Paper clips were an unlikely invitation to reconsider a career. Paula Jagemann had worked inside the internet business; now she was trying to sell the ordinary things people put on their desks. Her company had a storefront, a catalog and a perfectly understandable ambition. Then other office dealers began taking an interest in the machinery behind the counter. They wanted to use the software themselves.
That request contained a difficult business question. Should a company try to win the customer's order, or help somebody else win it? Selling supplies and licensing the tools to sell supplies could coexist for a while. Eventually, they made for awkward company. A dealer considering your technology might reasonably wonder why its prospective supplier was also competing for its customers.
Jagemann's place in the origins of ECI Software Solutions rests on that turn. She co-founded the business with John Sidgmore and served as an early chief executive. The resulting story has more to do with changing a working assumption than defending an original pitch. Even the paper clips were negotiable.
A career with several forwarding addresses
Born in Manchester, England, Jagemann spent parts of her childhood in Tennessee and Iran before her family moved to New Jersey during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Her early jobs included taking reservations at Trump Castle in Atlantic City and working for Marriott in Washington. In 1989, she joined telecommunications software company Telec, working for Sidgmore.
She followed him to UUNET in 1994 and went on to handle investor relations and public relations. Stock options gave her the means to invest in a venture of her own. The initial office-supply idea followed a complaint from her brother-in-law about the difficulty of buying supplies online. She committed $1 million; Sidgmore contributed $1.5 million.
There is a useful connection between those jobs, although their titles scarcely resemble one another. Reservations, investor relations and online procurement all depend on information reaching the person who needs it. The audience changes. So does the cost of getting something wrong. Jagemann's route into technology passed through work that required communicating with people rather than writing the underlying code.
Her subsequent work makes that distinction worth keeping. A founder can recognize a software business through the frustrations around a transaction. The opportunity may be visible to the person answering questions long before it receives a product name.
When the storefront became a showroom
By October 1999, Jagemann was describing a change of emphasis: the company would license procurement technology to small businesses and government agencies. Private-label agreements allowed customers to put their own identities on the system. About 30 companies had signed agreements by then.
“What we are finding is that our technology is our greatest asset.”
Paula Jagemann, October 1999
The commercial distinction was plain. Jagemann described slim margins in office supplies and a more attractive margin range for technology. Those were her contemporary assessments, rather than a guarantee of what either business would earn. But they explained why a founder who had started with merchandise was spending more time talking about licensing.
One early agreement was to build an online purchasing site for the National Industries for the Blind. The project connected the company's technology with an established procurement program. A new online retailer could therefore find work helping an existing organization conduct its business, without first persuading every shopper to remember another store name.
Private labeling has a small social grace: it lets the customer keep the credit. For an independent dealer, the name above the shop can embody years of local relationships. A technology provider willing to stay backstage has something different to offer from a retailer determined to make its own name unavoidable.
The order was only the beginning
As ECI developed, the retail supplies business was sold and technology became the focus. Independent dealers' interest had revealed an opportunity; the conflict between supplying those dealers and competing with them helped clarify the choice. Back-office software acquisitions brought another part of the operation into view.
An online order is a promise with paperwork attached. Somebody must know whether the item is available, what the customer should pay and how the transaction reaches the accounts. A pleasant storefront cannot settle every question behind it. Bringing commerce together with business management made the offering relevant beyond the moment somebody clicked to buy.
The detail matters in a personal profile because it gives Jagemann's founding work a shape. “Internet entrepreneur” can describe almost anything. Here, the problem was specific: smaller dealers needed ways to sell and operate in a market containing much larger chains. The software could help them participate while retaining their own businesses.
That direction also appears in contemporary trade coverage of ECI2/IOS2's Distributor Station, developed with Lagasse Bros. for janitorial and paper distributors. Jagemann, identified as founder and CEO, emphasized its range of features and quarterly updates. The customer was becoming more particular, with the requirements of a trade, rather than merely an internet connection.
The arrangement also spread the cost of technology development across customers. Distributors paid a setup charge, a subscription and transaction fees, while receiving access to a shared system. They could add their own products to the catalog. The offer respected the fact that two dealers might sell overlapping supplies without having identical businesses.
That is an unglamorous but consequential product detail. A dealer needs to show the goods it actually sells. Making room for those differences gave the software a purpose beyond reproducing the founder’s original online shop. It could support another owner’s choices, including products the first storefront had never carried.
Specialization can sound like a narrowing of ambition. It also forces a company to answer less forgiving questions. A general promise to make commerce easier is agreeable enough. A distributor wants to know whether the system fits the work waiting on Monday morning. That is a harder sales conversation, and a more useful product brief.
A growing company, measured in shoes
Jagemann had a less conventional test for organizational size. In 2001, she joked about reaching the point where, in the ladies' room, “you don’t recognize the shoes of the girl in the next stall.” At the time, ECI2 had 250 employees.
It is an office joke with an executive problem tucked into it. Growth changes how people know one another. A company that fits within a founder's personal acquaintance eventually needs other ways to communicate and make decisions. Her choice of detail brings that change down from a chart to a recognizable human scale.
The same year, Women in Technology recognized her with a Leadership Award. Her work also extended into the organization's board: Senate hearing testimony subsequently identified her among its technology company founders. These were connections outside the immediate business of selling and licensing, placing her within the Washington region's wider professional community.
There is something pleasingly practical about the shoes observation alongside a formal award. One recognizes the executive in public. The other catches the odd experience of becoming one: finding that your own workplace now contains people you have never met. A headcount can make growth look tidy. A founder has to encounter it in the corridor.
Another seat at the table
Jagemann later served on Maryland's Technology Development Corporation board. State appointment records document Senate confirmation in March 2008 and a four-year term beginning that July. The role placed her on the other side of a familiar subject: the environment in which technology ventures get started and develop.
Serving on such a board is a different form of participation from running a company. The founder's experience becomes part of an institution's deliberations. It also extends the story beyond the familiar sequence of launch, financing and exit. Someone who has built a business can remain involved in the conditions facing the people trying next.
Her connection with Hood College continued, too. Its 2020-2021 directory listed Paula L. Jagemann, class of 1999, on the Board of Associates. The entry offers a second view of her professional life: a college affiliation that lasted well beyond graduation, alongside her entrepreneurship and public board service.
The business that kept changing
ECI continued to develop under later leadership. By 2018, its reach included manufacturing, construction, distribution and field service; it reported $200 million in revenue for 2017 and 950 employees worldwide. Ron Books, then CEO, described industry knowledge and purpose-built software as central to serving smaller businesses.
Those later results belong to a company built by successive teams. They help explain the consequence of the founding decision without turning every subsequent acquisition or product into Jagemann's personal accomplishment. A useful origin story leaves room for the people who carried the work forward.
ECI's current company figures. A measure of the business's later scale, under successive leadership teams.
Today ECI describes a business serving industries from building supply to office technology. Its products address accounting, inventory, purchasing, production and other operational tasks. The distance from selling a box of pens is considerable. Yet the connection is still visible: a small business has a customer to serve, and needs the information behind the sale to work.
Jagemann's early decision remains interesting because it required accepting a different place in that transaction. A company's own storefront makes an obvious claim on attention. Software operating behind somebody else's storefront has a quieter role, but can become part of that business's daily routine.
The office supplies gave her a starting point. The dealers gave the company another direction. Her contribution was to help turn that request into a business - and to let the business change its mind.