OUGN 2016
OUGN 2016
Once more the OUGN conference was a great success - with 310 people on the cruise from Oslo to Kiel. Also this year with great content from Norway and the rest of the world. I have been part of the Board planning the conference, and for every year we feel we have made improvements. Some have been on the boat for many years - and many have heard about OUGN and want to come next time. So few minutes after the Call For Paper opens - we get abstracts submitted - the majority of the first ones come from outside of Norway.
One of our challenges is to select abstracts - the pain is to have to reject many of the speakers. We try to make a fair mix of Norwegian and International Speakers. We are very glad to get a lot of support from Oracle OTN/ACE program, which will sponsor some of the ACEDs. They often come a long way - this year from India, Argentina, Turkey and Jordan Israel. For international speakers we normally plan for 2 sessions - so a tip for next year is to submit 2 or more proposals. We will also normally give a priority to customers speaking at the conference, and we would like to get new speakers to OUGN. It is important that we inspire new speakers to share. One other tip is to send proposals for different tracks - some of the tracks get more content than others. We had to reject more than half of the abstracts - so the competition is hard.
Many speakers attended the Speakers dinner at a burger restaurant at Aker Brygge the day before the conference. This is a good way to start the conference - and both the food and social part was great this year! Thanks to Ann-Sofie for arranging that!
This year we had 20 ACE speakers - of a total of 81 speakers. In total there were 103 presentations. Fun this year that we now have 4 ACEA/ACE from Norway on the boat: Myself, Arturo Viveros, Øyvind Isene and Lasse Jensen. Jorge Quilcate will fore sure be there next year! The people on the conference were from 102 different companies.
The latest years we have had a fair mix of Norwegian and non-Norwegian speakers. With 8 tracks there will always be several sessions in English language to follow. Also many of the Norwegians will prepare their presentations in English language - to be prepared if there are non-Norwegians in the room. I followed the middleware-track, and most were in English there. I really appreciate the help from Maarten Smets,Deepak Arora and Yogesh Sontakke for the international contribution there. This year we had a norwegian keynote and panel debate - which was very good. For those who could not understand it, there were plenty of others friends and soon-to-become-friends to spend time with.
This must be one of the most social Oracle conferences. We all stay on the boat for 48 hours - we eat at the same restaurants, go to the same sessions and go to the same pubs/disco. The program was very packed this year - there are many sessions you want to attend, many you want to talk to. The internet connection was better this year - so from the twitter statistics from Gokhan at the end of the article you will see more activity than last year.
My company Sysco had 6 presentations this year - 4 of them on middleware/strategy. I had a presentation about REST support in SOA Suite, Cato Aune on Middleware administration using Cloud Control, Arturo Viveros about Mobile Strategy and Dalibor Blazevic about storing XML in database using SOA Suite. My presentation is availabe at REST-presentation. Most of the others are available at: OUGN presentation.
From a MW perspective the tracks: Middleware, Strategy And More and DevOps/Java is of interest. My advice is to look at them - some of these you will not see at other conferences - great content!
The audience on the MW-track was not very big - but that gave very good discussions and a group of people who knew each other after 2 days. There was a lot of expertise in the room! Hope to see even more next year.
One of the big successes this year was the Apps-track - thanks to Ellen Gravklev. They had to change room to get seats for all.
One other success this year (as last year) was the hands-on IOT/Big Data Workshop by Frode Pedersen and Inge Os. The room was full - and had free Coca Cola - so it was a good start of the conference. Sysco has the devices, so we will run the same workshop later - then with the latest version of IOT Clous Service.
Look at the pictures - this is where you want to be march 9-11, 2017.
Here are som blogs from others:
[Debra Liley] (http://debrasoracle.blogspot.no/2016/03/2016-ougn-norway-cruise.html)
[Gokhan Atil Twitter statistics] (http://www.gokhanatil.com/2016/03/ougn-2016-twitter-statistics.html)
Thanks to all of you who attended the conference and made it to a success! Hope to see all of you there also next year - and some more. This year we had participants from Germany and Spain that were not speakers - I hope to get more of that next year (Denmark and Sweden perhaps).