and cost savings and efficiencies. I also knew that the company was not leveraging it anywhere near the ability and capacity that it had. When people came to me and asked what I thought about this from a cost perspective, I said I was not sure. The product looked great, but one hundred thousand dollars, I did not know. I think if the only tool you have is Apptio Cloudability, maybe that is a fair pricing. It is very hard for me to judge when it comes to pricing. I did not have a lot to do with the negotiation of buying. I was just consulted a little on what my opinion was on going forward, whether we should get Premium or Apptio Cloudability.
Premium is particularly good with the advanced Turbonomics, but you do pay for that. I think if you are not going to use a lot of the automation that comes with the Turbonomics, with the cost findings and the ability to turn machines on and off and all these different things, it is probably not worth paying for Premium. But if you are going to utilize that, it definitely is worth paying for Premium.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I looked at Vanta in the past, and I looked at CloudCheckr, and there are a few other options we looked at. One of the main reasons that we came down to Apptio Cloudability is mainly because we had new leadership come in, and they had used Apptio Cloudability quite a lot. They really enjoyed the product. They had a relationship with the people pushing the product, not a personal relationship but a work relationship through a vendor relationship with these people before. They thought it was worth bringing in because of such a good experience before, which makes sense. I have seen this happen many times.
What other advice do I have?
If you are a small business and you are thinking about Apptio Cloudability, probably err on the side of Apptio Cloudability rather than Apptio Cloudability Premium. Also, check your pricing models and have a chat with your professional services and sales and the rest of them to find out the best deal you can possibly get because they are very good to deal with. They believe in their product and they want to get a good price for their product, but also they want to make sure that you are happy with their product and utilizing it to the best of your ability. Support has really been good from that perspective.
Apptio Cloudability does not give the ability to have an instant Jira ticket integration with the Turbonomic costings or the advanced costing inside Apptio Cloudability Premium at the moment. You cannot do that in Turbonomic right now. It would be a huge advantage if you could.
I would rate this review as an eight out of ten.