SOA@Oracle SCA, BPEL, BPM & Service Bus: Oracle Partner Event: Málaga 2012 Edition

In the first half of February 2012, I joined the Oracle Partner Event in Málaga, Spain. This event is organized by Oracle for all partners and special guests. The goal of this event is to learn from each other, between the participators as well with Oracle. We also get the latests information on the Oracle product strategy. The event is split into workshops and presentation sessions. The first two days is all about Oracle strategy, product updates and customers cases. While the last two days the workshops are being executed on SOA Suite, WebCenter and Weblogic.

My goal was to see and talk to my (ex)Oracle colleagues, Development and to get the latest info of the SOA Suite product stack and Weblogic Server. Apart from this networking is key during all these sessions, so I did a lot of chat with the participators to share experience, issues and any other business that comes along.

My focus is off-course Oracle Fusion Middleware and everything that is related to SOA/BPM. Here are some teasers.

Weblogic 12c
Weblogic 12c was announced at Oracle Open World in 2011, and can already be downloaded already. In this session we got in-depth information on all the new features that is currently available and what will come in the next releases.

Java EE 6
Simplified Deployment
Integrated Traffic Management (Exalogic)
Enhanced HA and Disaster Recovery
Higher Performance (that is default with new releases ;-) )
Transactions can also be stored in database
Seamless Upgrade (!)
Support for Exalogic
Support for Oracle Public Cloud

SOA Suite Strategy
Everybody in the SOA community was excited on the SOA and BPM sessions, new features of the upcoming releases where presented. We had sessions on the new PS5 patch set and what will come in the 12c edition, both for SOA and BPM.

Enterprise Manager is improved fault analysis
Testing BPEL processes from JDeveloper
Copy/Paste in JDeveloper of BPEL activities
Improved purging (see also purging document with PS5 enhancements)
DBAdapter supports coherence
Debugging of BPEL processes
Templating
All consoles integrated in EM (SOA / BPM / OSB)
Single IDE for all SOA products
...many many more...

Overall
I am not able to give any details on which functionality comes in which release or even when Oracle will release it. That was the only disappointment of this event, they will not give any dates. I think this will not change in a next event ;-)

Oracle Social Network
This presentation and demo, is off course running in the Cloud, but in this 'product' Oracle integrates a messaging system, with artifacts. In this case Siebel CRM was integrated with Oracle Social Network in such way that everybody can join the conversation; documents can be added, shared, annotations can be made and approvals are send back to Siebel CRM. Everything via social media on any device. This demo shows that business can me made via social media. Except this social media is not run publicly to everybody but in your own organization.

Apart of all the workshops, the global and parallel sessions, there was also time to relax. Oracle organized a dinner with live Andalusian music. We went to a traditional Spanish bodega were we had tapas and drinks. Here is a video to taste the atmosphere.