Prospects: Cloudy – OFM Middleware and PaaS Community Forum 2016 @Valencia

On friday the 22nd Fusion Middleware and PaaS Community Forum ends. Time to lean back and recap, what happened the last days.

To summarize it shortly: It was a unique event and a great experience being part of this professional conference, as the following facts will show:

• 2 days with tons of information about the Oracle Middleware on Premise and PaaS offerings,
• 2 days with very good and interesting hands-on bootcamps leaded by technical experts,
• 180 attendees consisting of a lot of experts, ACE“™s and ACED“™s
• A huge contingent of members from Oracle“™s Product management team,
• Great location with the Las Arenas hotel at the awesome city of Valencia, where the Fallas de Valencia (http://www.fallasfromvalencia.com/en) were taking place

So the surrounding conditions were excellent and announced exciting days, offering best conditions for networking, exchanging information and best practices.

The first day was mainly marked by strategy. So the latest information regarding Oracle“™s strategy for their cloud (PaaS, IaaS) and Middleware offerings were provided. This was very useful to give us as partners the opportunity to guide customers on the right path in their direction to the cloud.

On the second day more technical topics came to the focus. The attendees could choose out of four different breakout sessions covering diverse aspects regarding the current Middleware and PaaS offerings:

• SOA, integration and SOA Cloud Service track,
• BPM, Process Cloud Service and user experience track,
• Weblogic, Java Cloud Service and Engineered systems track,
• Mobile and Internet of things track

Within these sessions, the newest and upcoming features, information regarding the further roadmap for the products and also thoughts about current themes, like Microservices or API management and what is Oracle“™s understanding of these topics, which gives the attendees great insights where things are headed. As a highlight of this day, the ACEDs Lucas Jellema, Lonneke Dikmanns, Mark Simpson and Torsten Winterberg presented a showcase where diverse PaaS services (9! in numbers) where used to implement a voting platform. This shows how the diverse cloud services can be combined with each other, which was very impressive.

The last two days were marked by more practical stuff. Here six different bootcamps were offered, each having different focusses:

• Weblogic 12.2.1 WLS Multitenancy
• Mobile and Mobile Cloud Service
• Integrated PasS
• SOA 12c and PaaS cool & new
• Hybrid process applications
• Internet of things (IoT)

In all of those bootcamps a lot of theoretical and practical information were provided by the instructors. In addition, the attendees could get their hands on the newest versions of Middleware and PaaS products to get a first impression on the possibilities which are provided by the latest features of these products. At the same time, it was possible to give direct feedback to the instructors, consisting mainly of members of the Product management or Product development. So the feedback went directly the the right persons and can be used to further improve the current products and services.

All in all, and as I already stated initially, it was a great and valuable conference. The vision of Oracle“™s Middleware and PaaS strategy was depicted crystal clear and the chances for partners and customers were explained very well. Regarding the current Middleware products and PaaS services, it can be said that those become more and more mature, with a clear vision and a predictable as well as consistent roadmap with monthly updates for the cloud services. It is really great to see those evolvements. The future for Oracle, theier partners and customers is looking very promising.

Last, but not least I want to specifically mention Jürgen Kress, who makes such an impressive event happening and bringing such many great people together at an awesome location. Thank you Jürgen!