I love to visit Automic Conferences! You always meet interesting people, can talk, listen to the latest information from Automic and get to know customer use cases.

2016 had a lot of conferences for me:

  • In January, the Technicians Training took place in Vienna. It was a one-week workshop exclusively for technical Automic employees and partners. You could easily exchange with developers, consultants, support staff and other Automic partners. An absolute highlight – and I am already looking forward to the next Technicians Training in January 2017!
  • Also in January of this year, there was an Automic Live Conference in Vienna, where I had a short talk about the Automic database.
  • In June, the Automic World Europe was in Berlin.
  • In November I was at the Automic World North America, which took place this year in Orlando.
  • As a worthy conclusion of this year, last week, I was at the Automic Live in the most beautiful city in the world: Vienna.

I would like to briefly tell you about this conference.

The Venue

At the first glance, the 4-star-superior Falkensteiner Margareten Hotel Vienna looks like a perfect venue for the conference. You can easily reach it with both the public transportation and the car. And the food there leaves nothing to be desired.

Full house at the Automic Live in Vienna 2016.

But unfortunately, this is already the end of the praise, because the space was quite inept for the talks. On the one hand, it was too small and therefore quite narrowly furnished. On the other hand, the canvas and stage were on one of the short sides of the room so that the participants in the last rows were very far away from the happenings. And the sound was also quite modest, because the speakers tended to feedback.

Luckily, I was not very concerned about this: I sat in the front row and could see and hear wonderfully.

The Course of the Event

There was plenty of time for networking on the agenda. Both, in the morning and and the afternoon half an hour, noon 1.5 hours and then the whole evening (unfortunately, I could not attend the evening event, though).

Between the breaks there were also some talks ;-). The seven presentations were divided into four blocks.

Block 1: New Features in V12 and AWI

The first block contained only little new information for me: it was about the features of the V12 and the new AWI. I already know both from the last conferences and from my own tests. Nevertheless, it was exciting to get the information presented directly by the Director of Product Management Robert Schausberger.

And the short insights into the architecture behind the new AWI by Markus Holzer, Senior Product Designer, were also interesting.

Markus Holzer explains, why the AWI is fit for productive operations.

Block 2: Customer Talks

I like customer talks a lot, they describe the real life. Even if theory is  – in theory – like practice, it is worthwhile to learn from practical experience.

The first customer presentation was held by Fujitsu, who, as an IT service provider, has been working with Automic since 2000 and is managing some 300 customers. Fujitsu has written a web-based tool for the administration of the system, which can be used to manage users on several mandates and create forecasts for several clients.

Fujitsu not only provides customers with an environment, but also offers ready-made housekeeping processes, helps customers automate their business processes, and offers to run the service end-to-end, so that the customer does not need any access to the system.

Fujitsu uses international teams to operate this environment, with offshore resources not only being used for the processing of prepared tasks, as is often the case elsewhere, but also as an integral part of the teams. The next plans of Fujitsu: a DevOps initiative as well as a global expansion of the environment.

The second customer talk was held by Infineon. Infineon has been using Automic since 2002, above all for the automation of its more than 70 SAP systems and the loading of its own data warehouse.

Infineon is also an enthusiastic customer of Automic’s SAP System Copy, which saves them a lot of time and money – and at the end of the day they get even higher-quality SAP system copies than was the case with the manual process.

Currently, they operate the AE in version 11, and plan to go to V12 in 2017.

Infineon is enthusiastic about the Automic SAP System Copy.

Block 3: Analytics and SLA Management in V12

Actually, Tobias Stanzel should have introduced the V12 Analytics and the new SLA Manager in this block. Because he got sick, Robert Schausberger jumped into the breach for him.

I already wrote an article about the V12 Analytics and Tobias Stanzel – and the article about the SLA management is almost finished.

Robert Schausberger explains new features of the V12 AWI.

Block 4: ARA and DevOps –and Some Surprising News

Stefan Kures is the ARA man of the first hour and he knows the product inside and out. So he’s just the right person to present this topic. Because he recognized the problem with the space layout as described above, he shared his presentation live via WebEx, so that everyone could track the presentation on their own laptop or tablet. Wow Stefan, great idea!

Unfortunately, I have not heard much more of the presentation. At this very moment. I received the news of the day: CA had just bought Automic. From then on I was distracted. ARA and DevOps are exciting, but they couldn’t keep up with this news. Instead of listening, I startet to research, searched for conversation partners and prepared the Breaking News Article for my blog.

In the meantime, I have written a more detailed blog post with my point of view on the subject, that also helped me to self-therapeutically process the news.

The Conferences of 2017

2016 comes to an end, a new year of conferences is waiting. I will definitely visit the Technicians Training again and at least one of the Automic World Conferences (or maybe CA World, who knows …). Do you already know where you will be going next year?