Apptio to Meter Private Cloud Costs

Apptio, a provider of IT finance management tools delivered as a service, is launching a new Private Cloud Business Management solution. Apptio says the tool, which integrates with VMware and other cloud-based ITsystems, provides a "charge by metered consumption" model based on the total cost of the cloud service.

According to Apptio, a workable metered charge model for cloud cost management is a key step in developing private cloud deployments, which in turn help make cloud deployments an integral part of the IT environment.

As companies move beyond traditional virtualization to adopt private clouds, Apptio says IT organizations must be able to chargeback business units for cloud services based on consumption. To do this, IT organizations must understand the nature of those services, as well as the fully loaded cost to deliver those services, and the consumption of those services by each line of business.

Integrating with a variety of cloud-based IT systems, Private Cloud Business Management is designed to incorporate contributing costs such as virtual and physical servers, labor, facilities, software and other infrastructure based on the consumption of resources to provide enterprises with a total cost of ownership for private cloud services.

In addition to driving chargeback processes, Apptio says its new cloud management application can also quantify return on investment (ROI) and return on assets (ROA), service quality metrics, resource utilization metrics and demand management, and capacity planning.

While cloud-based enterprise computing is a “virtual” activity, it carries with it very real costs that are not always easy to quantify or track. By presenting cloud computing in a pay-per-use model that is becoming increasingly popular in an IT universe dominated by service-based deployments, Apptio is bringing the cloud one step closer to earth.