This week our guest is Jim Bureau, CEO of Jaggaer. He’s carving out a niche for an all-in-one solution, at a time when best of breeds are gaining market share. I’m known as a bit of a best of breed fanboy, so Jim is stepping into the dragon’s den, here!


I welcome Jim to the podcast, congratulate him for his bravery, and ask him about the challenges of offering a full suite solution in a tough market.


Jim says it’s important to acknowledge that, while companies may want to commit strongly to either best of breed or full suite solutions, the reality is that most companies end up using a mix of different tech approaches.

He goes on to talk about the importance of user experience. Whether a solution is best of breed or wider in scope, the thing that users pick up on is the experience. And that’s what Jaggaer focuses on.

The future landscape for established suites

I ask what Jim expects to see in the future for established suites like Jaggaer. Does he expect things to become more modular? Is that a direction he’s thinking of following with Jaggaer?

Jim says that the reason why full suites exist in the first place is that it’s expensive to tie things together. He thinks that simplicity is key here, and that this question brings up two important initiatives for Jaggaer at the moment.

One is creating an environment and ecosystem of partners that allows people to have suite systems while being able to plug niche, innovative vendors into that - quickly, easily and without requiring a lot of IT spend. Jaggaer allows customers to share third party modules and products that can easily be plugged in.

Secondly, Jim is also working on something called Jaggaer Compose. This allows the customer and partner community to build out business processes that are specific to a niche or industry, and can then be shared amongst one another. He believes this will completely change the game on how people interact with these systems today. 

It will officially be launched at the end of Q2.

A Pick and Mix approach

I ask Jim if he sees a future where customers can take a more  “pick and mix” approach. For example, let’s imagine a consumer thinks that an external spend analytics product is stronger than what Jaggaer can offer. Is that something that they could, as part of their RFP, specifically request? 

Jim says that, for any CEO, no-one wants to forgo business! But he accepts that this is how most companies want to work.

Jim has spent a lot of time and effort on Jaggaer’s autonomous commerce platform. Autonomy is important, and true autonomy comes from embracing sources outside of your own system - taking information from sources like TealBook or EcoVadis, and working that into your machine learning. There are so many sources of information out there, and you’re never going to own everything.

I agree that you can’t be...