Your AI agents are only as good as the data they can reach.
Our engineers make sure they reach all of it.
Two programs: our Forward Deployed Engineers get you to production. Your Inward Redeployed Engineers keep you there.
Founded 1992 · ODBC · JDBC · SPARQL · SQL · Knowledge Graphs
The two-engine model. OpenLink fields Forward Deployed Engineers into your environment to put AI agents into production against live enterprise data. In parallel, your own staff are reskilled as Inward Redeployed Engineers — so the capability stays when the engagement ends.
Every enterprise now owns two problems: AI agents that demo brilliantly but fail against real corporate data, and skilled engineers whose roles the AI era is repricing by the quarter. Most firms sell you a strategy document for the first and a webinar for the second. We deploy engineers at the first problem — and redeploy yours at the second.
1Forward Deployed Engineering#
The Forward Deployed Engineer is how serious software companies now go to market: an engineer embedded at your site whose sole mandate is a working production system — not a report, not a roadmap. Palantir proved the model; the leading AI labs have adopted it. We have practiced its substance for over three decades.
An OpenLink FDE engagement puts engineers on your ground who have spent their careers in the plumbing your AI agents depend on — ODBC and JDBC, SPARQL and SQL, Knowledge Graphs, and multi-model data management with Virtuoso. One deliverable, defined on day one: AI agents operating against your live data, inside your governance perimeter, in production.
- Scoped to an outcome, not billed by the meeting. The statement of work names the production system, the data sources it federates, and the date it goes live.
- Embedded, not remote-adjacent. Our engineers work inside your team, your tickets, your standups — friction is found where it lives.
- Loosely coupled by design. Agents connect to enterprise Data Spaces through open standards, so nothing we build locks you to us.
2Inward Redeployed Engineering#
Your board is already asking: what happens to our people? The honest answer: your existing engineers are the best AI investment you own, because they hold the one thing no vendor can ship — knowledge of where your data actually lives and why it looks the way it does.
The Inward Redeployed Engineer program retrains the DBAs, data engineers, and integration specialists you already employ — hands-on, on your systems, alongside our FDEs — as practitioners of AI agents, agent skills, and knowledge-graph-grounded data access. They don't attend a course about the system. They help build it, and graduate operating it.
The deliverables, plainly listed#
- AI agents, skills, and MCP-accessible tools loosely coupled with data spaces (databases, knowledge bases, filesystems, and APIs), reachable through open protocols.
- An enterprise Knowledge Graph and Data Spaces layer that makes your data legible to every future agent, not just the first one.
- Ontology design, implementation, and deployment for use with AI Agents and existing apps — documented, validated with SHACL, and mapped to your live data.
- A trained IRE cohort inside your organization, certified on the systems they helped build.
- Documentation and agent skills as maintained artifacts, versioned in your repositories.
- No lock-in: everything speaks ODBC, JDBC, SPARQL, SQL, GraphQL, and HTTP — standards, not proprietary tethers.
Expert Guidance for Your Data Journey#
Navigating the complexities of enterprise data access, integration, and management requires the right expertise, strategy, and technology.
Our Professional Services empower organizations to harness AI Agents and AI Agent Skills loosely coupled with enterprise Data Spaces — databases, knowledge bases, filesystems, and APIs.
Leveraging Multi-Model Data Management, Knowledge Graphs, Linked Data Principles, Data Products, and Intelligent Data Access Middleware, we help eliminate the technical debt caused by data silos while enabling interoperable, AI-ready systems built on open standards.
We offer tailored solutions across four key areas
Product Training
Equip your team with expert-led training programs to maximize the value of OpenLink solutions.
Consulting
Strategic and product-specific consulting to optimize data integration, governance, and virtualization.
Custom Solution Development
Tailored solutions that ensure seamless interoperability across databases, knowledge graphs, and document collections.
Deployment & Rollout Assistance
Expert guidance to streamline implementation, integration, and enterprise-wide adoption.
Each area can be engaged on its own, or as part of the two programs above: Forward Deployed Engineers develop, deploy and roll out the system; Inward Redeployed Engineers are trained on it alongside them. Modeling-heavy programs have a home too: see ontology and knowledge-graph modeling.
Built for your role#
Our Professional Services are tailored for every data stakeholder.
This role could not be loaded just now. Read about the Forward Deployed Engineering program above.
This role could not be loaded just now. See our consulting services above.
Ontology and knowledge-graph modeling#
An AI agent is only as dependable as the model of the data it reasons over. We design that model with you, and put it to work on the data you already hold.
Ontology and vocabulary design
Domain ontologies and controlled vocabularies in OWL, RDFS and SKOS, built to reuse established vocabularies such as schema.org before inventing terms.
From tables to a graph
Mapping relational and other sources to RDF in place with Virtuoso RDF Views, so the graph reads live data rather than a copy.
Reasoning and validation
Inference rules that make implicit facts queryable, and SHACL shape constraints that keep the data honest as it grows.
Governed access for agents
Attribute-based access control applied to the graph, so an agent sees what its user is entitled to see and nothing more.
What you receive: a documented ontology and vocabulary with its rationale, the mappings that connect it to your sources, example queries, and a hand-over session so your own team can extend it.
Why use our services?#
We have extensive experience in working with both commercial and open-source organizations, in addition to standardization bodies such as the W3C and the IETF.
As leading experts in the fields of Linked Data and the Semantic Web since their inception, we are in a unique position to pass on our knowledge and experience in the development and deployment of Linked (Open) Data (LOD) services to organizations seeking to bootstrap or enhance their product or service offerings using these technologies.
Why believe us — the facts
Founded in 1992, OpenLink Software has spent more than three decades building the data-access middleware — ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and beyond — that enterprises use to reach data wherever it lives.
Our Virtuoso platform hosts DBpedia, the knowledge graph derived from Wikipedia that helped seed the Linked Open Data cloud — the same web of structured knowledge today's large language models were raised on. When your AI agent needs a knowledge graph, you can hire the people who run one of the world's most-dereferenced ones.
Who runs our software: the organizations that use OpenLink products are listed in our Customer Snapshot.
Engagement shape: sized to your system. How many engineers we embed, for how long, and how many of your staff train alongside them as an IRE cohort are agreed after the scoping call and written into the statement of work.
Benefits#
Discover the advantages of partnering with OpenLink for your data integration and management needs.
The benefits could not be loaded just now. In the meantime, see the service catalogue above.
Book a 30-minute scoping call
Bring one AI initiative that is stuck between demo and production.#
We will tell you — specifically, and at no charge — what is blocking it, whether an FDE engagement fits, and what an IRE cohort for your team would look like. If we are not the right fit, we will say so in the first call, not the fourth invoice.