ITBI as a Lever for Cost Savings in Uncertain Times

In today’s business environment, uncertainty has become the norm rather than the exception. Geopolitical tensions, inflation, and market volatility continue to challenge organizations across industries. As a result, executive leadership teams are sharpening their focus on resilience, efficiency, and cost control.

Recent CEO surveys confirm that efficiency, resilience, and cost control remain top priorities for business leaders navigating geopolitical and economic uncertainty. PwC’s 28th Annual Global CEO Survey (2025) highlights that CEOs continue to invest in technology and operational optimization while preparing their organizations for long-term transformation.

From Cost Cutting to Cost Intelligence

Traditional cost-saving initiatives often focus on reactive measures such as reducing headcount, delaying investments, or renegotiating vendor contracts. While these actions may provide short-term relief, they rarely address the underlying drivers of IT cost. A more sustainable approach starts with understanding where IT costs originate, how they evolve over time, and which business activities drive consumption. This is the essence of cost intelligence.

Solutions such as ITBI help mainframe organizations combine workload analytics, historical consumption patterns, and cost allocation data to identify inefficiencies, understand cost drivers, and make more informed decisions about optimization priorities and future investments. This is particularly relevant in complex mainframe environments, where even small inefficiencies can have a significant impact on infrastructure and software costs. Greater transparency into consumption patterns not only supports optimization efforts but also helps establish a common understanding of cost across IT and business activities.

How ITBI Drives Measurable Savings

Cost Avoidance Through Continuous Optimization
One of the most powerful, yet often underestimated, benefits of ITBI is cost avoidance. One of our customers, a major banking institution, has established a dedicated optimization team with a clear objective of avoiding costs equivalent to one mainframe processor’s capacity every year. Using ITBI, the team continuously monitors workload changes and identifies anomalies.  

When inefficient code or unexpected workload increases are detected, deployment teams are required to optimize before costs escalate. Over time, the organization has consistently met its target. Importantly, while overall usage has remained stable, the bank has avoided the need to invest in additional processing capacity and associated software licenses. This highlights a key point: Cost avoidance is a real saving – it is simply less visible than a reduced monthly bill.

Significant Initial Savings for New Customers
Often large savings are realized when ITBI is first implemented. In one case, a global automotive company reduced its consumption by approximately 10,000 MIPS within the first year. After the initial optimization phase, the organization primarily uses ITBI to maintain control of consumption and prevent inefficient workload growth from reappearing.

Performance Optimization with Cost Benefits
ITBI enables organizations to avoid major infrastructure investments by addressing performance issues and capacity inefficiencies before they escalate.

For example, a large banking institution experienced performance challenges with a negative business impact. Through analysis of workload management (WLM) and traffic distribution, the root cause was identified and resolved, improving performance and potentially avoiding a costly upgrade. In another case, a large automotive importer used ITBI insights to optimize capacity management, particularly around software licensing thresholds. By fine-tuning capacity limits, the organization avoided unnecessary cost increases while maintaining stable performance.

Sustaining the Gains
While significant savings are often achieved during the initial optimization phase, maintaining those gains requires ongoing visibility and governance. One insurance company reduced consumption by approximately 30% over three years despite stable or slightly increasing business volumes.

Key success factors included:

• Establishing ITBI as a single source of truth for cost and capacity
• Ensuring executive-level focus on optimization
• Combining technology insights with operational expertise
• Cross-organizational visibility into cost and consumption

This illustrates that ITBI is not just a tool, but a capability that drives continuous improvement.

Why ITBI Matters Now

In uncertain times, organizations must balance cost discipline with the need to remain competitive. ITBI provides a middle path:

• It enables data-driven decision-making
• It supports continuous, targeted optimization
• It transforms cost management from a periodic exercise into an ongoing capability

Most importantly, it aligns IT operations with business priorities, ensuring that every unit of consumption delivers value. ITBI enables organizations to move from reactive cost cutting to a more proactive approach to cost intelligence and cost optimization – avoiding unnecessary usage and investments, while improving performance.