Case Study: Cox Enterprises achieves granular IT cost transparency and optimized technology planning with Apptio

How Cox Plans and Optimizes Technology Across Companies with a Standard Cost & KPI Model

Cox Enterprises, a $17.1B privately held communications and media conglomerate headquartered in Atlanta with ~50,000 employees, faced rising corporate technology costs and fragmentation across its businesses. Independent IT models reported lump-sum costs and used blunt allocation methods, leaving business leaders unable to see application-level run costs, assess multi-year OpEx impacts of projects, control cloud sprawl, or efficiently integrate acquisitions and redundant vendor/contractor portfolios.

Cox adopted Apptio’s TBM solutions and standardized on the ATUM cost taxonomy to create a service-based planning and chargeback model, wire in public/private cloud billing, and deliver consistent KPIs and benchmarking. The result: rapid acquisition integrations (normalized in days), migration of 60% of back‑office workloads to public cloud, reduction of contingent labor from ~150 vendors to 5, consolidation of carriers saving hundreds of thousands annually, informed project funding decisions (and approval for additional operations headcount), and ongoing visibility into cost, consumption and carbon emissions.

Cox Enterprises

Ed Smith

Chief Technology Officer