About Thijs

As CTO, Thijs is a key member of coMakeIT’s executive leadership and senior management team. Over an illustrious career spanning more than two decades, Thijs accumulated an impressive track record and played a crucial role in enabling the success of numerous technology companies with a global reach. With extensive, hands-on experience in design, architecture, and development of complex software products, Thijs provides unique insights and a practitioner’s perspective to help coMakeIT’s customers leverage leading-edge technologies, and drive innovation. He has an uncanny ability to think ahead of the curve, and visualize how emerging technologies can be effectively used to bring disruptive innovation to market.

Thijs first made his mark as a young software engineer with Baan in the late 90s. He was a part of the team that developed the Baan Virtual Machine, which was instrumental for the success of Baan ERP suite. During his time with Baan, Thijs worked on XML adoption in developing an architectural framework for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which was still in its nascent phase. After leaving Baan, Thijs was a part of the core team at TopTier Software, which pioneered and introduced the first commercial implementation of a SOA based ESB to the market. TopTier was acquired by SAP in 2001, and became the cornerstone of its hugely successful NetWeaver suite.

Thijs was one of the key minds that envisioned Cordys as a multi-tenant, SOA based PaaS. With his extensive expertise in large ERP implementations, Thijs led the drive to cloud-based, model-driven, collaborative systems and successfully decoupled deployment from development, way ahead of DevOps. His critical understanding of event-based and event-driven architectures brings enormous value in building scalable platforms.

Thijs graduated from Erasmus University, Rotterdam with a Master’s Degree in Managerial Computer Science. He is well-known for his thought leadership in CMMN (Case Management Modeling & Notation) and microservices architecture.