Niklas | 
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04 11th, 2008| 
Here’s something you don’t see every day.
This is likely the local proxy screwing up, still, makes for a good screenshot.
So, my first day at ApacheCon EU and my second day in Amsterdam. Last night was spent hunting down some amazingly good and hard-to-find Belgian beers. Turned out I stumbled on the perfect place for this very need.
Today started out at five o’clock, damn kids on establishing screwed up sleeping patterns. Anyways, that time of the day is good for writing code so I finished up some stuff for the demo I was going to do in my talk. Hotel breakfast was good, but it amazing how little you’re able to eat for €21. That game is skewed towards the dealer.
Next on the schedule, the key note which I didn’t listen to at all, even though I was in the room. Nerves beginning to make their moves.
After that was my talk. After the standardized initial technical screw-up (project cable not plugged in) it went okay. Not on my top 5 list but good enough not to kill myself off. Got some good questions and some interesting discussions during the rest of the day. Happy about that.
The rest of the day was spent at some of the sessions, Richard S Hall on Apache Felix and Erik Abele on load-balancing with Apache HTTPD fitted my current interests neatly. I continue to run into people I’ve only known from email conversations, which is pretty much my reason for going here in the first place.
Also, surprised at how fast I began missing the kids and wife. You spend every day with them and yet you can barely step on the plane before you realize you won’t be seeing them for a few days. Love is odd I guess.
Now how’s that a high buzzword density title. I’m no fan of BPM tools, especially as the tend to be at the top of the food-chain in what vendors offer these days. That’s just another way of saying that it’s an area that is not yet commodity. Which in turn is yet another way of saying that it’s a complex and uncharted area. Here be dragons.
Therefore it was kind of refreshing seeing this little French startup which aims at building a BPM engine with a SaaS deployment model. From the demo, it’s all pretty basic at the moment, but I find the idea intriguing. If you put your CRM stuff in Salesforce, why not let someone else take care of executing your processes? Using its partnership model and an ever growing ecosystem of open web-based applications, a product like this can offer integrations that every company would otherwise have to arrange on their own. And nobody wants to do integrations. Really.
Will this be the one to succeed in this area? No clue, but I believe this is an area to watch in the near future.
