Creating a new market category is not easy, but Apptio’s new approach to IT has earned acclaim in some of the world’s largest organisations.

With 35 of the Fortune 100 companies now adopting Apptio’s technology business management (TBM) SaaS applications, the company, and its philosophy of running technology like a business, has gained praise from some of the world’s leading CIOs.

It even has an impressive independent CIO user group on its side. After founding the TBM Council to promote its new model of IT management, Apptio released the community as a separate, non-profit organisation in the summer of 2012.

The Council, whose 1,000+ members include the IT heads of Facebook, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner and Coca-Cola, now operates predominantly to share best practices and experiences in the field, but remains a large advocate of TBM solutions.

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In November, it held its first TBM Conference in Seattle, which attracted over 400 CIOs and their direct reports, while December saw 70 turn up for a summit in London.

Information Age caught up with Apptio’s CEO, Sunny Gupta, to discuss the progress of TBM and the challenges of inventing a new market category. 

This new approach is of course born to cater for the much-discussed changing role of the CIO.

The transformation of the CIO over the last decade has seen it become a vital and strategic ingredient in the success of an organisation.

The end-to-end visibility afforded to the position provides invaluable insight into how a business is run, while technology’s function as driver and enabler of everything the company does puts the CIO at the heart of the organisation.

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But the pace of change has created a massive challenge for CIOs to adapt.

According to Gupta, the rise of cloud means CIOs must become ‘brokers’ of services who no longer focus on a technology agenda, but a wider business strategy.