While the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz may be best known as an investor in major successes such as Slack, Airbnb and Instacart, its very first investment turned out fairly well too.

That would be Apptio Inc., provider of hybrid business management software for the IT industry, which was acquired by IBM Corp. earlier this year for $4.6 billion in cash. The purchase by IBM reflected the company’s interest in Apptio’s value proposition for the hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence.

“We’ve been very focused on driving our hybrid cloud agenda since the Red Hat acquisition back in 2019,” said Bill Lobig (pictured, right), vice president of IBM automation product management at IBM Corp. “Over that time, we’ve been continuing to focus on using artificial intelligence to optimize the management of dispersed IT assets across hybrid clouds. [Apptio] now allows us to not only help our clients accelerate the deployment of their hybrid cloud solutions … but this all is being done with a guarantee that you’re getting optimal value and ROI from your IT spend. That’s what Apptio brings to the equation.”

Lobig spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rebecca Knight at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Eugene Khvostov (left), chief product officer of Apptio, an IBM Company, and they discussed how Apptio will add value-driven awareness for organizations in the hybrid cloud.

Strengthening IT resources

The acquisition of Apptio was designed to address an increasingly complex situation where companies with hybrid IT environments must focus on the management of security, infrastructure and cost-optimization for workload placement.

“What I’m hearing is that hybrid cloud drives an extraordinarily high degree of complexity that didn’t exist before,” Lobig said. “The amount of collaboration and insight and sophistication that needs to be managed is extraordinary. What we want to do through these synergies of Apptio and IBM is make optimal financially responsible, value driven performance-aware technology part of the fabric of your applications from the onset. That is the north star we’re driving at.”

For Apptio, which was founded in 2007, the integration with IBM was a marriage between two companies with a similar vision for broadening and strengthening resources in IT organizations.

“We pride ourselves in showing the value that technology brings, things like unit economics and really advanced capabilities, and IBM also has that same approach,” Khvostov said. “It became more apparent that Apptio’s philosophy and approach to democratizing access to technology IT resources, irrespective of where you’re using them or how you’re using them, was aligned.”

Synergy with Turbonomic and AWS

The opportunity for cost savings through the use of Apptio’s technology will help IBM’s clients in the financial operations arena. This can extend to services offered by Red Hat on Amazon Web Services, according to Khvostov.

“AWS and IBM are also partners …we’re adding that third leg of the stool,” Khvostov said. “One of the first things we brought to market around the acquisition time was the ability to manage and look at the cost associated with Red Hat OpenShift clusters running on AWS. You’re going to see more of that.”

Two of the IBM portfolio elements now in the mix for clients interested in managing AWS services are Turbonomic and Cloudability. Turbonomic is an application resource management platform that leverages AI to help customers optimize public cloud environments. The technology was acquired by IBM in 2021. Cloudability is Apptio’s cloud financial management platform designed to improve visibility and governance across different cloud environments.

“Cloudability savings automation allows you to go hands-off with your AWS reservation portfolio and have us take on the task of managing that,” Khvostov explained. “Turbonomic is really intended to help AWS customers ensure that their applications, running on the AWS footprint that they have, continue to be performant and cost effective. There’s going to be increasing opportunities for AWS customers and AWS partners to layer into that platform that we’ve built and create those applications and products that will change the game for how you as an AWS customer will manage your resources.”

This ability to manage resources and costs in the cloud is an important focus for IBM as it pursues its hybrid agenda through acquisition. Turbonomic brings IT asset optimization into the picture, which will complement Apptio’s financial management capabilities as well.

“We’ve also got great ideas around how we can drive quantifiable perspectives into business and work management and really make everything it does a value driver, not a cost center,” Lobig said. “Just like DevOps broke down silos between developers and operations people, FinOps is about breaking down silos between finance and operations people. In the hybrid cloud world that IBM is leading in and driving, the spend information in an OpEx world is completely decentralized to operations and engineering people. This is about connecting all of those threads and getting IT teams to work collaboratively across IT and spend data.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE