Oracle Open World 2009 highlights

Sitting in my hotel room after the keynote by Larry Ellison that had my ‘all time favorite action Hero and now governor’ Arnold Schwarzenegger as a guest, I was thinking about the highlights of this conference. One of them, obviously, was seeing ‘Arnie’ on stage.

But, on a serious note, there were several highlights as well. Let’s look at them in no particular order.

Vision on Enterprise architecture and BPM
In the past, Oracle was only talking about tools, tools and tools. Well, maybe sometimes about people: the people that administer the tools and the people that develop applications using the tools…
This year, there was an encouraging number of presentations from Oracle about Enterprise architecture, BPM methodology, and reference architecture. I guess this is the positive influence from the BEA merger; a lot of people in BEA came from Fuego, Flashline. They have a natural focus on business and architecture.
Apart from the presentations, Bob Rhubart organized an Enterprise Architecture meet up where I had a great time and met interesting people (architects) from both Oracle and other companies.

New features in the upcoming BPM Suite
Unfortunately, I missed the hands-on lab where you could test drive Oracle BPM 11g. Luckily, I got a great demo at the demo grounds from Mateo. The upcoming version is completely integrated in the SCA fabric. Instead of having screen flows, the human task service is used. Oracle Business Rules is nicely integrated into the product and everything still looks and feels the same as the previous (Eclipse) based version. The coolest part though, is the web client. I think it is called the composer. It is a web based application, built using ADF and flash,
where business users can either create new processes or change and edit existing ones (templates) that are delivered by IT. This makes handing over business processes from Business to IT and back much easier. Giving both the tools and information they need. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!

Hands-on labs
Another nice feature of Open World are the hands-on labs. They give offer a nice introduction into new features, and give you a chance to talk to the product managers at the same time. This year I liked the lab about connecting OSB to Oracle E-Business Suite the best. It showed me how easy it is to deploy the JCA adapters into Oracle Service Bus. The way this is done is surprisingly simple: you create the adapter, in this case the E-Business Suite adapter, in JDeveloper. Then you create a project in OSB, import the XSD and the WSDLs and you are done!
It sounded very awkward when I first read about it, because you need to develop the adapters in JDeveloper and then move over to the OSB console to deploy them. But because all you really need is to upload the WSDLs and the XSDs, this is a nice solution until OSB gets integrated with JDeveloper and SOA Suite 11g. That is another thing I look forward to: the new version of the OSB…

Meeting people and being back in San Francisco
Apart from the content, the conference is about meeting people. There are a lot of people you can meet, talk to and connect with. I love re-uniting with everybody. There are numerous occasions where you can do this, targeted at different groups. At the demo grounds you can talk to Oracle people, but also other vendors. I had a really interesting conversation with the people from Mulesoft.
Apart from that, there are the social events: there is a blogger night, SOA Partner Council event, Ace dinner and to top it all: the appreciation event tonight. I look forward to that: the rain from yesterday has stopped and it promises to be a great party!

So far, this trip has been very inspiring and worth while.