Apptio unveiled an application to centralise IT budget planning yesterday.
The SaaS firm is targeting CIOs and IT managers with its all-in-one budgeting and forecasting app, IT Planning Foundation (ITPF), which aims to help them tie technology spend to business priorities.
The company claims the tool removes the need for IT pros to juggle several different spreadsheets when planning the annual technology budget, using an interactive plan management system to connect different teams’ operating and capital budgets into one central plan.
US broadcaster DirectTV is using the tool in preview, and technology manager Matt Temple said: "In the past, IT budgeting was a months-long, manual, iterative, and costly process.
"Our early experiences with Apptio’s IT planning application have exceeded our expectations. We will have the ability to simply and quickly create one central IT budget that gives our team back the time they need to focus on innovation."
The release comes after Gartner recommended firms align their IT budgets with business planning back in a March report titled Align IT Budgeting With the Enterprise Strategic Planning Process to Drive More Value.
It said: "Often, the IT budgeting process is a detailed, line-item-driven exercise that fails to align with enterprise objectives. CIOs and IT leaders can increase the value that IT delivers by integrating the IT budgeting process with the enterprise strategic planning process."
And Sunny Gupta, Apptio CEO, on stage at the TBM Conference, said yesterday: "ITPF represents a new class of purpose-built, process-oriented applications that are easy to on-board and produce results quickly.
"IT is now able to connect the dollars of their financial plan to their ‘run grow transform’ strategy instead of wrestling with spreadsheets."
