The market
Most enterprises compare tools from three markets. Each was built for a different owner and a different set of data, which explains where it stops.
Built for the finance plan across the whole business.
They see technology as lines in a budget. Allocation is light, so the plan seldom reaches the service, the application or the team that used the money.
Built for the estate IT owns, costed from the ledger on the TBM taxonomy.
They stop at the edge of IT. Cloud is arriving in some of them as a later addition.
Built for metered cloud spend, read from the provider’s bill.
Mostly cloud. The people who build and run technology are left out, and allocation to the business stays shallow.
Built for every technology cost: consumed, owned and human.
One model across all three, with AI and labor in it from the start, reconciled to the accounts finance already uses.
Some vendors now own a tool in more than one of these markets. Owning both halves is not the same as joining them. Two products with two sets of rules still need a reconciliation job between them, and that job usually falls to the customer.
Where we lead
Cloud, AI, software, data platforms, infrastructure, devices and the people who run them sit on one set of definitions, so finance, IT and the business read the same number.
Forrester wrote that “MagicOrange’s enterprise financial management concept anticipates the necessity for ITFM platforms to bring in costs outside of technology to effectively govern the full costs and benefits of AI transformation.”
See the platformPick any number and follow it down through every allocation that made it, to the ledger line, the invoice or the metered event underneath. All-Back shows the whole path in one view.
Forrester gave MagicOrange the highest score in the evaluation for cost transparency model building and found it has “the cleanest cost transparency model-building interface in this evaluation.”
Follow the traceThe same engine allocates shared services outside IT, so HR, logistics and property can be costed on the model that costs the technology.
A global retail group runs one shared services model across 34 brands, spanning IT, HR and logistics. The Foschini Group measures total cost of ownership across IT, logistics and property.
See Enterprise Allocation ModelingLabor is the largest line in real technology cost, and cloud cost tools leave it out. MagicOrange captures it from the plan to the timesheet to the allocated cost, in the same terms as the cloud bill.
See Time Capture and Resource PlanningThe model produces what finance needs from it: VAT recovery, IFRS 17 reporting, transfer pricing and chargebacks posted back into the general ledger.
A major European bank improved VAT recovery by EUR 1.5m. A global financial services organization cut processing and reconciliation time by over 40% while establishing IFRS 17 compliant reporting.
See IFRS 17, VAT and transfer pricingData Studio, Analytics and AI Studio come with every capability, so you do not buy a separate integration layer or a separate reporting license to make the model work.
Forrester gave MagicOrange its top score for pricing flexibility and transparency.
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Category standard
Some things every serious tool on your shortlist should do. MagicOrange does them well, and we would rather say so plainly than dress them up as something rare.
Where we stop
A shortlist is easier to trust when each vendor says where it stops. These are the places we do.
Mapping your source fields to the standard objects is done by hand today, and there is no visual lineage graph yet. The audit log gives an auditor the trace they ask for, but not yet the picture a governance team would like to see.
See Data StudioNo customer has a multi-year AI cost result to publish yet, because the practice is so new. Our published results prove allocation and reconciliation at enterprise scale, and AI now sits on that same model.
See the published resultsMagicOrange works to the TBM taxonomy, but the Council’s benchmarking programs are the Council’s own, and we leave them there.
See how we use TBMCommon questions
Good, because that is where the work starts. The next question a board asks is what the spend returned. MagicOrange traces each cost to the service and the business unit it paid for, so the return can be booked against the same accounts as the cost.
Keep it. Usage data from a data platform or an AI gateway is a good input, and MagicOrange reads it. What MagicOrange adds is the rest: the same tokens priced against the service and the team that used them, on the model that holds the rest of your technology spend.
You could build the screens. The harder part is the model underneath: what an application is, who consumes it, how a shared cost is split so that every dollar is accounted for. The enterprises that have spoken publicly about building their own took years to reach numbers the business trusted. MagicOrange arrives with that model already defined.
Bring a number you answer for. We will show you the trace.
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