Some random thoughts on OOW17

Oracle Open World 2017 has come and gone already, but it left behind some really interesting points worth revisiting.

The conference spans so much, but I want to focus mainly on the topics related to my own expertise (Integration, Java, Application Development). So let's cut to the chase and take a look at the highlights:

• Focus is on Developers - the Java & Open Source movements seem stronger than ever, with JavaOne recovering a leading role this year and OracleCode summoning enthusiastic crowds on its first appearance at Open World. Also, Oracle has visibly placed a lot of importance on programs such as the Developer Community space, Developer Champion award, etc.
• Oracle PaaS has finally broken through - with increased maturity in most of the services, plenty of customer success stories and some nice improvements to the licensing model, PaaS adoption has become increasingly viable. This is an especially important moment for integration-focused partners, as in my opinion those who are able to better cope with the paradigm shift will be able to take full advantage of the growing market.
• Modern Architectures are at the Center of Innovation - Hybrid, Distributed, Serverless, Reactive, API-Driven are all architectural qualities associated with innovative systems and solutions. I attended a good number of excellent sessions on these kind of topics, whereas concepts such as SOA, BPM,  etc. have gone from being household names in years past to practically disappearing from the conference's agenda (this doesn't mean that such technologies can be pronounced dead already, but they definitely have ceased to be pillars of a so called "modern architecture"). I was also glad to see some of my peers incorporating OMESA (http://omesa.io) into their presentations; I still think this open project has lots of potential, but we definitely need to go back to the drawing table and grow it with these recent trends in mind.
• Embracing New Technologies is Cool - This year we had lots of sessions and quite some chatter about diverse tools and technologies such as Blockchain, Chatbots, Cloud-Native Microservices, Kubernetes, Kafka, Spark, just to name a few. Although we might not want to go jumping into every bandwagon, it's always interesting to consider and learn new things. Thus, I'm glad Oracle's encouraging it by providing a forum in this kind of event.

So,  Oracle has delivered as always one of the most relevant, memorable & eventful conferences of the year. This is definitely an interesting time to be a software engineer

Thanks for reading!

ODC Appreciation Day : Deploying a Project to OACCS from Oracle DevCS

Hello dear friends from the Oracle Developer Community. Today is ODC Appreciation Day 2017 and so I'm gonna share this little piece about one of my favourite product features: deploying applications to OACCS from Oracle DevCS 

This is actually a very simple capability, which I got to test again as recently as last week during OOW2017. But as trivial as it may seem, the fact that it's works seamlessly speaks volumes about the integrated nature and efficiency of Oracle's Cloud Development Platform.

So, if your Cloud services are correctly configured, it is as easy as to create a deployment profile for any of your applications and selecting "Application Container Cloud" as your deployment target:

Then the next time your deployment job runs, the selected build will be automatically deployed to OACCS according to the profile you configured.

It's Cloud + DevOps at its best, making life easier for both Developers & Administrators.

Well, this was quite a short post but enough to say #ThanksODC while highlighting a cool product feature.

Thanks for reading!!

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!!

Some Thoughts on OUGN Spring Seminar 2017

This was my second year aboard the Color Line ferry for the OUGN Spring Seminar. Happily, it was also the conference's 10th year anniversary, so all the speakers and attendees were in for a special treat this time around.

I must say that in my opinion this is one of the most special Oracle conferences out there, obviously due of the venue, but also because of the consistently excellent technical level of both presenters and attendees, which together with the intimate setting always end up producing excellent discussions, passionate conversations and a very high quality learning experience overall.

I was selected to deliver two presentations at this event: DevOps for Oracle FMW with the orawls modules & Advanced Cloud Design Patterns, and it was a blast to do it alongside my good friends Ronald and Simon respectively.

My company, Sysco, had as always a huge presence at the event, being one of the main sponsors, bringing a lot of people in and providing several speakers for many of the tracks.

This edition's big takeaway for me was the presence of a brilliant and highly-driven crop of young multi-national speakers, most of them presenting at OUGN for the first time. This guys and girls, coming from such distinct places as Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Holland, Norway, Croatia, Spain, etc.,  (and many of them travelling with own funds), are bringing a lot of excitement and value into the Oracle Community with fresh topics and disruptive ideas about the newest technological developments and trends. They are also quickly becoming household names, which means that people are actually signing up to conferences to hear what they have to say. So hopefully we'll see many faces from this new generation joining the ACED ranks in the near future.

Thanks for reading!!

"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:

https://youtu.be/3NMtfHHbWJU

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

https://paascommunity.com

Anchors aweigh: Recap of OUGN 2016

Let me start by saying that OUGN Spring Seminar has been one of the most memorable experiences I've had as a conference attendee / speaker.

I believe most of us in the Oracle community have heard the stories about this event, told by the people who have been here before, and it is definitely one of the most coveted slots throughout the year for speakers / ACEDs who wish to take part of this unique setup.

Fortunately for me, I just moved to Oslo in the past few weeks, and my new employer, Sysco AS,  happens to be one of the main sponsors of the seminar, so when a last minute chance to present on the boat came up, I was obviously all for it!!

Before boarding the Oslo - Kiel cruiser, OUGN organised a really nice speaker dinner at picturesque Aker Brygge, where I was really happy to see some familiar faces from friends I had met at previous events and which were now in Oslo for the Vårseminar. I was also surprised to realise all the different countries and regions represented by the speakers attending the conference, from Argentina to Mexico, USA, Holland, India, Portugal, Russia, Croatia, UK and much more.

The next day it was really swift to get onto the ship. I must say that I was really pleased with the excellent organization and logistics provided by OUGN's board. I've had the chance to be part of the organising committee for Oracle User Group conferences in the past, in my hometown of Mexico City, so I'm quite familiar with the hard work and the challenges this implies, though what we used to do is far from this scale. That being said, what the Norwegian User Group pulls off every year is truly commendable and one of a kind. One really outstanding element, which I think every conference should adopt, is the fact that the seminar was almost 100% paperless, as everything we needed was included in the guidebook app.

Once on board, the fun got started in every way imaginable. The mix is just perfect as you have sponsors, customers, speakers, colleagues and friends altogether with nowhere else to go. So, there was a time for everything, from doing business and attending excellent sessions to having drinks with friends, going on the sun deck to appreciate the mesmerizing landscape or  even late night singing and dancing at the multiple clubs available.

I really had a great time and met so many new friends; every meal was delicious and I was every minute in the company of very interesting and fun people, so i didn't really sleep much as I didn't want to miss out on all the fun!!.

I also enjoyed preparing and presenting my session about Oracle MCS, where I was really happy to see many of my good friends come and support me. I'm also glad the topics showcased stirred some discussion, as it is always a learning experience having people question and challenge what you're bringing to the table.

A couple of good tips for presenting on a boat are: avoid any live demos requiring fast internet connectivity and beware of motion sickness!!

Last but not least, it was really cool to see many of my Sysco Middleware teammates also presenting at the conference: Jon Petter, Oleg, Dalibor and Cato all had great sessions, and I'm sure the rest of our multinational and highly skilled team will follow on the same footsteps the next years.

Well, it was a blast and I'm really looking forward to hopefully coming back on 2017!!

Thanks OUGN & Sponsors, and congratulations on a fantastic fortnight!!, and thank you dear reader for going through this quick post =)

Comments and questions are welcome as always.

Oracle ICS Update - On premise Agent now Available

Hello appreciated readers, here's hoping to a fun and successful 2016 for you all!!

And for us Oracle FMW practitioners, there are some very exciting news to begin the year:

Yours truly has been following for a while the development and growth of Oracle's iPaaS platform: "Integration Cloud Service". And it's been a long wait, but at long last the ultra hyped On-Premise Agent has been released and is now available for all ICS subscriptions.

There are some other cool and useful new features in this release (e.g. content based routing, new adapters, etc.), which we will surely discuss during the next few weeks in a different post. However, in our humble opinion the Agent is a transcendent piece of the puzzle, which will open up a whole new set of use cases and possibilities for the implementation of cloud-driven integrations with ICS.

So, what does this mean?, let's look at it graphically:

Oracle ICS was an already powerful yet simple to implement tool, suited perfectly for Cloud to Cloud Integrations but somehow limited in its potential to participate in hybrid solutions (those which also include on-prem interaction).

The obvious problem here is that we know Hybrid Architectures are still predominant among organizations in the midst of a cloud adoption strategy.

And that's why the Agent is a real game-changer:

As it will allow not only direct integration with on premises Apps through ready made adapters, but also the potential of allowing seamless interaction between existing SOA Suite implementations and cloud based solutions, for example:

In the image above we see a highly complex hybrid solution, where ICS is positioned as the cornerstone for integration purposes. A very plausible scenario and definitely an interesting and disruptive paradigm shift.

So that's it for this first post of the year; but we will make sure to take a deep dive into this new technology and deliver a detailed how-to for our loyal readers.

For more information on this topic go to Oracle Technology Blogs:

https://blogs.oracle.com/integration/entry/new_agent_simplifies_cloud_to

Until the next time!!