OOW13: Racing Oracle Open World

For me this year’s Open World has three main themes: Community, Cloud and Mobile.

Although actually it included a fourth theme: the America’s Cup. The fabulous comeback of Team America and the spectacular sailing lead to an extra vibe during the conference. And although the media footage provided the best way to view the races, nothing beats the experience of standing ashore and watching the boats ‘fly by’ in real life.

Unfortunately the sailing also disrupted Larry’s keynote about the cloud but fortunately Thomas Kurian did an excellent job on that one. For me that keynote was one of the most interesting of the conference because it provided an overview of the big ambitions of Oracle for the clouds. A bit to my surprise, it also included an announcement by Microsoft about the availability of the Oracle Database, Oracle Weblogic and Java (either on Windows or Linux) in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

The cloud offerings are still increasing and now encompass a clear SAAS, PAAS and IAAS strategy. Fusion Applications modules like Human Capital Management, CRM and ERP and others are (or will become) available as Software Services, supplemented with social services. The database, weblogic, documents, mobile and others are the platform services that also includes development services like source control, wiki, incident management and build and deploy. Infrastructure services include (amongs others) storage, backup, identity, cache and messaging.

I’ve took the advantage to experience the java (weblogic) cloud in one of the many hands-on labs. This was an excellent lab that demonstrated much of the aspects on developing and deploying and managing Java / ADF applications in the cloud using OEPE, Maven and the cloud SDK. By the way, you can try it yourself on cloud.oracle.com; it takes only one day for activation ;-).

The community aspect is always a great part of Oracle Open World (actually of most conferences). The ADF community is very active and still growing. It’s therefore more then deserved that they have their own User Group Sunday. We were treated by excellent presentations on Performance, best, actually worst, practices, Security and Mobile user experience. The meetup on Saturday was an great way to meet everybody again and enjoy good food and drinks and have interesting discussions. Looking forward to next year. And off course, the many ADF (and other) sessions during the week provided lots of valuable information and good discussions, for example at the ‘Lessons Learned’ session on Wednesday by (amongs others) the guys from TIA. I also got great feedback on my own session ‘Oracle ADF Fusion Architecture: Manage the Modular Approach’.

On the demogrounds I got an great overview of the current state of the Developer Cloud (see earlier). It has been much improved and seems to perform much better and includes more features than before. But since it’s a fully managed environment with limited flexibility that’s aimed at cloud deployed applications I’m not sure if it’s a option for many of my customers. I’m looking forward to evaluate it (again) and see if and how we could integrate it in our development processes.

With all the great sessions, meetings, hands-on labs, keynotes, America’s cup, breakfast together, cycling around town etc. etc. it was again a great and valuable week at Oracle Open World. I’d like to thank everybody and I hope to be there next year.