A great mix of technical and social activities

Hallo, My name is Wouter and I have been working at Oracle since June 2008 as a Technical Consultant in the Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Enterprise 2.0 group of Oracle Consulting in The Netherlands. I was offered this job after completing the Master’s program Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Challenging

In the first month I received extensive technology and product trainings to prepare me for my first customer assignment. In my case I learned about advanced SQL expressions to query the Oracle database and the Application Express web system for quickly creating a web-based User Interface on top of this. In the customer project that followed, I was given the responsibility to find out about the precise requirements directly from the customer, and also implement a solution that meets these requirements.

Rewarding

After a few months I found a quite different, but equally compelling, project on my way. In this integration project for a large bank, the BPEL language (part of the Oracle SOA Suite) is used for business process orchestration that integrates 20+ back-end systems. My work consists of implementing new services in this middleware layer. Technologies that are used here besides BPEL include XPath, XSLT and Enterprise Java.

On the one side, this can be quite technical, e.g. analyzing threads of instances within an application server cluster. On the other hand, there is also a large social component: I meet many people besides my direct colleagues, we work closely together in tracking down issues encountered in test or production systems, and I am now also involved in new architecture designs.

This mix of technical and social activities, the opportunities to get up to speed quickly, and the possibilities to be engaged in discussions is what makes this job so attractive to me. People are open to hear your view on a particular customer problem. As a consultant, you have considerable autonomy in choosing the areas that you would like to become an expert in, and to follow the trainings to help you achieve this goal.

International

As an example of the international culture, in the current integration project I work together with consultants from India, Spain and Sweden. The different backgrounds of these people lead to many interesting discussions. Besides, they are also great fun to hang out with: we regularly hit the bars till late at night!

In conclusion, my one and a half years at Oracle have brought me opportunities to develop technical and personal skills, challenging problem solving, many nice colleagues and a great deal of fun!

If you are interested in working for Oracle in the Netherlands feel free to contact jessica.ebbelaar@oracle.com or visit our website http://campus.oracle.com.

(For related articles also look at the articles from April and May 2009 in our archive, from Frank van Vliet and Bahaaldine. They are also working in the SOA Lines of Business.)