Overview

The Apptio-LeanIX integration allows top-down and bottom-up analysis of the business technology support in the context of IT cost, criticality, technical & functional fit, and technology risk. The integration allows you to rely on accurate data in your IT Finance Management as relevant IT data is being collected through LeanIX.

Base Integration: The focus on users collaborating in LeanIX contributes to the high data quality – now, users can unlock the full potential of this data quality by efficiently using their key data on the IT landscape within Apptio. Establish a cross-departmental language by contextualizing financial data and achieve total cost visibility.

Advanced Integration Easily showcase the value of IT across your organization and improve the success of Application Portfolio Management, Application Rationalization, Technology Risk Management, and Cloud Migration Projects with high-value analytics of the combined dataset and data pulls from Apptio to LeanIX.

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Both the Base and the Advanced Integration are included in the APM Base Module!

Please contact your Customer Success Manager for instructions and assistance with this integration.

Integration use cases

Application Portfolio Management (APM)

APM is the practice of governing and optimizing inventories of software applications to achieve precise business objectives. This is accomplished by creating transparent overviews of IT application landscapes to standardize software throughout business units, promote agility and innovation, and better evaluate IT costs for development.

By utilizing the integration between Apptio and LeanIX, users can level-up their application portfolio management efforts to:

Application Rationalization

Application portfolio rationalization is the act of streamlining the existing application portfolio with an explicit goal of improving efficiency, reducing complexity, and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) through a myriad of processes. LeanIX stands as the single source of truth for IT data pertaining to business capabilities, applications, IT components, user groups, projects, and providers. Syncing this data to Apptio’s industry-leading cost modeling SaaS solution enables users to broaden their reporting capabilities and dissect reports using different sets of analytics. This provides automated, comprehensive financial reviews and more accurate budget forecasting.

A company in the casino-entertainment industry with nearly $9 billion in global annual revenues synced their LeanIX instance with Apptio to eliminate manual effort and ensure a continuum of accurate data that matches their technology business management (TBM) taxonomy. This led to easy visualization, tracking, and reporting of application costs as they relate to business functions across the enterprise.

For enterprise architects (EAs) working to report up the ladder, and C-level executives examining cost pools across the IT landscape, the integration between Apptio and LeanIX helps the application rationalization process by:

Technology Risk Management (TRM)

Most companies are much better at introducing new technologies than retiring them. When out-of-date systems remain live, it can be a feeding frenzy for cyberattacks or pose a threat of service outages – both of which lead to significant (and costly) disruption of operations. That’s what makes technology risk management so important for maintaining compliance.

The responsibility of TRM largely falls on CIOs and CISOs, but enterprise architects also play a major part. The integration of LeanIX and Apptio helps to minimize migration costs from retiring legacy IT components and reducing the support costs associated with keeping outdated systems live. It does so by empowering EAs to:

Cloud Migration

With most global enterprises adopting a cloud-first strategy, EAs and cloud architects (CAs) have been tasked with managing this widespread transformation and its financial impact on the business. This is especially true when determining which applications, for which business processes, would be best suited by a cloud migration to save costs and improve technical fit. What was once a manual effort of data entry and importing can now be accomplished seamlessly with the dynamic integration of Apptio and LeanIX.

The Apptio-LeanIX integration enables higher levels of collaboration across business and IT stakeholders evaluating cloud transformation strategies. This is accomplished through:

• Streamlining feasibility analysis to determine which applications are viable candidates to be moved to the cloud.
• Structuring the cloud migration plan by looking at application data from multiple angles i.e. technical fit, functional fit, cost, and workload.
• Tracking status of cloud transformation projects and associated costs.

How the LeanIX-Apptio Integration Works

Now that we have established some of the benefits of the out-of-the-box connector between Apptio and LeanIX, let’s take a look at how the holistic link between business, IT, and finance works.

Base Integration

The Base integration of LeanIX and Apptio is available for customers today. Users can unlock the full potential of their IT data by syncing it to Apptio to reveal the true financial impact of their IT landscape. This will empower cross-departmental collaboration through total cost transparency and a shared language when discussing deployed technologies (see image below).

An example of what is already possible to achieve is the LeanIX Enhanced App Review Dashboard in Apptio.

From the Apptio Cost Transparency Dashboard for Applications, you can switch to the LeanIX Enhanced App Review Dashboard. Here, you see Application Cost displayed by Technical and Functional Suitability and can also get a deeper look at Application Spend either by Functional or Technical Suitability and as seen over time.

For example, take note of the decreasing amount of Application Spend for items with an Inappropriate Technical Fit:

Switching to the GDPR tab next, you can find what percentage of the applications are GDPR compliant. So, you might want to prioritize ensuring those compliance policies.

Advanced Integration

This release enables financial data to be pulled from Apptio into LeanIX, giving customers a combined dataset with accuracy in both platforms. Customers will also be able to analyze time-based cost metrics in LeanIX.

Breakdown of Key Features