Oracle OpenWorld 2013 – Wrap up by Sven Bernhardt

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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Promoting Organizational Visibility for SOA and SOA Governance Initiatives – Part I by Manuel Rosa and André Sampaio

imgThe costs of technology assets can become significant and the need to centralize, monitor and control the contribution of each technology asset becomes a paramount responsibility for many organizations. Through the implementation of various mechanisms, it is possible to obtain a holistic vision and develop synergies between different assets, empowering their re-utilization and analyzing the impact on the organization caused by IT changes. When the SOA domain is considered, the issue of governance should therefore always come into play.

Although SOA governance is mandatory to achieve any measure of SOA success, its value still passes incognito in most organizations, mostly due to the lack of visibility and the detached view of the SOA initiatives. There are a number of problems that jeopardize the visibility of these initiatives: Understanding and measuring the value of SOA governance and its contribution – SOA governance tools are too technical and isolated from other systems. They are inadequate for anyone outside of the domain (Business Analyst, Project Managers, or even some Enterprise Architects), and are especially harsh at the CxO level.

Lack of information exchange with the business, other operational areas and project management – It is not only a matter of lack of dialog but also the question of using a common vocabulary (textual or graphic) that is adequate for all the stakeholders. We need to generate information that can be useful for a wider scope of stakeholders like Business and enterprise architectures. In this article we describe how an organization can leverage from the existing best practices, and with the help of adequate exploration and communication tools, achieve and maintain the level of quality and visibility that is required for SOA and SOA governance initiatives.

Introduction
Understanding and implementing effective SOA governance has become a corporate imperative in order to ensure coherence and the attainment of the basic objectives of SOA initiatives:

  • develop the correct services
  • control costs and risks bound to the development process
  • reduce time-to-market

Read the full article here.

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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Fusion Middleware (FMW) Proactive patches including SOA Suite 11.1.1.7.1

We are glad to announce that the following Fusion Middleware (FMW) Proactive  patches were released on October 15, 2013.

Bundle Patches :

Bundle patches are collections of controlled, well tested critical bug fixes for a specific product  which may include security contents and occasionally minor enhancements. These are cumulative in nature meaning the latest bundle patch in a particular series includes the contents of the previous bundle patches released.  A suite bundle patch is an aggregation of multiple product  bundle patches that are part of a product suite.

  • Oracle Identity Management Suite Bundle Patch 11.1.1.5.5 consisting of
    • Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11.1.1.5.9 bundle patch
    • Oracle Access Manager (OAM) 11.1.1.5.6 bundle patch.
    • Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) 11.1.1.5.2 bundle patch.
    • Oracle Entitlement Server (OES) 11.1.1.5.4 bundle patch.
  • Oracle Identity Management Suite Bundle Patch 11.1.2.0.4 consisting of
    • Oracle Access Manager (OAM) 11.1.2.0.4 bundle patch.
    • Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) 11.1.2.0.2 bundle patch.
    • Oracle Entitlement Server (OES) 11.1.2.0.2 bundle patch.
  • Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA ) 11.1.1.5.6  bundle patch.
  • Oracle GlassFish Server (OGFS) 2.1.1.22, 3.0.1.8 and 3.1.2.7 bundle patches.
  • Oracle iPlanet Web Server (OiWS) 7.0.18 bundle patch
  • Oracle SOA Suite (SOA) 11.1.1.7.1 bundle patch
  • Oracle WebCenter Portal (WCP) 11.1.1.8.1 bundle patch
  • Sun Role Manager (SRM) 4.1.7 and 5.0.3.2 bundle patches.

Patch Set Updates (PSU)

Patch Set Updates (PSU)  are collections of well controlled, well tested critical bug fixes for a specific product  that have been proven in customer environments. PSUs  may include security contents but no  enhancements are included. These are cumulative in nature meaning the latest PSU  in a particular series includes the contents of the previous PSUs  released. 

  • Oracle Exalogic 2.0.3.0.4 Physical Linux x86-64 and 2.0.4.0.4 Physical Solaris x86-64 PSUs.
  • Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.6.0.6 and 12.1.1.0.6 PSUs.

Critical Patch Update (CPU) :

The Critical Patch Update program is Oracle’s quarterly release of security fixes.

The following additional patches were released as part of Oracle’s Critical Patch Update program:

  • Oracle JDeveloper 11.1.2.3.0, 11.1.2.4.0 and 12.1.2.0.0
  • Oracle Outside In Technology 8.4.0 and  8.4.1
  • Oracle Portal 11.1.1.6.0
  • Oracle Security Service  11.1.1.6.0, 11.1.1.7.0 and 12.1.2.0.0
  • Oracle WebCache 11.1.1.6.0 and 11.1.1.7.0
  • Oracle WebCenter Content 10.1.3.5.1, 11.1.1.6.0, 11.1.1.7.0 and 11.1.1.8.0
  • Oracle WebServices 10.1.3.5.0 and 11.1.1.6.0

For more information :

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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Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Summary

Have you missed Oracle OpernWorld 2013? – here are the key information from Thomas Kurian’s middleware presentation, our partners presentations and the first impressions on SOA Suite 12c. Thanks to all partners for the excellent presentations and the product management team for their superb demo ground!

Oracle OpenWorld General Session 2013: Middleware
Watch Full-Length Keynote

At our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required) you can download the presentation slides from Thomas Kurian’s presentation FMWGeneralSessionTKv22.pptx.

To download all session slides, please click here.

Here are my personal OOW 2013 highlights:

Community Reception

BAM 12c Dashboard

SOA Suite 12c Managed file transfer

Adaptive Case Management (ACM)

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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Supporting multiple ebMS service versions in Oracle B2B by Ronald van Luttikhuizen

In recent years I’ve been involved in different Oracle B2B implementations and troubleshooting projects based on ebMS and AS2 protocols. Not so long ago, I came across a project that needed to support multiple versions of an ebMS service. Versioning is quite trivial for SOAP and RESTful Web Services using e.g. different namespaces, version indicators in endpoint locations, and so on. However, it is a bit different for ebMS-based services implemented in a B2B gateway.

Case
ebMS is one of the protocols supported by the Dutch government standard DigiKoppeling for exchanging information between governments such as municipalities, provinces, and departments. In this particular case, the existing integration flow that needed to support a new version of an ebMS service is as follows: Read the full article here.

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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Getting Started with Oracle SOA B2B Integration: A Hands-On Tutorial

Krishnaprem Bhatia and Alan Perlovsky and Scott Haaland published their b2b book, with the highlights:

  • Getting Started with Oracle SOA B2B Integration: A Hands-On TutorialDesign, implement and monitor B2B transactions quickly using this clear, detailed and practical guide
  • Wide coverage and detailed discussion of Oracle B2B functionality and features for the new and advanced users
  • Full of practical examples, illustrations and product screenshots explained with clear, step-by-step instructions

Enterprises engaging in B2B communications with their trading partners are facing increased pressure to increase automation and reduce costs. Increased compliance requirements and globalization of economies is fueling B2B adoption in every industry. Gateway solutions in Oracle SOA B2B enable these enterprises to connect easily with external trading partners.

Getting Started with Oracle SOA B2B Integration: A Hands-On Tutorial will show you how to use Oracle B2B platform to extend your current business processes to connect with your external trading partners in an automated, secure fashion, using industry standard B2B protocols. It will show you how to set up documents, partners and agreements and manage your B2B transactions end-to-end, all the way from application to trading partners and vice versa.

Starting with an introduction to the B2B industry you then be introduced to Oracle B2B and SOA platforms. You will then begin creat document definitions and get you started with trading partner management. Once you have a solid grounding you will then be taken into the more complex topic of SOA. Integration, reporting, and monitoring will all be covered in detail.

Then you will be shown how to secure your B2B distribution, security is an essential part of all businesses and B2B is no different. Finally you will be introduced to advanced topics that should give you the skills and knowledge to easily go out and do all of this again with next to no guidance.

Utilizing the combined experienced of one of the most knowledgeable Oracle B2B author teams assembled this step-by-step practical guide provides you with the essential information required to implement Oracle B2B solutions including multiple hands-on tutorials that will help you get up and running quickly. The book is available from Packt. Looking for additional SOA books or BPM books or you have published a book, please feel free to add it to our publications wiki!

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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Cloud Integration & SOA Governance & Fast Data & API Management Resource kits available

Do you want to learn more about the hot topics in SOA? Make sure you access:

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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Advanced Oracle BPM in 21 Days book by EAIESB

pictureThis book address all latest features included in PS6.

  • BPM Composer
  • Case Management
  • Guided Business Process Management
  • Web Forms
  • Player
  • Simulation
  • Process Analytics

Looking for additional BPM books or SOA books or you have published a book, please feel free to add it to our publications wiki!

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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Oracle SOA Suite 11g Performance Tuning Cookbook

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Performance Tuning CookbookOracle SOA Suite 11g forms the heart of many organisations’ Service Oriented Architecture. Yet for such a core component, simple information on how to tune and configure SOA Suite and its infrastructure is hard to find. Because Oracle SOA Suite 11g builds on top of a variety of infrastructure components, up until now there has been no one single complete reference that brings together all the best practices for tuning the whole SOA stack.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Performance Tuning Cookbook contains plenty of tips and tricks to help you get the best performance from your SOA Suite infrastructure. From monitoring your environment so you know where bottlenecks are, to tuning the Java Virtual Machine, WebLogic Application Server, and BPEL and BPMN mediator engines, this book will give you the techniques you need in a easy to follow step-by-step guide.

Starting with how to identify problems, and building on that with sections on monitoring, testing, and tuning, the recipes in this book will take you through many of the options available for performance tuning your application.

There are many considerations to make when trying to get the best performance out of the Oracle SOA Suite platform. This performance Cookbook will teach you the whole process of tuning JVM garbage collection and memory, tuning BPEL and BPMN persistence settings, and tuning the application server. This book focuses on bringing together tips on how to identify the key bottlenecks in the whole SOA Suite infrastructure, and how to alleviate them.

The Oracle SOA Suite 11g Performance Tuning Cookbook will ensure that you have the tools and techniques to get the most out of your infrastructure, delivering reliable, fast, and scalable services to your enterprise.

Looking for additional SOA books or if you have published a book, please feel free to add it to our publications wiki!

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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SOA & Cloud Integration Marketing Kit available

We are very interested to run joint marketing events jointly with you are partners! At our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required) you can find a new marketing kit: Integration Success Workshop. This event is designed with an aim at increasing IT/developer confidence in order to increase adoption especially with SOA/BPM products. This event is technical and hands-on and is designed to be to a few types of audience classifications – all who are highly technical and are at the practitioner-level:

  • Existing customers who may be tempted by open source, other competition because they think our products are hard to use, too complex, and don’t meet new use cases.
  • Existing customers who may already have some understanding or familiarity with the SOA/BPM products but want to learn how to build out more modern SOA/BPM deployments via Cloud/Mobile.
  • New customers who are interested to learn firsthand some of the new breakthrough capabilities in Cloud and Mobile.

Themes of this event are centered on Cloud Integration, Mobile Integration, and Continuous Integration. Modules will be delivered on specific themes, and are designed enable a conversation with customers about each theme and how SOA / BPM can solve key challenges within that theme (e.g. Extending Applications to Mobile Devices). Access the event kit here.

Support marketing campaigns

We can support such events by:

  • Oracle speakers – contact your partner manager
  • Marketing budget – contact your A&C marketing manager
  • Event location – free use of Oracle Customer Visitor Centers conference rooms
  • Promote your event at events.oracle.com: http://tinyurl.com/eventspecialized
  • E-Blast: invite customers to your event – contact your A&C marketing manager

For additional marketing kits e.g for BPM please visit our SOA Community Workspace

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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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