OOW 2013 is over and we’re heading home, so it is time to lean back and reflecting about the impressions we have from the conference.
First of all: OOW was great! It was a pleasure to be a part of it. As already mentioned in our last blog article: It was the biggest OOW ever. Parallel to the conference the America’s Cup took place in San Francisco and the Oracle Team America won. Amazing job by the team and again congratulations from our side
Back to the conference. The main topics for us are:
- Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c
- Adaptive Case management (ACM)
- Big Data
- Fast Data
- Cloud
- Mobile
Below we will go a little more into detail, what are the key takeaways regarding the mentioned points:
Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c
During the five days at OOW, first details of the upcoming major release of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and Oracle BPM Suite 12c have been introduced. Some new key features are:
- Managed File Transfer (MFT) for transferring big files from a source to a target location
- Enhanced REST support by introducing a new REST binding
- Introduction of a generic cloud adapter, which can be used to connect to different cloud providers, like Salesforce
- Enhanced analytics with BAM, which has been totally reengineered (BAM Console now also runs in Firefox!)
- Introduction of templates (OSB pipelines, component templates, BPEL activities templates)
- EM as a single monitoring console
- OSB design-time integration into JDeveloper (Really great!)
- Enterprise modeling capabilities in BPM Composer
These are only a few points from what is coming with 12c. We are really looking forward for the new realese to come out, because this seems to be really great stuff. The suite becomes more and more integrated. From 10g to 11g it was an evolution in terms of developing SOA-based applications. With 12c, Oracle continues it’s way – very impressive.
Adaptive Case Management
Another fantastic topic was Adaptive Case Management (ACM). The Oracle PMs did a great job especially at the demo grounds in showing the upcoming Case Management UI (will be available in 11g with the next BPM Suite MLR Patch), the roadmap and the differences between traditional business process modeling. They have been very busy during the conference because a lot of partners and customers have been interested 
Big Data
Big Data is one of the current hype themes. Because of huge data amounts from different internal or external sources, the handling of these data becomes more and more challenging. Companies have a need for analyzing the data to optimize their business. The challenge is here: the amount of data is growing daily! To store and analyze the data efficiently, it is necessary to have a scalable and flexible infrastructure. Here it is important that hardware and software are engineered to work together. Therefore several new features of the Oracle Database 12c, like the new in-memory option, have been presented by Larry Ellison himself.
From a hardware side new server machines like Fujitsu M10 or new processors, such as Oracle’s new M6-32 have been announced. The performance improvements, when using one of these hardware components in connection with the improved software solutions were really impressive. For more details about this, please take look at our previous blog post.
Regarding Big Data, Oracle also introduced their Big Data architecture, which consists of:
- Oracle Big Data Appliance that is preconfigured with Hadoop
- Oracle Exdata which stores a huge amount of data efficently, to achieve optimal query performance
- Oracle Exalytics as a fast and scalable Business analytics system
Analysis of the stored data can be performed using SQL, by streaming the data directly from Hadoop to an Oracle Database 12c. Alternatively the analysis can be directly implemented in Hadoop using “R”. In addition Oracle BI Tools can be used to analyze the data.
Fast Data
Fast Data is a complementary approach to Big Data. A huge amount of mostly unstructured data comes in via different channels with a high frequency. The analysis of these data streams is also important for companies, because the incoming data has to be analyzed regarding business-relevant patterns in real-time. Therefore these patterns must be identified efficiently and performant. To do so, in-memory grid solutions in combination with Oracle Coherence and Oracle Event Processing demonstrated very impressive how efficient real-time data processing can be.
One example for Fast Data solutions that was shown during the OOW was the analysis of twitter streams regarding customer satisfaction. The feeds with negative words like “bad” or “worse” have been filtered and after a defined treshold has been reached in a certain timeframe, a business event was triggered.
Cloud
Another key trend in the IT market is of course Cloud Computing and what it means for companies and their businesses. Oracle announced their Cloud strategy and vision – companies can focus on their real business while all of the applications are available via Cloud. This also includes Oracle Database or Oracle Weblogic, so that companies can also build, deploy and run their own applications within the cloud. Three different approaches have been introduced:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Using the IaaS approach only the infrastructure components will be managed in the Cloud. Customers will be very flexible regarding memory, storage or number of CPUs because those parameters can be adjusted elastically. The PaaS approach means that besides the infrastructure also the platforms (such as databases or application servers) necessary for running applications will be provided within the Cloud. Here customers can also decide, if installation and management of these infrastructure components should be done by Oracle. The SaaS approach describes the most complete one, hence all applications a company uses are managed in the Cloud. Oracle is planning to provide all of their applications, like ERP systems or HR applications, as Cloud services.
In conclusion this seems to be a very forward-thinking strategy, which opens up new possibilities for customers to manage their infrastructure and applications in a flexible, scalable and future-oriented manner.
As you can see, our OOW days have been very very interresting. We collected many helpful informations for our projects. The new innovations presented at the confernce are great and being part of this was even greater! We are looking forward to next years’ conference!
Links:
SOA & BPM Partner Community
For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.
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We now have 2 self-study courses on Oracle Rules:
demonstrated, allowing us to get a fairly good overview of what is going to come for SOA Suite – later in 2013 and sometime in 2014 (probably the first half of that year).
An in-depth look at the interaction of people, processes, and technologies in the transition to a service-oriented architecture.
With WebLogic 12.1.2 Oracle now also supports JAX-WS SOAP over JMS. Before 12.1.2 we had to use JAX-RPC and without any JDeveloper support. We need to use ANT to generate all the web service code. See this 
PaaS Community Blog 