Welcome

I'm JENS KLASEN

Technology Evangelist · Free Thinker

25 years in IT, and I haven't given a single talk on something I didn't first test myself on real hardware or real code. I'm a sparring partner for decision-makers when infrastructure, sovereignty and AI all land on the table at the same time — and I'm the one who picks up the hammer while others are still talking. What I recommend, I also build myself. Sometimes on the side, sometimes full-time, always seriously.

Let's talk Read the Saga

25+

Years in the field

30+

Certifications

10×

vExpert

Skol

The man behind the code

Who I am

I'm one of the few in this industry who came up through the command line and never lost the muscle. Twenty-three of those years spent with vendors and in vendor-adjacent roles — which means I know how vendor narratives get built, because I helped build a few. Today I use that knowledge in the other direction: I sit on the customer side of the table, translate between the board and the platform team, and say so when what the next sales rep is promising doesn't actually work that way in the real world.

With my wife · two souls, one path

"Bald head, full beard, ink under the skin — and a mind full of architecture diagrams. I'm not a suit selling buzzwords. I'm the one who picks up the hammer while others are still talking."

— Jens

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ᛟ Born May 1978

ᛟ Married since 2017, father of a daughter (2015) and a son (2018)

ᛟ My guiding values: Structure, Foresight, and Responsibility

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Structure

Clarity over chaos

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Foresight

Think today — deliver tomorrow

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Responsibility

For people, nature & code

What drives me

Passions

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Animal Protection ↗

Active in fawn rescue (Kitzrettung Rheinhessen) — every year we save dozens of fawns from mowing deaths. Engaged hunter with a personal reserve since 2014, focused on sustainable conservation and ecological balance.

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Fitness

Regularly exploring the Rheinhessen region and beyond by eBike. Staying fit with LesMills Bodypump and Apple Fitness+. For a unique balance to office life: Sports Chanbara — Japanese sword fighting.

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Archaeology

Deep fascination with early civilizations and their achievements. The Nebra Sky Disk and the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg are prime examples of how advanced our ancestors already were.

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Technology

Tech enthusiast at home too: smart home automation, own photovoltaic system with battery storage, and fully electric mobility. Technology should make life simpler and more sustainable.

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Music

Soundworlds — from modern fury to ancient roots

Music is never just background noise for me — it is an experience of extreme contrasts.

Modern fury

My heart beats for the unbending energy of Metalcore and Deathcore. I value the technical precision and massive riffs of Parkway Drive, as well as the dark, monotonously melodic depth and orchestral force that define Lorna Shore. This raw, unfiltered power is what defines the appeal of modern extreme music for me.

Ancient roots

But where the fury ends, another journey begins — just as captivating: the return to the roots. As a counterbalance to the modern wall of sound, I lose myself in Nordic mysticism and atmospheric depth.

ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ

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Feeling nature With the organic sounds of Wardruna, Danheim and Forndom, I dive into forgotten worlds.
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Melodic range Artists like FAUN and Sowulo show me how timeless folk melodies can be.
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Ancient force The raw throat singing of Nytt Land and the breathtaking ritual performances of Heilung create a connection to the primordial that reaches far beyond conventional music.

For me, it is no contradiction but a perfect symbiosis: the modern rage of Deathcore meets the timeless heritage of the North. Both genres share an intensity that gets under your skin — whether through a distorted guitar or a frame drum.

At my back: my family. In my heart: my drive.

My Anchor

My Family

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My family is my everything — the still point behind every battle, the light at the end of every long day, the reason I pick up the hammer in the morning.

But for them to be that — for me to be there when it counts, to provide security, freedom and opportunities — I have to carry the weight. I have to show up. I have to deliver. Not out of duty, but out of responsibility. Every project, every decision, every step forward is also a promise to the three people walking beside me.

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Be there

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Deliver

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Provide

ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ ᚷ ᚹ ᚺ ᚾ ᛁ ᛃ ᛇ ᛈ ᛉ ᛊ ᛏ ᛒ ᛖ ᛗ ᛚ ᛜ ᛞ ᛟ

About the Runes

Why Runes?

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The runes have fascinated me since I was a child. To me they are a bridge to our ancestors — a tool from a time when language, nature and spirituality were still one. Anyone who knows me knows: this has nothing to do with the misinterpretation and misuse of these symbols in German history. Quite the opposite — I want to give them back their original meaning: connection, responsibility, humility.

ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ

Inspired by the Opening Ceremony of the band Heilung — spoken by Kai Uwe Faust at the start of every concert — words that speak straight to my soul:

„
Remember that we all are brothers. All people, beast, tree and stone and wind. We all descend from the one great being, that was always there. Before people lived and named it. Before the first seed sprouted.

— Kai Uwe Faust · Heilung · Opening Ceremony

ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ · Reverence for all that lives · ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ

My Craft

How I work

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I'm a sparring partner for decision-makers when infrastructure strategy, digital sovereignty and AI readiness all land on the table at the same time. And enough of an evangelist to translate complex matters so the board and the platform team end up with the same map in front of them.

I haven't just followed the evolution from server virtualization through software-defined datacenter to AI-capable private cloud — I helped build it, across 25 years and every layer of the stack. That's exactly why I can afford to say the uncomfortable things others keep quiet about out of vendor loyalty. I don't sell products. I evaluate technologies by whether they'll still hold up ten years from now.

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Who I work with

CTOs, CIOs, CDOs and CEOs in organizations standing at a crossroads — upper mid-market as much as lower enterprise. Especially where sovereignty isn't a marketing word but an obligation: public sector, regulated finance, manufacturing, service providers. Wherever decisions about infrastructure are simultaneously decisions about independence, compliance and long-term viability.

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The bridge I build

SysOps, DevOps, Platform Engineering, MLOps — four worlds that talk past each other in most organizations. My work is to bring them into a shared language: from classic IT operations through developer-centric platforms to production-ready AI workloads. Without this bridge, AI stays a pilot that never ships. With it, infrastructure becomes a foundation people can actually build on.

The method

In four phases

Always in this order.

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I ᛚ

Listen

Understand what has grown historically, what the decision-maker really wants — and what is just noise.

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II ᚨ

Map

Make visible how the parts connect and where the real leverage lies.

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III ᚲ

Forge

Work on the solution together with the internal team — not as an outsider who hands over recommendations and leaves.

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IV ᚷ

Hand over

My goal is that the organization can carry on without me. No dependency, no endless mandates.

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What you take away

„No off-the-shelf answer."

Instead, two things: a map that shows how your infrastructure actually connects — and the three or four questions you need to ask your teams and vendors next. We'll find the answers together, or you'll find them yourself. What matters is that they're the right questions.

ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ

If one of these themes is on your mind —

Let's talk

Proof, not claims

From the workshop

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Three projects that show how I work — not what I claim.

KitzControl

As of April 2026 — Handed over to CopterPro, built 2024–2026

Every spring, before the mowers run through the meadows of Rheinhessen, volunteer pilots use thermal-imaging drones to find roe deer fawns hidden in the tall grass. KitzControl is the platform behind that work: a multi-tenant architecture with cleanly separated roles for coordinators, helpers, commercial pilots and farmers, built on Next.js and PostgreSQL with PostGIS for the geo data. Plus the things you only build once you've actually flown yourself: DIPUL airspace queries and drone weather pulled directly into the operations dashboard — one click before takeoff instead of three browser tabs. I built the platform across two seasons together with Kitzrettung Rheinhessen e.V. and then handed it over to CopterPro to continue development and run operations. That's the most honest test I know for my own advice: does the architecture I recommend to clients also hold up when I'm the operator and the bug hits me personally?

JK-Fitt

As of April 2026 — In active development

JK-Fitt is my personal AI coaching app, and I'm the first customer. Apple HealthKit delivers sleep, HRV and VO2max. The RENPHO scale I talk to directly — through the unofficial cloud API, with RSA-encrypted login and Keychain storage, because the official path through Apple Health only passes four values and leaves the interesting thirty behind: body water, visceral fat, skeletal muscle, segmental analysis. The coach — a system prompt grounded in several training philosophies, wired up through my own Anthropic API key — gets that complete context including 7-, 30- and 90-day trends and speaks plainly when recovery doesn't match the planned interval session. I don't test AI in slides — I test it on my own body. What doesn't hold up here, I don't recommend to clients either. And on this project I see what's shifting right now: standard apps still have their place, but they're no longer the only affordable option. Personalized software and tailored AI solutions are achievable in weeks rather than months — provided someone understands not just the building, but operations, maintenance and ongoing development. That's the kind of work clients now come to CID for.

RAMmageddon

As of April 2026 — Analysis: November 2025, Published: January 2026

In November 2025, something in the supply-chain data caught my eye that didn't fit the prevailing narrative: memory prices weren't a seasonal dip — they were the start of a shift. I discussed it with CID's technical CEO, and we decided to pull forward a major server and storage order. In January 2026 I went public with the analysis — as a multi-part series called „RAMmageddon" in my LinkedIn newsletter „Future Proof Tech Briefing". The thesis: several lines are converging here. HBM allocations for AI accelerators are tying up DRAM capacity, new US tariffs are reshuffling cost structures, the Strait of Hormuz is no longer abstract geopolitics but a line in procurement planning, and Europe's chip dependency is moving from policy paper to quarterly problem. From that follows the actual core message: anyone trying to fight back with more hardware is buying on the wrong market. The answer that holds is software modernization and right-sizing. I didn't describe the crisis because I'm clairvoyant — I described it because you can see it when you look at supply chains and software architecture at the same time.

The Chronicle

My Saga

Four chapters. One thread: technology as a tool — never an end in itself.

Current

Since January 2025

CID GmbH

Technology Evangelist

CID is a software company from the Rhine-Main region, founded in 1997, that has been running AI and container technology in real production environments for over twelve years — not as a lab, but with customers in regulated industries. My role there is the interface between what holds up technically and what lands in the boardroom conversation. I translate in both directions and at the same time guide customers who want to step out of single-vendor dependency — without walking straight into the next one.

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2023

evoila GmbH

Senior Sales Specialist & Unit Lead

At evoila I led a team of six and built the bridge between sales and solution architecture — not as a clean separation of roles, but as the reality of a growing systems integrator where strategy, customer conversation and architecture decision all land with the same person. Key areas: modernizing application landscapes, bringing AI and ML into existing processes, and tearing down the line between classical IT and Operational Technology wherever it only still exists out of habit.

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2011

Dell Technologies

Principal Solutions Architect

Over a decade of experience as Solution Architect at leading IT manufacturers. Designing and implementing solution architectures for enterprise customers — positioning IT as a strategic business enabler rather than just a cost center.

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2000

Career Start

IT Specialist (IHK Certified)

The foundation: IT specialist training with IHK certification. Building deep technical expertise in Microsoft Windows infrastructure, storage systems, and virtualization — the bedrock for a career at the intersection of technology and business.

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Forged in fire

Battle Scars

Certifications, awards, and community recognition — the visible traces of 25 years on the front line.

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Strategic Focus

▸ VMware Certified Professional — VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Administrator
▸ NVIDIA-Certified Associate: AI Infrastructure and Operations
▸ Broadcom Partner: Certified Expert — VMware Cloud Foundation
▸ Broadcom Partner: Proven Professional — VMware vSphere Foundation
▸ Broadcom Partner: Proven Professional — NSX
▸ AWS Partner: Sales Accreditation

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Recognition & Community

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VMUG Innovation in Leadership Award 2024
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VMware vExpert PRO 2026, 2025, 2024
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VMUG Volunteer Leader 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023
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VMware vExpert 2017–2026 (10×)
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VMware vExpert vSAN 2024, 2019, 2018, 2017
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Dell EMC CTO Ambassador 2017

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Foundations

▸ VCP 9 / VCP-Cloud / VCP 5-DCV / VCP 4 / VCP 3
▸ VCAP4-DCA
▸ VCI: VMware Certified Instructor
▸ DCSA: DataCore Certified Solutions Architect
▸ ITIL Foundation
▸ MCSE (Windows 2000), MCSA (Windows 2003)
▸ MCTS (4×), MCP 2.0

All marks on Credly

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Game & Responsibility

Hunting

Responsibility and Strategic Stewardship

Since 2014, I manage my own hunting reserve in Rheinhessen. For me, hunting is far more than a hobby — it is a lived responsibility for nature and wildlife. The focus is on ecological stewardship, sustainable wildlife population management, and habitat preservation. Additionally, I volunteer with Kitzrettung Rheinhessen, where we use drones and thermal imaging to save young fawns from mowing deaths.

Conservation

Species Protection

Tradition

Nature Bond

Kitzrettung Rheinhessen

Speak with me

To the Table

A conversation with me is worth your time when you're standing at a real crossroads: infrastructure approaching the end of its lifecycle, a vendor that after an acquisition isn't the one you signed with, an AI project that needs to move out of the pilot phase, or the uncomfortable question of whether the next hardware generation is really the answer. Not worth it if you're looking for confirmation of a decision that's already been made — there are cheaper voices than mine for that. Everything else: gladly.

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