Every department in a big company had a system for its numbers except the one that ran the computers. Apptio set out to fix that. The Bellevue, Washington company sold software that pulled together data on servers, software licenses, cloud bills and staff, then showed chief information officers what each service cost. It called the field Technology Business Management. When Apptio filed in 2016, cloud spending was rising fast and getting harder to track.

Accounting for the CIO

Sunny Gupta co-founded Apptio and became chief executive in October 2007. He had just sold his previous startup, iConclude, to Opsware. Apptio built a set of cloud applications for IT cost transparency, benchmarking, planning and a Bill of IT that charged costs back to business units. The bet was that technology chiefs wanted to run their departments like a business, with the same hard numbers a finance chief used.

Sixteen Dollars, Then Vista

Apptio priced at $16 a share in September 2016 and listed on the Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol APTI. Two years later Vista Equity Partners agreed to buy it for $38 a share in cash, a deal valued at about $1.94 billion. Apptio left Nasdaq in January 2019. In 2023 Vista sold the company to IBM for about $4.6 billion, and Apptio became part of IBM's software business.

Cover: The Tribute Money, Rembrandt van Rijn. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for counting the tribute money (cost accounting).