Last week I visited Hyderabad in India in order to deliver a SOA Suite training for Genpact consultants that participate in a Systems Integration project for General Electric Plastics. The schedule for the training week was published on this blog earlier.
It was my first visit to India. It was hot alright, but in a comfortable way as the humidity was low. And we visited at the right time: in May and June it will be summertime taking temperatures well over 40 degrees centigrade during the day time. Since we had lots of topics to cover during the week, there was little time for sightseeing. And it was as if the cab drivers knew: every day we were treated with yet another route to the Genpact office building. For Europeans with their traffic rules and regulations Indian traffic is absolutely fascinating. Streets are crowded, the number of traffic lights is low, just like the number of rear-view mirrors :-). But rarely seen in European traffic, people in India just sort of blend into it. Honk your horn and dive right in hoping that the others will leave some room; and they will (what a relieve)! Best of all: no one gets mad.
Every day we visited the Genpact office in HITEC City, the Hyderabad Information Technology Engineering Consultancy City, a major technology township where you find most if not all of the larger IT companies. It is huge, over 100,000 people find employment over there. And even more and bigger offices are under construction. The training was in the Cyber Gateway office building (picture taken from Wikipedia):
On Wednesday afternoon Neeraj Chauhan and Neeraj Kumar from Oracle delivered a presentation on the Oracle eBusiness Suite Adapters that are part of Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.1. Well presented from obvious experience and specifically targeted at the needs of the audience.
For most of the training, as much time as possible was freed up for hands-on work: after an introduction or a demo from me with respect to a subject, the trainees put it into practice. Focus was on ESB and BPEL, working our way to an event-driven organization and matching architecture. As people got a feel for the concepts and gradually started finding their way through the design-time and run-time environments of Oracle ESB and BPEL I noticed that they also began to appreciate the productivity provided by support of solid standards in the Service oriented architecture and modern tools to implement these. At the end of the week we were glad to see a number of team members creatively wiring ESB Systems to BPEL Processes. This is a snapshot of the team, taken in one of the patios of the Cyber Gateway building:
India is a fascinating country with colorful people. I would not mind going back some time, hopefully spending less time in offices and hotels and getting a chance to actually pay more attention to the country itself.
That was a nice writeup. Pity you could not see enough of Hyderabad. Next time you are here, hope somebody takes you out for a Irani Chai “Hyderabadi Cup of Tea” and Biryani 🙂