What does it cost to host a client?
Our team which is now the TBM office was plagued with this question. It was a question that drove us towards TBM and ultimately towards Apptio. We got excited at the possibility of being able to assign an all-inclusive cost to our services and then show who was consuming them. However, we wanted to take it a step further and expand the capabilities of Apptio to our client list.
Prior to Apptio, a client owner would come to us and need an estimate of the cost to host a specific client in our data centers either for Client Level Profitability (CLP) analysis or cloud hosting comparisons. Once we understood the scope of the request, we would have to gather information from the infrastructure teams, the software team, FP&A, and others to build out the analysis. The process took anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks and once completed was immediately outdated. The analysis wasn't easy to refresh, and results could vary depending on the analyst. We needed the maintainability, consistency, and ease of access that an Apptio based analysis offered.
With Apptio, we can update our analysis monthly with minimal effort. Client owners now have access to not only current month costs, but historical costs as well. We can even provide client owners with the servers tied to their clients and the storage allocated to them by storage device. What Apptio allowed us to create was the cost portion of a CLP statement, our hope is that we can bring in client revenue soon to create a true CLP analysis.
I have outlined the steps we took to achieve client level reporting in the below slide deck. Enjoy!
#ApptioforAll#ACE