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About Stefan Tilkov

Last updated: August, 2006

Short bio text (for conferences etc.)

Stefan Tilkov is co-founder and a prinicipal consultant at innoQ, a consulting firm with offices in Germany and Switzerland. Stefan focuses on enterprise architecture consulting for Fortune 1000 companies, which currently translates to assessing SOA maturity and deriving appropriate steps for a road map towards a service-oriented enterprise.

The long version

I am a managing director and co-founder of a Germany- and Switzerland-based consulting company called innoQ. Although I do quite a bit of administrative stuff, I still try to maintain some technical knowledge. This means, for example, that I still consult in customer projects. Fortunately, the company is still small enough so that this is feasible. My technical interests include large-scale software development, preferably using modern, object-oriented and/or component based techniques, and specifically two subareas - Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) and Model Driven Architecture (MDA). MDA is of interest to me not the least because innoQ develops and markets a product call iQgen, an MDA-compliant (whatever that means) code generator.

I am also one of the SOA editors at the InfoQ online community site, a member of the JavaSPEKTRUM Fachbeirat, a decent-frequency blogger and a frequent speaker at conferences in Germany and abroad.

I've been involved in the IT industry since 1990, when I started studying Technical Computer Science at the Berufsakademie (BA) Stuttgart (this is a cooperative program where you study while being employed; I was an IBM employee at that time) and finished with a Bachelor's Degree. In 1993, I joined a company called MLC (now defunct) where I started to work as a C++/Unix programmer, got to know databases, network programming, distributed computing technologies such as DCE and CORBA, became a team lead, project manager, and area manager before finally deciding I was too young to spend my life on administration only and left to become a freelance consultant. While being able to program again was great, the freelance existence bothered me because it's hard to influence stuff when you're on your own, so founding a company was a natural next step and happened in 1999.

Since then, we've been slowly growing innoQ from 5 to around 40 people; our focus remains on software architecture. My personal interests have evolved to include a variety of topics such as such as SOA, Web services, REST, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, model driven development methodologies (MDE, MDA, MDSD, and DSLs), and how to integrate all of this into a coherent whole — if you're looking for help or simply some for some discussion partner, I encourage you to drop us a note.

(Also worth mentioning: innoQ is currently hiring, so please write to us at jobs@innoq.com if you're looking for a job somewhat similar to those described here.)