Last week the Automic World Europe took place in Dusseldorf – and not often has an Automic event been anticipated with so much excitement. It was, after all, the first major Automic conference after the takeover by CA.
For me, the anticipation really started when I updated the Automic World app two days before the conference, arranged my agenda, and read the list of participants. Many acquaintances had announced themselves and I could look forward to conversations with them.
When I entered the meeting rooms at the Hilton Dusseldorf shortly after 10 o’clock, I was rather surprised at how many people immediately involved me in conversations.
I owe this to my friend and colleague Joel Wiesmann, who had given a lecture to FOKUS (the Automic Users’ Association) on the day before the event. There, he had presented his “Workflow Commander” (WFC) – and he also mentioned me, as I am involved in the project, too. According to the feedback, the interest seems to be quite large and I will publish more about this in my blog, soon.
Automic, by the way, was once more quite generous concerning the gifts for the participants. There was a nice backpack, a T-shirt and some more little give-aways for everyone.
All participants received generous gifts.
Keynotes of the Automic World
At 11:15 am, the official welcome was given by Stefan Zeitzen, Senior Vice President Sales at Automic. It started immediately with good news: Next year there will once more be an Automic World in Germany, probably in Frankfurt.
Todd DeLaughter, CEO of Automic, reported how successful 2016 was for Automic. The growth in AWA was good, but ARA went through the roof.
Then it got exciting, as Ayman Sayed, Chief Product Officer at CA, entered the stage. His lecture was really remarkable.
In his lecture, he once again assured us that the ONE Automation Platform will be continued and CA will invest a lot of money in its development over the next years.
We already got a first impression of how the collaboration between CA and Automic will look. Several lectures showed CA products already integrated into Automic’s ONE Automation Platform.
We are glad to see, that CA will continue work on the Automic products!
After Ayman, Gwyn Clay, VP Product Management at Automic entered the stage. His lectures about the Automic Roadmap are always great. Compared to last year, a lot has changed on the roadmap.
- As announced at the Automic World 2016 in Orlando, support of IPv6 and support for 500,000 agents will be integrated to get prepared for the IOT.
- The statements on the Rest API were somewhat weakened. There will be a Rest API in V12.1, but not yet a complete one. I don’t know how the official Rest API will relate to the unofficial one of Automic employee Brendan Sapience.
- Analytics get an expansion. The exact extent is not yet known, but visualization of external data will be possible. This was demonstrated by Tobias Stanzel in his lecture.
- Data Driven Processing is coming. I already reported about it after the Automic World in Orlando, now I could even take a look at it at the exhibition stand of Automic Development. Looks really exciting!
- Project “Blackbird” was presented. With Automic’s own big data project, data from customers are collected and transferred to Automic – optionally, of course!
- I was surprised that two points seem to have disappeared from the roadmap: The integrated Critical Path Analysis and the support of an open source database.
Daniel Braaf presented a nice demo during the third keynote “Strong, together, CA and Automic” by Ralf Paschen: He triggered workflows of an automation engine via Amazon Echo. Capgemini did a similar demo in Orlando – and just like then, it did not run 100% smoothly. But that did not matter, it was a very nice and entertaining demo!
Even though not everything worked: A nice demo for the interaction of Amazon Echo with Automic.
The Rest of the Conference
In addition to the keynotes there were of course many other exciting lectures. Juliane von Bosch really spoke to me in her lecture, when she told how Bosch upgraded to version V12. They found that switching from the Java GUI to the AWI simply does not work without training – even if Automic claims something different.
Finally, there was a highlight at the evening event: A photo booth for funny recordings – and it was used extensively. Take a look at the results:
Some customers said that for them the agenda and the lectures were not as strong as in some of the last years (sorry, but I simply didn’t have the time to give a lecture this year 😉 ). But I was very enthusiastic about it and the event was over much too fast.
I can only recommend anyone to come, even if not every lecture is interesting for every participant. Talking to other customers and getting in contact with Automic insiders from areas such as support, development and UX design for the AWI is worth it!