About Bas Bartholomeus
Independent architect for enterprise customer data platforms. Most of my work is Adobe Experience Platform and Real-Time CDP: I design the architecture, stay involved while it gets built, and hand day-to-day ownership to the team that lives with it.
Former Adobe Consulting EMEA · 9+ years · Freelance / contract · Netherlands, Belgium and Europe · hybrid or on site
The route here
I started in media measurement and digital analytics, working with publishers, advertisers and media agencies: audience measurement, campaign and streaming analytics, and the SDK implementations and validation underneath them. Certified Digital Analytix Expert with comScore in 2015. The recurring question there was whether a number could be trusted, which is the same question a customer profile raises later on.
From measurement the work moved to audience platforms: DMP use cases, segmentation and activation, Adobe Analytics and Audience Manager. That is where customer data stopped being a reporting problem and became an architecture problem, with identity, consent and latency as the hard parts.
Then nine years inside Adobe Consulting EMEA as a senior consultant, first across the Experience Cloud solutions, later on Adobe Experience Platform: Real-Time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics, Web SDK collection, and custom activation through Destination SDK. Enterprise programmes in telecom, finance, media, retail and regulated industries, often the escalated ones where the XDM model, the identity strategy or the governance had come apart. Alongside that, training: over 200 professionals on Audience Manager and Adobe Experience Platform.
Teaching has run through all of it. Inside Adobe I built and delivered training for customer teams and developers, over 200 professionals across Audience Manager and Adobe Experience Platform, and that habit shaped how I work now: take what the platform does, put it next to the customer's own architecture, use cases and data, and keep going until the team can apply it independently in their own environment.
Since early 2026 I do the same work independently, on the client side. The order of that route matters more than the length of it: I design the things I have built, validated and debugged myself, which is why I can tell an architecture that will hold from one that only looks good in a diagram.
How I work
I work for the organisation that owns the platform, not for the party delivering it. In practice that means sitting next to your internal engineers, your enterprise architects and your marketing teams, and working alongside Adobe Professional Services, specialist freelancers and whichever implementation partner is on the programme.
Good partners do good work. What clients more often lack is someone on their own side who can judge the design and ask the awkward question while it is still cheap to answer. Someone whose job it also is to keep the knowledge in the building after the project ends.
One principle runs through all of it: not everything belongs in AEP. What lives where should follow from the use case, latency, identity, data minimisation, governance and activation needs. A platform bought is not an architecture decided.
The three things I get asked for are implementation architecture, an independent review of something already running, and capability transfer so the team can carry it themselves.
Engagement
Engagements run from a focused architecture review of a few days to an embedded client-side role of a few days a week, over months, across an implementation or transformation programme. Freelance or contract. Based in the Netherlands, working with Dutch, Belgian and wider European programmes, in Dutch or English, hybrid or on site with your own architects and engineers when that is what the work needs. Engagements run under whichever title the organisation uses: AEP architect, RT-CDP or customer data architect, Adobe implementation architect, MarTech solution architect, design authority. The work behind the title is the same.
Evidence
Adobe Analytics to CJA migration leadership, programme recovery with multi-vendor governance, and a custom Destination SDK connector for consent-aware activation.
Case studies →Published technical work on Adobe Experience Platform, including end-to-end testing and reach for Destination SDK integrations.
Read the articles →Over 200 professionals trained on Audience Manager and Adobe Experience Platform, from developer enablement to practitioner workshops, with the curriculum and material written for the customer's own architecture. Five certifications including AEP and CJA.
Certifications →I also design and build furniture and integrated systems in my own workshop. Same rule in both places: understand the structure before you build anything, and stay accountable for the result long after delivery. Wood is less forgiving than software, which is a useful discipline to keep. Studio work →
Work together
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether I can help and what a sensible first step would be.
