Another Spring means another excellent Oracle EMEA PaaS Forum for Oracle partners. Every Year Juergen Kress organizes the event, finding really nice venues to host several hundred people over four and half days.

The event is split into several parts,  Monday afternoon normally involves Oracle Ace’s presenting on best practices, insights on applying the various technologies etc.  For me this meant presenting on the London Developer Meetup, looking at how it worked, what has been successful, and what hasn’t.  For those know have read my blogs on the subject (here) will know about our Drone initiative.

Then Tuesday is a single stream day where Juergen has managed to pull in SVPs and Senior Product Managers from around the globe to provide a high-level view of what has been going on with their products. For anyone consulting in the Oracle domain, this is incredibly useful. For example, there is a clear strategy coalescing around AI and Machine Learning both as a service proposition to users, but also how these technologies are being made available and used within other products.  Other areas such as OIC and SOA CS have stability and maturity, and the road map is about maximising connectivity with the newer products.

But before the sessions start, Juergen starts with opening remarks, and demos’ something engaging.  In previous years this has been things like Digital Assistants/Chatbots and so on.  This year, we have been fortunate to be an active contributor by demoing the drone through the use of APIs and talking about the ideas.  The dry runs of the demo on Monday went without a problem, but when it came to the main show, the drone was a little uncooperative – we think because the air-con had really kicked in.  But importantly, even not achieving the desired result, the message of engagement made it home.

Wednesday is split into streams with in-depth sessions from the different Product Managers, he amount of insight gained from these sessions is tremendous, some of which is very much protected by safe harbour statements or not for public disclosure such is the honest and open discussions. The day closes with an Ace Director initiative which demonstrates the application of Oracle Cloud products to a plausible use case, and Luis Weir (Capgemini Oracle CTO) is part of. This session has become something of a tradition now.

The day’s business concludes awards, and for a second year the UK Capgemini team have taken home two awards for APIs and PaaS Contribution.

Luis Weir with his API award

The final two days are then a choice of Hackerthon or 1/2 day training sessions on different products with the relevant Product Managers, and an excellent opportunity to pick the brains of the presenters as well as get hands-on experience with the different products.

The week isn’t without it’s social and networking activities of course …