CASE STUDY
Client: JAGGAER
Service: Cloud Audit & Cloud Cost Optimisation
JAGGAER is a global provider of technology for business spend management. Headquartered in North Carolina, JAGGAER has offices around the world and provides services to leading corporations on every continent. In 2018, Gartner named JAGGAER a Leader in the “Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites” and in its 2018 “Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-pay Suites” (again in 2019 and 2020). JAGGAER was acquired by UK private equity house Cinven in 2019 and began embarking on a large-scale migration to the Cloud.
Cinven is an international private equity firm with a 30-year record of accomplishment, focused on supporting companies that want to step-change their growth. Cinven has offices in nine international locations and their portfolio companies typically have the benefits of scale, product, and price leadership. Given their size, they attract highly capable management teams from around the world.
JAGGAER is made up of several acquisitions. By moving all the different datacentres into the cloud, it would allow JAGGAER to simplify its technology landscape and improve the performance and reliability of their services. When JAGGAER started embarking on a large-scale cloud migration, they were looking for insight into whether it would be possible to reduce the costs associated with such a migration. Their costs were increasing rapidly, and JAGGAER wanted to understand if:
JAGGAER had engaged other consultancies and tool providers to understand the level of opportunity. The consultancies provided very high-level statements without detailing how JAGGAER could make any significant cloud cost savings and were only willing to supply this information once JAGGAER had purchased their services. It was suggested that there was limited scope for optimisations. Capacitas stood out from the other consultancies. We immediately built credibility by providing JAGGAER with science behind the diagnostics that were carried out and could, in turn, guarantee that there were significant savings to be made.
The initial audit was an essential step where Capacitas took a broad overview of JAGGAER’s existing and complex estate – both on prem and on the cloud – to get a very solid understanding of why the architecture had been setup the way it had. This kind of audit involves several ‘discovery workshops’ working alongside the teams, for each product, and asking them to talk through the products, technical requirements, historical user demand, and predicted growth. The Capacitas team then looked at the entire infrastructure to discover whether what we found matched what JAGGAER had shared in the workshops. What we discovered was that most of the time the architecture did match, however, the demand/utilisation did not. The results of the audit were based on our analysis, and it was clear that JAGGAER utilisations were low or different to the expected profiles in comparison to the architecture that had been setup. Capacitas was then able to make some key recommendations on their cost savings.
During the cost optimisation engagements Capacitas guided JAGGAER throughout the implementation of all key recommendations made in the audit. Most of this was achieved through scheduling weekly meetings with each of the JAGGAER teams and walking them through their own utilisation data to illustrate that they did not need to have such an overprovisioned estate. Through our engagements at Capacitas, we often see engineering teams deploy the biggest and the best ‘kit’ and it is easy to understand why. This was mirrored at JAGGAER. However, a change in mindset and culture was quickly adopted and embraced by their teams. They saw and understood that they could still have outstanding performance with less kit. We showed them that by investigating their own data utilisation, much of their infrastructure would drastically improve the plan-driven active utilization of their cloud-based infrastructure. This, coupled with laying the cold hard dollar amounts for the infrastructure side by side with the utilisation profile of each environment, was a realisation moment in terms of the concept of technical efficiency.
From the initial audit we could see that JAGGAER could create a seven-figure saving during the initial 6 months, and we showed them how do to this on a week-by-week and product-by-product basis.
The audit was completed in 4 weeks followed by 2 cost optimisation engagements each lasting 3 months. Capacitas and JAGGAER are currently in the middle of a 4-month transformation engagement which is designed to solidify the cultural shift and continue to make cost efficiencies behaviours part of everyone’s mindset. The collaboration from the JAGGAER teams has been outstanding, and it just proves when the Cloud is done right, it can become rocket fuel for any organisation.
Capacitas has helped JAGGAER to currently stay $2.7M under their predicted annual cloud budget. Another key benefit has been the speed at which we were able to actualise these savings. The shift in mindset and culture across the Jaggaer teams, in terms of how to manage the Cloud, has been outstanding and this has undoubtedly made all the processes easier to complete.
Throughout our engagement with JAGGAER, we had weekly calls with key members of each of the teams to offer support and provide guidance in actualising the above savings. We provided detailed steps for JAGGAER to implement the optimisations and overcome concerns about performance. In addition, Capacitas is delivering comprehensive workshops on cost optimisation and key cloud services and a detailed step-by-step cost optimisation guide. We have also shared in-depth analysis on the performance of key products to help the teams understand efficiency at the application level. In addition, we created executive and technical dashboards so Senior Leadership and Engineers can see their cloud spend broken down by product, services, and areas. JAGGAER top executives are now also much more aware of cost saving areas and these will continue to be part of their on-going cloud strategy.
Capacitas will be providing additional assistance around the performance challenges on the legacy database. There is a 12-month managed service contract in place from November 2022. This will allow us to help JAGGAER maintain this significant reduction in their cloud spend by providing light-touch support and guidance. We will also conduct 2 mini-audits in April and November 2023 to ensure we continue to be on track in terms of cost optimisation
The collaboration between the Capacitas and JAGGAER teams has been extremely successful, and we are looking forward to continuing our partnership.
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Capacitas are experts in cloud excellence and our consultants holds deep industry experience. We have a unique and holistic data analytics approach that spans through cloud cost, performance, and scalability vectors to understand and address customers’ specific business and technology challenges. This is not possible with traditional approaches that fail to consider interdependencies across all three cloud vectors. |
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Capacitas goes beyond traditional cloud optimisation approaches. We ensure that benefits across the three key cloud vectors are maintained by helping our clients navigate ongoing business and technology changes. We go right up through the entire tech stack into the application thereby typically getting x 4 cost and scaling opportunities! |
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At Capacitas , we also focus on transferring cloud knowledge to customers’ engineering teams in a programmatic way, and to a far greater extent than traditional cloud optimisation partners. This ensures that scalability, performance, and cost benefits are maintained for the long term. |
Some of the largest commercial, manufacturing, and life sciences companies in the world trust JAGGAER with billions of dollars of annual spend. Additionally, JAGGAER is the leading procure-to-pay provider in the higher education and government sectors. JAGGAER eProcurement and strategic sourcing customers across the globe have gained access to the best suppliers, with the best terms, on our scalable, customizable, user-friendly platform. Our SaaS-based, source-to-settle solution provides unparalleled visibility, insights and recommendations to procurement leaders and suppliers. The result is a fluid supply chain driven by powerful spend analysis, comprehensive contract management and efficient accounts payable solutions. Learn how our solutions can power your organization on JAGGAER.COM.
If you want to see big boosts to performance, with risk managed and costs controlled, then talk to us now to see how our expertise gets you the most from your IT.
