HomeStreet Bank traditionally had been more reactive within their IT organization but as their financial asset base grew they realized there was a need to take a more strategic view on IT. Their IT environment had evolved to encompass close to 150 physical and virtual servers with both direct attached and network based storage, predominantly running Windows Server 2003, and over 600 PCs (laptops and desktops).

HomeStreet adopted the Apptio on demand service offering to serve as the foundation for achieving this alignment. By easily importing data on labor, operational costs, and hardware and software spend and depreciation they were able to leverage the intuitive, visual modeling environment and integrated analytics to develop an understanding of where costs were flowing in IT. They then leveraged this insight to define core IT Services such as IT security, application deployment, email, shared services, and IT leadership to better define what they are delivering to the business and associate actual costs with those services. With this model in place they were not only able to understand actual costs, but also track budget forecasts and their performance against key financial and operational metrics by service. In addition they now had a true "Bill of IT" that they could share back with the business to ensure that IT investments were correctly prioritized to add maximum value to the business.