7th Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum

The 7th Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum event took place 20/21 January in Malaga, Spain, with attendees from Oracle and partners across Europe.

Day 1
After a brief introduction from Alejandro Novo, Oracle Channel & Alliances Lead for Iberia, we were presented with three Partner Success Storys on SOA implementations by Logica, Promatis and Accenture. These covered adoption of SOA in Transport, Leasing and Public Sector.

The overriding theme in all of the presentations was focus on key wins around improving business process efficiency and adoption of SOA technologies to leverage existing investments. Jurgen Kress, Fusion Middleware Forum Lead, and Wolfgang Ehrenthaler, Director, Oracle Progam Office WCE, delivered Oracle’s SOA Sales Toolkit and campaigns for Partners.

The takeaway message from this session was around Oracle helping partners to generate more revenue, higher market awareness & deeper product knowledge. Wolfgang presented benefits, content and usage of Demand Generation campaigns around SOA that are available for Partners (links to follow). Grant Ronald, Oracle Forms & JDeveloper Product Manager, gave an overview of 11g Development Tools, in particular Forms & JDeveloper.

Day 1 concluded with a guided tour of Malaga, and a Tapas reception followed by dinner, with way too much to eat!

Day 2
The second day of the conference started with a brief demonstration of SOA Suite 11g by Torsten Winterberg from Opitz Consulting. Then there followed a series of breakout sessions covering a wide range of topics, including SOA Toolkit selection & adoption, Building Fusion with JDeveloper and ADF, Oracle BPM Studio, AIA, Forms to SOA, Telco Industry Value Proposition for Fusion Middleware. I attended the sessions on Oracle BPM Studio and Forms to SOA, summaries below:

Oracle BPM Suite (Matthew Schumpert, Oracle): One of the key messages I took from this session is that since the acquisition of BEA and the merging of the BEA Business Process Modelling tools with the Oracle BPA suite there is no real hard criteria around when each tool should be used, as it is possible to generate services / BPEL processes from both.

However, BPA suite lends itself more to processes with a Human Workflow element, and BPM lends itself more to system to system based processes. At a high level, the structure of the BPM Suite follows three roles: Designer (Business Analyst), Developer (Studio) and Enterprise (Runtime).

Forms To SOA (Grant Ronald, Oracle; Harald Wolf, Wolf Consulting): In this session Grant took a brief journey through the history of Forms and Reports, right back to 2.0 and Oracle 5! He then looked at the way in which many traditional tools-based users are starting to adopt newer technologies, and some of the barriers that are preventing them from doing so, such as lack of skills, retraining etc.

As a case study in how this can be done he talked about how Oracle itself retrained 5000 Forms & Reports developers (who previously worked on eBusiness Suite) with a one week training course, and they are now developing the Oracle Fusion apps using JDeveloper / ADF. The key to this is that although the technology itself is vastly different, a lot of the complexity is hidden from the developer via use of the relevant tools.

To demonstrate this, Grant worked through an example of creating a simple web service through JDeveloper and loading it through Forms Developer. The generated form then had a button that called out to a web service function to send an SMS message to his phone. He also demonstrated another simple web service call from a form out to Google Maps to track an order. There are a number of products currently on the market to support existing Forms users who are looking to modernise and migrate into the SOA world, such as the PITTS migration tool. Another offering was demonstrated during this session by Harald Wolf (WolfConsult, Germany).

Their product is a mixture of repository, search and migration tools. The repository tools are similar in some ways to the Oracle Designer toolset as they allow you to perform impact analysis on Forms based applications. However, the key difference is that the repository is based on the actual Forms metadata rather than ‘Design’ data. The migration tools allow you to migrate from traditional Client Server environments (Forms 4.5, 6 etc) to either web based Forms (10g etc), or SOA enabled, Web Services. The claim is that it is possible to migrate 100% of functionality, but I think this has to be taken with caution based on advice and experience from other educated sources.

Collateral
Jurgen Kress will be putting all of the presentations from the event on the Community website within the next few days.

Summary
Overall, the conference was extremely useful, and was an excellent opportunity to catch up on what’s happening in the SOA & Fusion community. This is the second event I’ve been to, and they are a great way of networking and meeting some of the top people around Europe in the SOA area, and at the same time having the ear of some of the influential product people within Oracle. The timing of this event was a bonus, as I’m working currently on an opportunity around Forms migration to SOA, so it was great to link up with both Grant Ronald and Wolf Consulting.

Link to Forms Modernization.

Doug Toop, Business Development Manager