Our Mission
eccenca — Reclaiming the Essence in the Age of AI
We live in a time of staggering computational power, yet our machines — despite their brilliance — still stumble on the simplest of human truths. They can calculate, predict, even mimic, but they do not understand. They do not know in the way we mean when we speak of wisdom, judgment, or shared meaning. And perhaps that’s the heart of the problem.
We’ve become obsessed with data — oceans of it. But data, in its raw form, is just the echo of something else. It is the residue of actions, the byproduct of decisions, the signal left behind when something meaningful occurred. Data tells us what happened, but almost never why.
And yet, the why is everything. It is where intention lives. Where purpose, context, and responsibility dwell. Without the why, there can be no trust — and certainly no truly intelligent AI.
eccenca exists because we believe the essence of an organization — and by extension, any complex human system — cannot be reduced to columns in a database or stored in disconnected silos. We believe it must be modeled, expressed, and shared in a language of meaning — one that respects the nuance of perspective and the subtlety of context.
This is why we build upon semantic web standards like RDF, OWL, and SHACL. Not because they are fashionable, but because they give us a formal language for meaning — a way to reconcile the diversity of viewpoints across systems, departments, even cultures. They allow us to say: this is what this means here, and this is how it relates to what you mean over there. They allow us to retain difference, while still connecting. That’s not just interoperability — that’s philosophy in action.
eccenca Corporate Memory is not a tool to hoard data. It’s a practice — a discipline — of remembering what matters, how it’s connected, and why. It is our attempt to preserve the essence of things: the knowledge that is tacit, contextual, and often lost in the rush for scale.
By giving AI access not just to data, but to structured, contextual understanding, we don’t just make AI smarter — we make it more human-aware. We help AI systems align with our needs, our processes, and our ways of making sense of the world. This is not about replacing humans. It’s about supporting us — augmenting our ability to decide, adapt, and evolve in complex environments.
In that sense, eccenca is more than a name. It’s a statement of purpose:
To extract, clarify, and preserve the essential — so that we, and the systems we build, can act with wisdom, not just information
Our Management Team
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Hans-Christian Brockmann
CEO
Chris is founder and CEO of the eccenca GmbH as well as the IT management consultancy brox IT-Solutions GmbH. He is adviser to the president of the APICS Supply Chain Council and the APICS Digitalization Task Force as well as head of the APICS Readiness Task Force. Chris holds a BA from the University of Göttingen and an MBA from Wake Forrest University Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Before starting brox IT-Solutions GmbH in 1998, he served as Senior Sales Manager at ERP provider Baan Solution Center Automotive. With brox he developed the brox Data Management Centre – an SAP certified data quality management tool used by organizations like BOSCH, Continental, ZF and MAN. He also initiated the Eclipse project “SMILA” and served as a director in the board of the Eclipse Foundation.
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Prof.Dr. Sören Auer
Board of Advisors
Following stations at the universities of Dresden, Ekaterinburg, Leipzig, Pennsylvania, Bonn and the Fraunhofer Society, Sören was appointed Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Director of the TIB in 2017. He has (co-)authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications on semantic technologies, knowledge engineering and information systems. He also led several large research projects, such as the EU H2020 flagship project BigDataEurope and co-founded renowned research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia and the Big Data Value Association. Sören is an advisor to the industry, European Commission, W3C and member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
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Dr. Sebastian Tramp
CTO
As Chief Technology Officer Sebastian is responsible for the technology and product development at eccenca. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Leipzig and authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications. Sebastian is a founding member of the renowned AKSW research group and was PC member, reviewer and organizer for more than 30 research and technology events as well as scientific journals including ESWC, Semantic Web Journal, and Journal of Web Semantics. He also has led a number of key Linked Data technology projects, including the development of the data wiki OntoWiki.
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Stefan Reinhardt
Chief Sales Officer (CSO)
Stefan Reinhardt is Chief Sales Officer (CSO) at eccenca. He is responsible for the sales strategy and coordination as well as the international expansion of sales activities for existing and new major customers and partners. He brings many years of experience in selling digital B2C, B2B and B2B2C (software) solutions.
Before joining eccenca, he held various management positions, e.g. International Sales Director, Senior Vice President, as well as Managing Director at the world's largest business payment service provider First Data/Tele Cash, Telekom subsidiaries and several (Internet/Fintech) start-ups. -
Marcel Fröhlich
Director Services
Marcel is the director of service delivery at eccenca. He holds a degree in computer science (Uni Tübingen & VU Amsterdam) and an MBA from ESB Reutlingen. Marcel jumped early into the Berlin ecosystem in 2000 founding relevantive, a user experience startup. Afterwards he spent 10 years in the corporate world serving in various management positions in T‑Systems International GmbH. He was responsible for substantial project & consulting business in various industries mostly focused on business information management.
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René Pietzsch
Head of Product Management
René is the head of product management at eccenca. He has a diploma in computer science and media from Dresden University of Technology. He worked as a test developer and software engineer at IBM Research and Development lab in Böblingen. In his subsequent position at a strategic consulting agency he has been certified as Professional Scrum Master and served as product and project manager in multiple strategic projects for big clients in the German telecommunications industry.
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Dr. Robert Isele
Head of Artificial Intelligence
Robert is head of the AI & data integration unit at eccenca. He holds a diploma in computer science from the Technical University of Munich and a PhD from the University of Mannheim. The focus of his work is data integration of heterogeneous information sources using linked data. He is leading the development of the Silk Link Discovery Framework and contributed to a number of data integration systems.