my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Everything you ever want to know about enterprise sales

This title sounds a bit like dirty secrets, doesn't it? When thinking of enterprise software sales most people think about arcane, lengthy, sometimes sleazy bureaucratic processes entailing: Vendors who are very secretive about pricing: If you have to ask for a price our product isn't for you! Lots of pointless meetings Obnoxious PowerPoint presentations A plethora of stakeholders A decision maker who won't be using the software product being bought and - of course - a user who doesn't have a say but has to use this ... Read more

ZenQuery is now open source

Today I made ZenQuery available as open source (under the Apache License). ZenQuery is an 'Enterprise Backend as a Service' and allows you to easily access databases through a REST API without any programming knowledge required. Get SQL result sets as JSON, XML or CSV data, which can easily be processed by tools such as MS Excel or in your own applications. ZenQuery provides you with an instant REST API for your SQL queries. Anything that can be expressed by SELECT * FROM ... Read more

Monetizing Open Source Software Is Still Hard

Some weeks ago the guys behind LocomotiveCMS - an open source CMS that's competing with Wordpress - published a sobering article on how they failed making a profit with open source software so far. Their model basically relies on building reputation from their open source work and benefit from community contributions to their software. Their revenue is generated from both doing consulting for LocomotiveCMS and selling hosting services in a SaaS package. Not too unusual a model. The harsh reality - however - ... Read more

ZenQuery 1.0 is available today!

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new product I'm currently developing: ZenQuery, an Enterprise Backend as a Service. I’m pleased to announce the first public version of ZenQuery today. Since the first public announcement regarding ZenQuery roughly 30 days ago we’ve been busy working on this release. Today, you’ll be able to try out ZenQuery 1.0 yourselves on your own server and environment. I really hope you like what we’ve got for you so far. For more information please have a ... Read more

ZenQuery: From Idea To Product In 2 Weeks

Earlier this week I've launched a new product called ZenQuery. In a nutshell, ZenQuery is an application that creates an instant REST API (with JSON, XML and CSV formats) for SQL queries. This allows you to easily access any kind of data from your database without having to deal with technical details such as database drivers, connections, ORM or caching. A typical use case is an enterprise company which for example wants to create a new mobile application. The data needed for such ... Read more

Resources For SaaS Businesses And Enterprise App Developers

SaaS Club is a new website that keeps track of relevant resources for SaaS businesses and developers. These resources are organized both in categories such as 'product', 'metrics' and 'sales' and according to their target audience, e.g. 'developers & designers' or 'managers & product people'. Enterprise App Developer Atlas is an 'interactive map of the developer journey', i.e. it's a catalogue of tools for enterprise web app development. Tools are organized according to product phases and aspects such as API, testing, deployment ... Read more

MemoEasy – Termine online buchen

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.Terminausfälle sind für viele Unternehmen ein erhebliches Problem. Ärzte, Friseure, Versicherungsmakler - für diese Dienstleister und in vielen weiteren Branchen läuft ein Großteil des Geschäftes über vorab vereinbarte Termine ab. Nicht wahr genommene Termine sind daher nicht nur ärgerlich, sondern führen auch zu teils erheblichen Umsatzeinbußen. Solche Umsatzausfälle müssen dann erst einmal wieder aufgefangen werden. Ausgefallene Termine können kurzfristig nicht wieder neu vergeben werden. Oft werden Termine einfach deswegen nicht wahr genommen, weil Kunden ... Read more

Notifications in web apps: Mailgun and Twilio

If you want your web app to notify your users upon specific actions or events Mailgun and Twilio are great solutions for doing so. The former allows you to - among various other features involving eMail - send eMails via a nice and simple REST API. This is particularly handy because you don't have to worry anymore about delivering eMail asynchronously in order not to delay user actions in the browser. For example, with Mailgun you can simply commit a registration confirmation ... Read more

Topicalizer – an information extraction suite – now open source

Topicalizer is a suite of text analysis and information extraction tools developed by me. It used to be available under http://www.topicalizer.com. However, I unfortunately don't have any time any more to properly maintain it, which is why I'm open-sourcing the code for others to learn from and build upon: https://github.com/BjoernKW/Topicalizer Read more