Interview with Amagno CEO Jens Büscher

Via GetMyInvoices, users can create invoices & co. that are automatically imported into the Amagno enterprise content management system. We interviewed Jens Büscher, the company’s founder and CEO.

In 2010, you launched an innovative enterprise content management solution to help companies
that significantly reduces paper consumption in companies.
How did you come up with the idea to found Amagno?

I have worked in the public sector for seven years. While the paper was the ultimate source, rooms upon rooms were filled with paper. The PC was an expensive typewriter. Everything was printed or copied, especially anything that arrived on the desks. Every employee copied every process for their files. Still, no one knew where a process was or where it needed to go. In the event of staff absences, the process was at a standstill. Of course, retrieving information is almost impossible this way. I looked around to see what digital solutions were available on the market. There were many, but they were far too technical and hardly usable for office staff. I wanted to change that with Amagno. With Amagno, we want to improve people’s everyday working lives so that they can once again devote time to their core tasks.

What are Amagno’s objectives in this?

Clarity. Employees can put Amagno into operation independently within a few minutes, retrieve everything and work in a legally compliant manner. All processes are transparent. Amagno turns the company into an open book within the scope of the users’ rights, as the integrated full-text search finds everything again in seconds. Thanks to its name-giving “magnetization”, Amagno reads data from documents, so there is hardly any need to type out information. At the same time, the company gains greater legal certainty than analog work and becomes more sustainable.

What differentiates Amagno from other ECM providers and
how can your digital workplace solution simplify everyday business?

Fundamentally, all ECM providers are functionally similar and the market is sufficiently large for every company to find its preferred provider. Our focus can be described in three aspects: everywhere, immediately, sustainably.
” Everywhere” means: the workplace is everywhere – on any device and at any time. By ” immediate,” we mean: We are in a new Millennials generation, users as well as decision-makers. Everyone wants to load their solution immediately from a store and put it into operation. So it simply has to convince in minutes. This is exactly what we focus on. By “sustainable” we mean both ecological and economic sustainability.

To what extent does this reduce the CO2 footprint of companies?

Simply looking at the paper saved would be too limited. Even though that alone makes a big difference. The production of paper consumes an unbelievable amount of wood, water, and energy resources. A recently published study by the digital association Bitkom showed that digitization is a key lever for climate protection. Collaborative digital solutions & cloud sharing platforms reduce 15 to 17 percent of transport and primary energy emissions in a business context. If less paper, toner, and other precious resources are used, this has a positive effect on the companies’ carbon footprint – and automatically on their finances.

Do you invest in environmental protection measures in any other way?
If so, which ones?

Amagno has a Green Team, which is dedicated to green issues with a high level of personal commitment. As a result, we have already achieved a lot. In addition to various small things, we compensate for our necessary business trips, which have been greatly reduced since Corona. In the future, we will continue to try to travel only when it is really necessary and then choose environmentally friendly means of transportation. We also donate the CO2 equivalent of all digitally stored documents in the Amagno Business Cloud to CO2-compensating projects every year. Likewise, we try to focus on sustainability in all our purchases, from used hardware or green data centers to green electricity, for example. Our Green Team has become our personal environmental police, always ready with great ideas and valuable tips. I think that if we continue to raise our sustainable awareness and continue to act in an environmentally conscious and sustainable way in the future, we can still achieve a lot.

Amagno is one of the fastest-growing digital companies in Germany. What is behind your concept for success?

A key success factor is our one-stop-shop concept. Amagno develops almost everything itself and users get all the features right out of the box. We do not have the chaos of modules, nor do we charge page prices for each sheet scanned. The pricing model is very simple. The customer is independent of us and does not need external help.

Why did you decide to use the cloud and
which experiences have you gained with it?

We live in a new world of decision-makers and employees. I would like to use a solution immediately and solve a problem with it. This should be connectable to other systems very quickly with interfaces. I have no interest in months of services and expensive external consultants. The cloud, together with the right product, provides that. In addition, we can make improvements available to users very quickly. The experience has been very good. Often, the discussion about security, but also a poor broadband connection, inhibits the topic. In addition, we must not fool ourselves when it comes to security: Every server that can be accessed from the outside will be attacked. Here, the cloud has advantages with the big players, such as Microsoft, which invests millions and thousands of specialists in security every year.

Your next big online event will take place in October.
Can you give us a preview of some of the program highlights?

We presented trends, perspectives, and new interfaces. This year it will be a public online event. We have invited Lars Thomsen as the keynote speaker for our keynote on the topic “Future of the working world”. In addition, there will again be many interesting topics and inspirations on how to use Amagno to successfully shape the digital future. We will also present the next generation of our software as a multiplatform app. The project is one of my passions and I am very excited about the feedback of the participants.

What are your future plans?
The focus for us is clear, but has many milestones: Amagno is to become one of the leading ECM cloud platforms with high self-service content. The future lies in automation and digital business processes with anyone. ECM has to get out of the enterprise because business processes are typically cross-enterprise. That is our goal.