Q&A with new Jaggaer CEO (Part 2): Merging its history and making a mark on the future

“Jaggaer has a wealth of information,” said new Jaggaer CEO Jim Bureau. “Over the past 25 years, we’ve gathered more and more data to build intelligence upon, and it’s incumbent upon us to be able to tap into that information in a meaningful way so that we securely provide appropriate instructions to our customers to enable them to be proactive with it.”

In a Q&A with Spend Matters Founder Jason Busch, Bureau outlined the suite provider’s plans after three big changes this year: all of its solutions are now on a single platform called Jaggaer One, it got a new owner over the summer and the change in leadership a few weeks ago that elevated Bureau.

In Part 1 of this series, he focused on customers and Jaggaer’s global view.

In Part 2, Bureau discusses Jaggaer’s partner network and looks further into the company’s future to discuss what its products will look like and what the company hopes to accomplish.

Q&A with CEO Jim Bureau

Jason Busch: If we think about the current assets today and the opportunities to drive full integration through Jaggaer One, how do you see that impacting customers?

Jim Bureau: We made a big effort in 2019, particularly at the beginning of the year, to put all of the assets that we have onto the Jaggaer One platform. This enables us to take advantage of end-to-end synergies from the business processes performed by the various modules. So today, when we look at our customer base, I’ve got very large multinational organizations that are getting benefits from all the modules that used to be Bravo, SciQuest, Pool4Tool or CombineNet — all of these assets are interacting seamlessly on the Jaggaer One platform. It’s very satisfying to see those deployments up and running, utilizing the infrastructure that we’ve put together over the course of the last nine months.

As you can probably appreciate, it hasn’t been easy. It never is, but the effort has really started to pan out for us, and these customers are seeing the value. It’s also really important for us that every one of the assets that we currently have and that we have moving forward plug into the infrastructure. Customers should never see a lapse in service in any way. Great customer experience is a core Jaggaer value, and we will absolutely adhere to that in the future.

From a go-to-market standpoint today, the systems integrator partner ecosystem has been a real enabler of the growth of some of your peers.  A number of the larger systems integrators (SIs) will go to market for specific opportunities with a single vendor, pitching together. So I’m curious: How important is the SI consulting ecosystem for Jaggaer today and for tomorrow?

Of the various initiatives we have going across our company, this is probably one of the most important now. If you go back two years at Jaggaer, all of the assets that we had were really focused on making sure customers had one entity to go to do an implementation. And while that’s been great, and we’ve been able to ensure we’ve got long-lasting customer success, the reality is that partners are in every one of these customers already, and they’re working hand-in-hand with those customers.

We therefore have a current initiative whereby we involve a partner in some way with every single opportunity. Now, Jaggaer may assist in that effort to ensure that those projects are moving along appropriately, but every opportunity will involve a partner. This is great for the partner ecosystem because Jaggaer offers a broad range of comprehensive solutions; so, if I’m an Accenture or BearingPoint or Deloitte, there are plenty of opportunities for me to work with Jaggaer customers to optimize the full depth and breadth of what Jaggaer offers.

As opposed to just doing a quick P2P solution that has got some value but not as much as a comprehensive solution, the value proposition that we add to the partner community and our customers is to do true end-to-end, which often requires some change management. We are therefore working very closely with each of our partners, and that is a material initiative and a material change. In fact, over the past two years, we’ve more than doubled our partner engagements.

Let’s do some future-casting. Imagine it’s the start of 2023 — where has Jaggaer made its mark and how did you get there?

Where Jaggaer will have made its mark, if we’re successful three years from now, is in having changed the dynamics of how users interact with the system. The best UI is no UI — being able to interact with systems in a meaningful way so that you’re not hunting and pecking. Information should be served up to you.

Jaggaer has a wealth of information. Over the past 25 years we’ve gathered more and more data to build intelligence upon, and it’s incumbent upon us to be able to tap into that information in a meaningful way so that we securely provide appropriate instructions to our customers to enable them to be proactive with it.

I think that’s going to be a material difference to the way in which procurement systems are used today. Today, there are often disparate systems all over the place. Sometimes customers use Jaggaer for one thing and another supplier for other things. And the question is how do you allow your customers to be able to tap into intelligence regardless of the infrastructure they have in place? If we’re successful three years from now, it’ll be because we were able to deliver on this better than anybody.

Is there anything we’ve missed in this or that you’d like to share?

Well, our customers are fantastic, but the one thing that I haven’t touched upon as much as I could or should is Jaggaer employees.

Jaggaer employees are a unique bunch. We have some core values at Jaggaer that are just really important in everything that we do. It’s having a passion for what you do, having empathy for the customer, being transparent in everything that we do, and being accountable.

Folks who work at Jaggaer show up with those four core values, and they’re really at the heart of everything that we do. So, whether it’s any kind of internal communication, customer communication, analyst communication, everything falls back to one of those four core values. And they really serve our vision.

We have a vision to transcend the customer experience, and to simplify the complex by providing an intuitive, intelligent, SaaS-based spend management solution. Really, it goes to providing unparalleled user adoption and customer success. And that’s why Jaggaer employees come to work every day, and everybody knows it and breathes it and lives it. And it’s a fun thing to do when you see it in your employee base, so it’s quite exciting at the moment.