I just boarded on my flight back to Amsterdam and  I'd grab a chance to put down my first impressions of this week.

Apart from catching a flu, it was a great event. As could be expected the word describing the weather fenomena I'm about to enter resonates throughout the whole event. (For those who didn't catch my vague description: it's 'Cloud, Cloud,  Cloud).

One of the presenters put that Oracle needs to go for 100% Cloud for a while to become a recognised Cloud provider. But in a few years it wil most probably turn out that in most cases we wil be in a hybrid environment. And then Oracle will have the best papers to provide for both Cloud and On-Premise.  By the way: Oracle will encounter the same problems with upgrades that customers have for years.  So it can be expected that upgrading Oracle software will improve over time as well.

The most interesting session on the first day for me was the session of Grant Ronald about Application Builder Cloud Service and Max: Mobile Application Accelerator.  The latter is a little like Forms Builder in the cloud to build an app the 4 GL way.  Very cool in my opinion and Grant was amusing as always.  Smart to give him the last slot of the day.

The second day started for me with an excellent introduction and demo of Real Integration Business Insight or in short Insight.  Although leveraging BAM it has a whole different approach.  With BAM you need to complete your composite with Business Indicator definitions and deploy it. Only then you can define your queries, views and dashboard.  But with Insight you can do it top down. You don't need to define any indicators or sensors in your composites or service bus projects.  You define a model with milestones and Business Indicators afterwards in Insight. Then you need to map the indicators and milestones to particular points in your services.  Probably this is done by a more technical person or architect, who knows the implementation of the services.  For the rest business users can implement it. Your model can even span composites that are not interrelated with an ECID, using a correlation key.  This comes in convenient in cases like where  one BPEL process writes something to a database and later another instance picks it up.  Logically you're still working on the same business process but for SOA Suite it wasn't the same flow anymore.  Did you get that I mentioned Service Bus?  Besides BPEL it works for SB as well.  And since BAM is leveraged you'll find the models back in the data sources so you'll be able to expand from there and use the BAM functionality to join it with other sources. 

I took some sessions on PCS. They announced a few new capabilities for the next few releases.  For me Correlation Sets is a highly appreciated addition.  We have it in BPEL from the first release.  In BPM it was added to to the second patchset and apparently they left it out of PCS. Probably because correlation is hard to grasp. But when you want to interact with a running process you need to indicate how the engine can conclude for which instance the incoming event is meant. 

There is a very native integration with DOCS so you can add documents to a folder related to the process instance.  But there will be a new start event to start an instance on arrival of a document in a certain folder.  This caters for an end 2 end document workflow.  Thight integration with Oracle Social Network allows you to interact with peers on an task.

Another thing I took from there was that apparently we still see PCS too much as a stripped down version of BPM Suite in the cloud.  So we tend to think in ways like: 'why is this piece of BPM functionality not in PCS' or 'In BPM we can do this, why can't we do that in PCS as well?'. But although BPM was the starting point I believe that we need to start seeing it as a whole separate product with its own purpose. So let's think from PCS and think on how this could be used and grown up  as a child on it's own legs. So that needed to come of my chest... ;).

The day ended with a nice ACE hacking event on how you could build a showcase with as many Cloud Services as you can.  Not everything went smooth but I think they did a good job.

I took the PCS Hybrid Applications track for the workshop.  It could have been a little more elaborate but it was nice. Got to play with the upcoming April release of PCS in a VM. It looked great. If I get the chance I'll post a little bit more on that later on.

Yesterday we went into the city of Valencia for the Fallas Festivities.  I learned this morning it had something to do with carpenters and to burn their waste.  The whole week there were lots of fireworks, even older people walk around with a box of fireworks and throw around fire-crackers: something we see only teenagers doing on the day before new year. And there were processions and funny statue groups. 

So that completes my overview I think.  I hope I'll be able to write about some subjects in a little more detail soon.