Bernd Ruecker

Bernd Ruecker is co-founder and chief technologist of Camunda, a Berlin, Germany, company whose process orchestration software runs long-running business processes, and more recently AI agents, for companies such as T-Mobile, Lufthansa, ING and Atlassian. He started Camunda in 2008 with Jakob Freund.

Meeting Jakob Freund on Xing

He calls himself "a software developer at heart" and holds a master's degree in software technology from HFT Stuttgart. Around 2007 he was a freelancer in Stuttgart, Germany, when Freund contacted him on the business network Xing and asked him to write about BPEL, a process standard listed on his profile. "He came back and said, 'You know what? BPEL is crap, I'm not going to write about that, but I can write about something else'," Freund recalled to Computer Weekly. Freund later visited him in Stuttgart, and after a long night out the two decided to start a business process management consultancy together.

Becoming Camunda's Evangelist

The two ran Camunda as co-CEOs for its first five years. When joint decisions began to slow the firm, Freund became sole chief executive and Ruecker took the role Freund describes as "our evangelist, our free radical." In 2013 Camunda pivoted from consulting toward building an open-source workflow engine, "and that shift defined our trajectory," Ruecker writes on his site. He has contributed to open-source workflow engines for more than 15 years, and he still likes writing code to prove out ideas.

Writing the Books on Process Automation

With Freund he wrote Real-Life BPMN, a practical guide to modeling and automating processes with the BPMN flowchart standard, which has gone through several editions in English, German and Spanish. In 2020 he announced Practical Process Automation, published by O'Reilly, which explains how to run long-running processes in microservice and cloud architectures without making each service hold its own state. "I've been thinking about this question for a long time now," he wrote, adding that his discussions with customers "showed one thing clearly: We need guidance."

He later co-wrote Enterprise Process Orchestration (Wiley, 2024), a guide to the strategy, team structures and technology behind process work, and he is writing Agentic Orchestration, about moving AI agents from pilot projects into production.

Speaking on Distributed Systems

Ruecker speaks regularly at international conferences and writes for technology magazines, focusing on how process automation fits modern architectures built on microservices, domain-driven design and event-driven systems. His talks cover topics such as keeping data consistent across distributed systems and the pitfalls of event-driven architecture, and the book site says he loves getting feedback from readers.