SOA Partner Community Forum Budapest

March was such a busy month and I just haven’t got around to blogging about what I got up to, so am taking the opportunity to put that right.

It started with the SOA Partner Community Forum in Budapest with I have mentioned in my last PaaS4SaaS update.  My daughter lived in Germany and I had spent the weekend with her and I flew from Dusseldorf to Budapest with Germanwings. As I write this blog today I continue to pray for all the families affected by that disaster.

I did actually manage to see Budapest, I did one of the two hour bus tours which I think that the best use of two hours any delegate or traveller can have.  In Budapest our hotel was actually one of the stops on the tour. The New York Café is now the restaurant at the hotel we stayed and it was amazing to eat twice a day in such a beautiful building.

The forum had some demo grounds from product management and for the first time I met Vlad Babu who had been drafted in to cover UX, he did a great write up of UX at the event.

 
Budapest is a beautiful city with the old castle looking down over the city and in the Danube River; it is lit up at night and is just phenomenal.  I actually did the tour twice, once on a morning when I had no sessions and second late afternoon when the forum finished. I did try to get fellow delegates to come with me but it encroached on their drinking time!  After the second tour I took a boat along the Danube as the sunset and it was just so beautiful. I got back to the hotel in time for the second or third drink so I didn’t really missed much at and all this for just €25 euros, the cost of a two day ticket. 

Was the forum worth it? Defiantly  not only did I learn what is coming, but I got to try out how they work, and ask the people who know, how that specifically will help my use cases. To get all of that in a few days, rather than trying to navigate around the relevant parts of Oracle, is a major time saver, and now my network includes more useful people as we move into using these products. And the award, well that was wonderful.