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Loud! 2006 - Our own OOW, but smaller…

On November 9th my employer, LogicaCMG, organised it’s own version of Oracle Open World, but just a little bit smaller. About 130 colleagues came to Amstelveen to listen to the keynote (after a good dinner) and after that three times a choice from one of the three parallel sessions. As usual the evening was very well organised (thank you committee!), but there was some experience as it was already the 7th version of this annual event.
The keynote speaker was Rob Blaauboer who enlightened us about Innov8 (the 8 should be the mathematical infinite sign, but I can’t find that one on my keyboard), a method to visualize what technologies a company should adopt or look in to in the nearer or farther future.

The first parallel session I visited was Oracle2Go by Reza and Robert. Oracle2GO is a framework as an extension of the ADF Framework, to develop applications faster and with higher quality. They mentioned a couple of success stories and proudly pointed out that they managed to achieve a productivity of 4 hours per function point (calculated according to the fpa standards of the Dutch NESMA): a productivity that is barely to improve in the ‘old fashioned” Designer/Developer approach!

After that Lex Borger told us about Identity and Access Management: he explained the problems around AIM and pointed out the different alternatives for solving these problems. Finally – as this was an Oracle related event – he mentioned the solutions Oracle offers.

The last session I choose was The Best of Breed of Fusion by Ivan Pellegrin. He stated that the Oracle product range is so gigantic nowadays, that the time you could know everything about all Oracle products (as in the time there was only a database, Forms 2.3 and RPT/RPF) has been long gone. So we have to choose our interests and specialise in that area. Form his point of view BI Publisher and WebCenter will get a lot of attention in the near future.

The evening was closed with a quiz (a sort of Jeopardy or 1-against-100) where the winner, he who knows the most (or guessed best) about Oracle related questions, received a Playstation2.

All in all it was a great evening and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

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