Apptio - Anaplan

tjgaynor

Have any partners or customers encountered an Apptio - Anaplan integration?

At its core, Apptio is an IT budget/spend management tool that seems to do a decent job managing the complexities of a large IT landscape, but integrating that (rather than ripping and replacing) with Anaplan could have some pretty awesome strategic implications for a prospect I am working with. Any details on if and how this has been done by anyone in the ecosystem would be a huge help. 

 

Tristan Gaynor

tristan.gaynor@anavatepartners.com

JaredDolich

@tjgaynor - Tristan,

Great idea. And, one I think was intended by the "Anaplan Plus" concept. To be honest, I haven't had the pleasure of integrating Anaplan to Apptio but I have integrated Anaplan to other planning point solutions. Here are some learnings:

• Ideally, the integration is to a data lake, data mart, or data warehouse, not to each other. This all depends on the "real-time" requirement.
• For this to work, the point solution we integrated to needed to have a robust set of RESTful APIs. So in this case, Apptio would need to have at a minimum a way to export and import. Ideally, a way to force an action or macro.
• A very, very confident ETL practitioner will make a HUGE difference. Integrating planning solutions can potentially have a lot of moving parts outside of Anaplan. Not to mention all the auditing, scheduling, on-demand actions, and transformations that need to occur.
• Consensus on the Master Data - Synchronizing the dimensions in Apptio and Anaplan is paramount. Which, of course, leads to the consensus by stakeholders on the hierarchy definitions. <-- I wouldn't underestimate the effort on this!
• One source of truth. To extend on the master data idea, the master data ideally is in the data lake and is administrated formally by a particular role, possibly IT or business.
• Documentation. While it's rather academic to build the interface, at some point they will break and require support. A well documented integration guide really helped me.
• Error trapping and notifications. As part of the auditing, a well thought out plan to communicate the issues helps a lot.
• Utilize a timestamp. I built a variety of system modules for this, but the idea is that when data is imported to Anaplan it comes with a timestamp. The system module parses the time stamp, but you can use this for some really important auditing, particularly when you need to ensure everything has been accounted for.

Anyway, just some notes on integration. Not exactly what you were looking for so I hope it was helpful.