Opus Software

I co-founded the software engineering shop Opus Software AG with a few friends. Over the course of 12 years, we grew it to about 12 employees. The company then declined again when we failed to establish our internally successful Atlas database framework as a stand-alone product. Opus’s spiritual successor today is Encodo, founded by ex-Opus folks. A much reduced Opus itself also still exists.

Our main products were:

• Atlas, a model-driven database application framework, which drove everything from database schema, schema updates, user interface, and reporting, from a single model. A key selling point was that the model was layerable so that our clients could taylor their off-the-shelf apps to individual customers with model overlays. Today still it powers applications of i-ag, who is also its current maintainer. It used to drive the branch office app of Raiffeisen, and the main application of Umbrella with large deployments at Kuoni and Hotelplan. Atlas’s modern successor today is Encodo’s Quino.

• Opus Reporter, a sophisticated engine for turning data into printed reports. It was used extensively in Atlas, but also sold as a standalone component.

• Opus DirectAccess, our first public product, was a very fast link between Borland Delphi and Microsoft Access.

Opus Software grew out of Red Point Systems, a garage-style operation that I started with Remo von Ballmoos (now co-founder of Encodo) during our university years, where we developed new languages, compilers, database servers, and more fun things.