Trip Report - OSLC Connect @ ALM Forum in Seattle March 30 - April 4

I recently attended an event in Seattle called ALM Forum, used to go by a slightly different name and purpose in past years (ALM Summit).

Quick Summary

Overall I thought it was well worth the time and would recommend going back next year.  Since my primary purpose for being there was to promote OSLC and get a better understanding of adoption problems.  So I think we covered those fairly well.

Event by Event Summary

I had to opportunity to attend many of the sessions and events, I'll touch on a majority of them but some with less significant information to share I probably just omitted for brevity.

Monday

Spent most of the day meeting up with some customers and OSLC advocates.

OASIS OSLC Booth in Exhibit Hall

Booth setup, this was a first.  It was a good opportunity for the OASIS OSLC Member Section to leverage funds from OASIS membership to contribute to sponsorship of the event and have this booth in the exhibit hall.  When we could, Sean Kennedy and I would staff the booth.

OSLC Happy Hour

This was a good social event Monday evening which we had about 10% of the conference attendees (not bad) attend.  Collected some information via some surveys, met some new people, finally me some face-to-face and many good conversations on issues and successes with integrations.

#integration #HappyHour @ALMForum - join us at Fountain Wine Bar w/ @DavidJWest & @sspeiche pic.twitter.com/xW7mRMpSM8
— Sean Kennedy (@seanpk8) March 31, 2014

Tuesday

Breakout Session: Better Integrations through Open Interfaces

This was my session on the Integration track, which had good attendance.

Better integrations through open interfaces from Steve Speicher

Wednesday

ALM for the Internet of Things by Ravit Danino (Director, Applications Product Management HP Software & Solutions)

Ravit gave a good overview of the key challenges and opportunities for ALM and PLM tool integrations, highlighting needs for standards-based integration between vast set of tools and suppliers that will be used.

Thursday

PROMCODE: An Open Platform for Large-Scale Contracted Software Delivery in Software Supply Chains - Mikio Aoyama

Professor Aoyama gave an excellent presentation on the challenges of large-scale efforts and how OSLC is being used to combat those challenges.

Lightning Sessions

Challenges and Opportunities in ALM-PLM integration - Michael Azoff

Michael touched on large opportunity for ALM-PLM integrations, seeing that there is still a large gap between the disciplines.  He also observed that OSLC was the place where many PLM vendors were turning towards solving some of the integration challenges and spoke of the positive outlook there.

Integration Principles and Reality - Ludmila Ohlsson

Ludmilla summarized their work at Ericsson and the vision around open standards-based integrations based on leading standards such as OSLC and how to broaden the adoption to more tools.