Synchronise your Technology Spend

ClearCost has been providing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)/ITFM (IT Financial Management)/ITSM (IT Service Management) solutions and tools for twenty years. ClearCost started by releasing our ground-breaking product, Budget Cost Manager, to provide companies with an easier way for organisation’s to manage their IT costs across business units.

Today, ClearCost supports organisations to reimagine their technology function, and its role in helping them meet their overall goals. We provide an extensive array of TBM (Technology Business Management) solutions that work in conjunction with your existing corporate systems.

ClearCost supports and enhances your existing investments in each of the following platforms:

ClearCost transforms the way technology functions operate by providing valuable insights into the allocation of resources to Technologies, Services and Customers. This better enables the synchronisation of technology spend with business strategy, and automation of processes relating to IT performance – including cost transparency, benchmarking, demand management, showback/chargeback, operational performance, and budgeting.

Companies are then well equipped to make quicker, data-driven decisions about managing their technology function – all so that CIOs can focus on what really matters: driving growth for the company!

ClearCost collects raw data from disparate systems (financial, operational, vendor management, project management) and assembles the data using a powerful, IT-centric analytics platform to provide data-driven insights presented in a language the business understands. This intelligence includes IT infrastructure, applications and business services for both on-premises and cloud resources.

ClearCost offers a comprehensive IT Financial Management platform which works with your existing systems in a mutually beneficial way.

ClearCost integrates data from your current corporate financial systems such as Oracle, SAP, Technology One and NetSuite, to maintain the essential ‘source of truth’ for financial data and then extend it into the world of Service Financials.

ClearCost’s proven and robust IT cost modelling architecture categorises disparate data and aligns it to the products and services provided by IT and consumed by the business. Thus we have verified company financial data integrated with IT operational data producing analytics across services, assets, projects and vendor charges (including the all-important cloud billing).

By integrating the multiple disparate sources of data into empirical views of IT enabled value, ClearCost empowers Technology, Finance and Business leaders to make better, data-driven decisions by articulating the business capabilities delivered from the IT investment, the essence of a true ROI baseline.

ClearCost delivers these capabilities via a powerful, IT-focused analytics platform and cost modeling architecture based on best practices developed from over two decades of ITFM expertise & wisdom. ClearCost supports IT leaders to improve cost transparency, to inform what every dollar spent delivers.

ERP, GL and Accounting systems were never designed to manage the business of IT, a business based on technology capacity meeting business service demand.

Managing the business of IT encompasses an understanding and quantification of platform capacity, complex vendor arrangements for cloud and hybrid technology platforms, service creation, management and delivery, demand profiling, benchmark analytics and IT investment planning and management. Without the necessary operational inputs, optimising IT cost quality, using simplistic tools like spreadsheets over multi-million dollar spends of incredible complexity, is simply not possible nor practical.

ClearCost has been praised by customers for bridging the gap with their existing ERP and CPM tools to provide the infrastructure, application and business service views needed to manage the business of IT.

ClearCost can be used with any existing BI and visualisation tool including SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, PowerBI and Tableau. These traditional business intelligence solutions can then be combined with ERP and ClearCost data warehouses to provide consolidated high-level views of corporate data.

ClearCost Advanced Analytics includes all the visualisation and data discovery capabilities of next-gen BI tools in addition to an IT-specific cost-modeling architecture. It is used to combine high-level corporate data with IT operational data and provide the analytics that IT organisations need to make informed, strategic decisions and optimise spend.

ClearCost Integrates with your existing ITSM system, including ServiceNow.

IT Service Management tools (e.g., ServiceNow, BMC) are used as an important data source of operational and infrastructure data used by ClearCost. The industry’s Service Management tools are designed to help manage IT operations, and until recently, have not been expanded to offer IT Financial Management reporting.

While Service Management tools are an important component in the
IT business management eco-system, they have yet to offer the critical capabilities that the ‘pure play’ ITFM systems offer. ClearCost integrates with and works alongside Service Management systems to exchange relevant data, ensuring a ‘best at breed’ architecture for the IT business.

The ITFM functions of cost optimisation, benchmarking, chargeback/showback, and planning are complicated and require data from both financial and operational systems to be successful.

ClearCost merges your existing ERP, CPM and Business Intelligence data with IT Ops data to intuitively deconstruct these shared costs so they can be allocated confidently.

ClearCost presents a pre-built, IT aligned, unified view of IT financial and operational data, allowing you access to unparalleled visibility while uncovering compelling insights, facilitating actionable transparency and enabling your IT business to always know where it stands alongside peers and industry. This powerful combination of enhanced capabilities makes ClearCost’s ITFM platform the smart choice to pair with existing tools and data.

Attempts to achieve the outcomes delivered by an ITFM solution using financial systems or spreadsheets are prone to error, labour intensive, anti-social and hard to duplicate on a monthly or quarterly basis due to continuous change within IT.

ClearCost enables Technology leaders more easily and effectively manage and communicate the cost, quality and value of the IT services they deliver to their organisation.

Choosing ClearCost will allow your business to leverage existing investments in data within ERP, CPM, BI and visualisation tools, along with IT operational data, to drive cost optimisation and benchmarking, create transparency, confidently provide showback/chargeback and view the fully burdened total cost of ownership (TCO) for your technology organisation.

ClearCost provides a built-in data modeling architecture and metrics developed on ITFM Best Practices and years of industry-specific expertise.

As an organisation currently leveraging your Enterprise financial and ERP tools, you understand the value of using best-in-class tools to manage the most critical parts of your business. Our customers use ClearCost to extend the reach of corporate systems data to address the unique and specialised information needs of running the business of IT.

ClearCost has over 20 years’ experience with a track record of enabling CIOs to capture, and CFOs to understand, the full value of their technology investments.

To learn more about ClearCost and how you and your organisation can benefit from TBM, please visit the ClearCost website or the ClearCost blog at clearcost. software.