Dive Brief:

• Apptio, an IBM company, is preparing to fully roll out a new virtual assistant designed to support professionals, including corporate finance leaders, who play a key role in managing their organization’s cloud-related costs, according to a recent announcement.
• The tool, which is currently being tested as a beta product with select customers, is poised to reach the “general availability” stage by early 2025, or possibly before the end of this year, Eugene Khvostov, Apptio's chief product officer, said in an interview.
• “We’re going to continue to collect feedback and refine some of the capabilities,” he said.

Dive Insight:

Apptio announced earlier this year that it was testing the AI assistant.

The tool is among several new features joining Apptio’s FinOps suite, according to a press release issued by the company last week. FinOps refers to a practice aimed at helping businesses to optimize the financial performance of their cloud computing infrastructure.

Apptio is also beefing up its Cloudability product with a new feature — currently available in beta form — that is designed to allow users to more proactively optimize costs for software development applications like GitHub before overruns arise, the release said.

The company also announced the introduction of new carbon emissions reporting metrics in Cloudability to help FinOps teams “quantify environmental impact alongside cost impact for their cloud deployments.”

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% to total $678.8 billion in 2024, up from $563.6 billion in 2023, according to Gartner.

Nearly three-quarters of organizations are struggling to optimize their cloud spending, with over half anticipating a change to their cloud strategy in response to cost pressures, according to survey findings published in June by tech consultancy Esynergy.

The challenge is fueling a growing market, as more and more companies turn to FinOps software vendors like Apptio, which was acquired by IBM last year for $4.6 billion. Apptio’s competitors include VMware, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2023 for $69 billion.  

Cloudability, one of the products that IBM acquired in the Apptio acquisition, is designed to help businesses monitor, analyze and optimize their cloud spend.

Powered by generative artificial intelligence, Apptio’s new virtual assistant is capable of helping customers pinpoint trouble spots more quickly by addressing targeted questions such as which teams in the organization are driving up cloud costs the most, according to Khvostov.

“We’ve been able to provide really great answers for questions like that,” he said. “The next frontier is: what do I do now? How do I make sure the teams that were over budget get back to budget? Customers are really pushing us to provide better, more actionable answers. So that’s one area we’re really focused on.”

Customers also want to feel assured they’re working with a tool that can be trusted to handle such sensitive tasks with “transparency and safety at the forefront,” Khvostov added.