miércoles, 13 de abril de 2016

"De núvols i falles" - Oracle FMW Forum 2016 Recap


 For the second year in a row, I've had this incredible opportunity to take part in Oracle EMEA's Partner Community Forum. This time around I do come from Europe, as I'm currently living and working in beautiful Norway with Sysco Middleware AS. OFM Forum is always an exciting place to be and a most worthy experience, so here's my recap for this edition, I certainly hope you will enjoy it:


Something great about this event is that everybody knows we can always count on Jurgen to pick a superb location for it. Valencia is no exception, as it is a stunning city with so much sights, culture and a very unique Spanish flavour.

For me, being a Mexican, staying in Valencia was particularly enjoyable, since I had the chance to hear and talk some Spanish, eat a lot of paella & bocadillos, drink horchata, attend bullfights and soccer matches. I even brought my wife with me for this trip, so she could also enjoy and take a little breather from our adaptation process to the Nordic lands; I was even allowed to bring her along for one of the networking events, so she could meet some of my friends and colleagues, which was great and a lot of fun for me.

It also happened that during the same week, traditional and super famous local festivity "Las Fallas" would be taking place. So add a little pyrotechnics, parades, light shows and fiesta to the mix and you will end up experiencing a really colourful fortnight.


But besides all the wonderful entertainment, what we really were for in Valencia was to talk extensively about technology and strategy with fellow partners, ACEs and Oracle's top Middleware people for sales, product management, education, channels and architecture.

The conference agenda was packed again this year, with a lot of knowledge and insight being shared by some of the top Oracle speakers in the world. It was no surprise that the main discussion threads veered around some topics which have become increasingly familiar and relevant for IT practitioners:

-Cloud
-Digital Transformation
-Enterprise Mobility
-APIs
-UX / CX

An important thing to note for the moment being, is that as broad as these subjects may be, most of the buzz and the investment are coming down to one particular element: PaaS (Platform as a Service)


So if you attended OOW last year and/or any recent major Oracle conference, you will surely know that all the roads are leading to PaaS right now, whether we're talking about integration, API management, mobile backends, analytics, IoT, PaaS4SaaS, etc.

It can be a little overwhelming, since the number of available options seems to be growing by the minute. For example, in this event we were introduced to brand new features in API Cloud Service, as well as to BAM's heir apparent: Insight Cloud Service.

The sheer number of cloud services in Oracle's PaaS offering, as well as their customer appeal, use cases, practical applications, touching points and possible overlapping have been common arguments which we've been having for quite some time and which are getting hotter as the platform keeps widening. In fact, just a week before OFM Forum I had some lengthy discussions about all this with fellow friends/ACEs at OUGN (article coming soon).  

For this reason, the most hyped presentation of them all was the ACED production, where my good friend and showman extraordinaire Lucas Jellema, along with Lonneke Dikmans, Torsten Winterberg and some others would join their creative and brilliant minds in an audacious attempt to orchestrate live interaction between at least eight different cloud services:



In spectacular fashion and despite the wi-fi challenges, they did manage to pull it off, implementing a fun and easily understandable social-driven scenario which showcased many of Oracle PaaS's multiple facets, so kudos to them!!

Another interesting development is the release of Oracle Cloud Machine, which customers may lease in order to setup their own Oracle-powered private clouds with all of the management and UI features from Oracle's public cloud. Its another strategic move by the vendor to keep enticing customers, especially those who are a bit reluctant or slow on their transition to the cloud.

The last couple of days are for workshops, and though not everybody's able to stay, it's really worth the effort if you have the chance. This year I feel like I made a very wise choice by switching to Weblogic Multitenancy 12c, where our instructors put together a really great and well prepared workshop so we could learn and play a little with WLS's new and exciting capabilities. After trying it out, I can immediately think of a lot of use cases for leveraging multitenancy / virtual containers, and I can't hardly wait for it to be supported for the rest of Fusion Middleware components such as SOA, OSB et al.

Well, this is it, so I really hope to be back next year, and again I tip my hat to Jurgen and the rest of the Oracle staff for putting together a great event and showing us such a great time as well.

Thanks for reading!!

P.S. Here's a short video we improvised with a couple of friends at the location, where we share some additional opinions about the conference:


And don;t forget to visit SOA / PaaS Community!!:










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