According to a MarketsandMarkets report, the global cloud-based ITSM industry is expected to grow 15% annually over the next five years to be worth $8.78 billion in 2021. Bellevue, Washington-based Apptio (Nasdaq: APTI), which listed last year is trying to make its mark in this industry.

Apptio’s Financials

Apptio was founded by Sunny Gupta, Kurt Shintaffer, and Paul McLachlan with the intention of offering a service that could help the CIOs of organizations manage the business of technology more efficiently. It soon developed a platform that integrates Cost Transparency, IT Planning, IT Benchmarking, Bill of IT, and Business Insights SaaS applications into a service that helps align technology investments to business priorities, engage business stakeholders to drive accountability and value, and optimize and increase efficiency of hybrid IT resources. Its service is able to automatically aggregate, cleanse, and establish relationships across disparate financial, operational, and vendor invoices and map that data into its standard IT cost model. It claims that the deployment of its platform helps IT organizations channel 3-5% of their spending over five years into innovation that is more strategically aligned with the broader goals of the business.

Apptio recently reported its first quarter results for the year that surpassed market expectations. Revenues for the quarter increased 19% over the year to $36.2 million driven by a 20% growth in subscription revenues. Services revenues grew 18% over the year to $7.7 million. Adjusted net loss of $0.08 per share was better than the Street’s forecast of a loss of $0.12 per share.

Apptio’s continued losses are attributed to its high expenditure on R&D and sales and marketing. During the last quarter, R&D spend increased 15% to $9.7 million and sales and marketing spend grew 17% over the year to $19 million.

For the current quarter, Apptio forecast revenues of $43.5-$44 million and it projected the year’s revenues between $179-$182 million.

Apptio’s Expanding Offerings

Meanwhile, Apptio continues to improve its product offering. During the quarter, it announced the launch of a new Interactive Benchmarking product that will have the ability to customize peer selections. The enhanced service will offer more flexibility to interact with the entire benchmark dataset, including unique anonymized data from Apptio’s community of customers. It also released a next generation version of its Bill of IT application with the ability to set rates and prices so as to deliver a configurable email “bill” to the business.

Last month, Apptio announced the launch of real-time analytics for managing and optimizing public cloud costs in AWS. The new capability provides IT leaders with real-time visibility into the cost and consumption of public cloud IaaS/PaaS environments alongside details of their on-premise and private cloud investments. The new service will help Apptio extend its lead as the only product capable of managing the cost of ownership of Hybrid IT. It will provide its customers with the ability to view their cloud spend on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis to proactively monitor spend and spot trends. The tool will allow IT to leverage a standard model delivered by Apptio to allocate cloud cost and consumption directly to the infrastructure, applications, and services each business unit consumes.

To help IT leaders manage costs, it is also improving its Cost Transparency application. Recent enhancements will provide new business metrics so that IT leaders will be able to frame technology services in terms of the business impact and financial metrics.

Till September 2016, Apptio was venture funded with $136 million in funding from investors including T. Rowe Price, Shasta Ventures, The Hillman Companies, Madrona Venture Group, Greylock Partners, Janus, 137 Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Cisco. Prior to listing, the company had raised $45 million at a valuation of $600 million in 2013.

Last year in September, Apptio raised $96 million by offering 6 million shares at $16 each, valuing it at $610 million. Since listing, its valuation hasn’t moved significantly. Its stock is currently trading at $17.14 with a market capitalization of $666.5 million. Soon after listing, the stock had touched a high of $24.60. It hasn’t touched that peak since but has recovered from the year low of $10.77 it had fallen to in April this year.