Amazon cloud partner Apptio raises $45 million

Apptio, a start-up that helps big companies like Boeing Co track billions of dollars in technology spending, said on Wednesday that it raised $45 million from institutional investment firms including Janus Capital Group.

T. Rowe Price; The Hillman Company, the investment firm of billionaire Henry Hillman; and existing venture capital backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group, also invested.

Apptio, led by Chief Executive Sunny Gupta, has raised a total of $136 million so far. The previous funding round valued Apptio at about $600 million and this latest round was a "significant" increase on that, Gupta said, while declining to give a specific number.

Apptio is one of a slew of start-ups that have sprouted to help enterprises use cloud computing services more. Apptio is a partner of Amazon Web Services, the cloud business of online retail giant Amazon.com Inc.

AWS, as it is known, is increasingly relying on partners like Apptio to help it lure more big businesses to its cloud.

"Global 2000 companies need a trusted, impartial partner to help them make the transformation to next IT," said Matt McIlwain, a partner at Madrona. "Apptio will be using the capital to extend their market leadership and expand their geographic reach."

Apptio counts almost one-third of companies in the Fortune 100 as customers, including Royal Bank of Scotland, Safeway, Target and Xerox, helping them manage more than $60 billion in annual IT spending.

Apptio helps chief information officers at big corporations compare the cost of renting remote cloud computing services with their own computer systems.

"Every customer wants to compare the cost of AWS with their own cost structure," said Gupta in a recent interview with Reuters. "CIOs trust us to do this type of analysis versus a vendor like AWS which is trying to sell services."

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