Apptio, an IBM company, has announced the availability of AI TCO & Usage and Hybrid IT TCO Impact, two features designed to empower enterprises to take control of their hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and to ultimately drive increased ROI from AI and hybrid IT investments.

With AI TCO & Usage, teams can actively monitor spend and performance across AI initiatives to help drive measurable business value. Hybrid IT TCO Impact provides finance teams with visibility into the financial impacts from migrating applications across hybrid environments. The new offerings join Apptio's slate of SaaS solutions for Technology Business Management (TBM), which encompasses IT financial management (ITFM), FinOps, and strategic portfolio management (SPM), collectively designed to align organizational IT strategy to business value and outcomes.

While AI investments have become a strategic priority, only 25% of surveyed CEOs in an IBM CEO Study say their initiatives delivered the expected ROI over recent years. To maximize the impact of AI, organizations need clear visibility into not only costs and usage, but also the intended value and ROI. AI TCO & Usage addresses this need by helping users track and optimize their AI initiatives, offering transparency into ongoing costs, consumption, and data-driven business decisions.

At the same time, 73% of surveyed organizations in the same IBM CEO study are embracing hybrid cloud to support AI deployments, making demonstrable ROI even more critical. FinOps teams are increasingly collaborating with IT financial management and technology business management teams to obtain deeper visibility into investments and minimize the risks of ballooning costs and wasted resources within their hybrid IT environment.

To help address potential blind spots in cost visibility, IBM Apptio's Hybrid IT TCO Impact provides comprehensive cost visibility, enabling companies to track application TCO and unit rates across environments, and adjust strategies to reduce costs and enhance efficiency amid constantly evolving migration needs.

"These solutions are built to fill critical gaps in enterprise TBM, to give organizations greater agility to stay on top of the constantly shifting cloud and AI landscapes," said Eugene Khvostov, Chief Product Officer, Apptio. "AI TCO & Usage is designed to solve the AI ROI dilemma, and we developed Hybrid IT TCO Impact to support technology decision makers on their overall hybrid cloud strategy. Both solutions are specifically tailored to address some of the industry's most pressing needs, including IT cost transparency and demonstrating value, and we're excited to bring them to market."

AI TCO & Usage enables organizations to track total cost and business impact across AI initiatives, helping them optimize spend, measure outcomes, and scale. With active visibility, users can make more informed investment decisions, enable solution adoption, and maximize the impact of AI across the organization. Additionally, users can:

• Monitor the lifecycle of their AI investments, providing defensible transparency into ongoing AI costs and usage across AI models and AI solutions.
• Proactively get ahead of AI sprawl by continuously monitoring AI TCO trends and anomalies, obtaining visibility into detailed cost drivers - cloud, vendor, labor - while surfacing AI usage and user adoption across business units.
• Drive more informed AI scaling decisions by assessing unit economics and enable responsible AI consumption and show back across their organization.

Hybrid IT TCO Impact is a solution available for IBM Apptio Costing that helps enterprises demonstrate the financial impact of application migrations across their evolving Hybrid IT landscape, featuring:

• Financial Visibility: Provides a dedicated financial view into application migrations, tracking cost shifts and ROI across the hybrid IT landscape. Informed by this data, organizations can balance costs across cloud and on-prem infrastructure.
• Single-Pane Management: Unifies on-prem, private cloud, and public cloud footprints into a single view, delivering visibility into the hybrid IT estate.
• End-to-End Insights: Enables active tracking of migration progress, supporting alignment with broader cloud business and financial goals.

"The growing complexity of cloud deployments and increasing investment in AI are making IT cost optimization an increasingly elusive target," said Jevin Jensen, IDC research vice president, Intelligent Cloud and FinOps. "TCO features are needed across both public and hybrid clouds to stay on top of the constant changes and plan more proactively."

Hybrid IT TCO Impact and AI TCO & Usage are both available today.