A Quick Recap of Oracle PaaS Community Forum 2017

I've been attending this conference 3 years in a row now, and strongly believe that if you're part of the Oracle Middleware / PaaS partner community, it's the one you really don't want to miss throughout the year.

The focused content, networking opportunities and VIP access to the top Oracle PMs & Architects obviously make coming to this event a great investment, but this year we also got the Community Day with lots of best practices presented by Oracle ACEs and the first OMESA workshop, which I will go back to in a second.

As always, huge props are in order to the unwavering excellence of Jürgen and his team when it comes to organizing and hosting the forum. Location has always been fantastic, but this year for me it was awesome to travel away from the cold and into a sunny resort. I also got to play this year's first rounds of outdoor tennis during the weekend, even hitting some balls with a couple of peers.

This time around I couldn't stay for the workshops the last two days, but anyhow, I have two key takeaways from my personal experience at the conference this year:

1. OMESA (Open Modern Enterprise Software Architecture) can and should become the next big thing. Even though the content is still a work in progress, and the workshop at Split came as a first experiment, you could just feel the knowledge, experience and talent oozing out of the conference room where we sat to discuss the guidelines to this project. With Luis Weir as a driving force and a strong core of lead Architects from all over the place, this group has all the tools to exercise constructive thought leadership and deliver meaningful assets to the IT community. 
2. Oracle PaaS is truly finding ways to deliver. Although we're all supporters, many of us have also been overly critic in the last year; however, the maturity they were able to showcase at this event together with the actual numbers to back it up was really commendable and uplifting. Moreover, in this edition we were finally able to hear several success stories from the partners themselves, some of which have gone to great lengths (AMIS, Opitz, e-Proseed, Avanttic, etc.) to influence the market and position PaaS solutions among their customers.

Split + PaaSForum, what a great and inspiring way to start the year. Until the next time!!