Apptio has unveiled Cloud Financial Planning, intended to equip cloud leaders with the ability to create accurate, driver-based forecasts.

The leading-edge offering provides these forecasts by accounting for planned future spending, shifts in priorities and other cost drivers. As a result, these cloud spend forecasts are more dependable and defensible.

The 2022 State of FinOps Report states that the vast majority of FinOps practitioners currently face disjointed processes to build their cloud forecasts, leaving them to rely on ad-hoc collaborative planning methods, siloed information, and ill-fitted tooling, resulting in a lack of team ownership, visibility, and flexibility in their planning.

Apptio notes that it has built its expertise by partnering with more than 1,800 global customers to solve complex investment-planning challenges over the past 15 years.

With the release of Cloud Financial Planning, the technology business management application provider is extending its capabilities to encompass addressing the unique challenges presented by this area of managing a business.

The new offering improves forecasting with business rationale, incorporates priorities across multiple stakeholder groups, and provides the flexibility to accommodate changes as they occur.

Further, instead of only relying on past data to predict future needs, Apptio Cloud Financial Planning captures and analyses team inputs such as detailed cost drivers, new investments and mid-stream changes of plan to provide more accountable forecasts through accurate data and the ability to track spending.

In addition, the offering gives users a collaborative workspace to engage stakeholders throughout the planning phase.

“With Cloud Financial Planning, we’re taking Apptio’s unique expertise and understanding of financial management processes and marrying that with our ability to ingest, interpret, and model cloud usage data,” says Jeremy Ung, Chief Technology Officer, Apptio.

“It’s significant not only because we’re driving innovation in this category, but also because we’re equipping our customers with much-needed tools to support and scale with new technology paradigms. These capabilities will be instrumental in helping decision-makers engage stakeholders in the planning process and automate the consolidation of budget inputs to create accurate financial plans.”

Apptio notes that most organisations ingesting cloud usage reports struggle with implementing effective cloud financial management processes, even if they have a deep understanding of the planning process for this technology.

The company’s latest offering provides the necessary tools that have thus far been lacking when it comes to estimating the costs of individual cloud resources.

These tools give customers the means to create actionable and defensible plans for future cloud deployments, enabling customers to:

Plan for the future

Cloud Financial Planning is the industry’s first tool to recognise that cloud-based workloads behave fundamentally differently than servers and storage. It delivers a comprehensive planning tool for the unique features of these workloads.

Run what/if scenario analyses in the cloud

Unlike solutions that rely on simple inputs or past consumption to generate a linear forecast, now customers can account for expected growth or net-new costs and incorporate scenario analysis and cost optimisation at the planning phase.

Adapt to changing parameters of cloud initiatives

Cloud Financial Planning builds on Apptio’s deep experience and best-in-class financial algorithms to automatically consolidate budget inputs and calculate cloud costs, even in rapidly changing environments.