Within the Oracle community, SYSCO was known for its tech blog, the SYSCO Middleware Blog. Now, Cegal is relaunching and rebranding the blog as the Cegal Tech Blog. With the relaunch of the blog, our integration and development departments wanted to take the opportunity to share both some history and plans moving forward.

History

It all started in 2013 when the SYSCO Middleware department was established with a single employee, Cato Aune. The department quickly grew with a handful of people, all passionate about Oracle Integrations and all helping customers with complex situations. The passion, mixed with the insight of how many were stuck on similar issues, drove Cato Aune to create a space where the department's unique experiences and in-depth knowledge could more easily be shared: The SYSCO Middleware Blog. 

The blog kicked off in March 2014, with the first post being written by Jon Petter Hjulstad on the topic: RDA's health checks in SOA installations. The blog was, in fact, the first successful effort by the department around end-to-end CI / CD with open source technology. In this case, GitHub, GitHub Pages, and Jekyll were used in combination with custom scripts. Later, Jenkins and other tooling were also added.

Only a few years later, the I&D department had grown to about ten employees and joined the Red Expert Alliance. At this point, the blog was considered the leading blog on Oracle Middleware internationally and awarded one of the best technical blogs in EMEA by Oracle 2018/2019.

When traveling to conferences in the US, people would come up to us and acknowledge its impressive content and how it had helped both them and their customers in several situations. 

Jon Petter Hjulstad, Director Development

Jon Petter also remembers how they, several times, were called into meetings about roadblocks or errors, and with the help of the extensive details in the SYSCO Middleware Blog, customers were solving issues on their own. 

At the time of the merge with Cegal in 2022, the blog had 140 technical posts. 

Moving forward

Ever since the Cegal merged with SYSCO in January 2022, there has been a question of what to do with the SYSCO Middleware Blog, but everyone agreed it was time to expand its horizons. It will still be a place to share expert Oracle integration knowledge. Now it will also be a platform to share all the other experiences and skillsets that the Cegal consultants have, among those: Oracle Middleware, OSB, Databases, Kafka, Weblogic, Google Cloud KMS, Camunda, Sesam, Kubernetes, SoapUI, gRPC, and Vue.js. 

In addition, Cegal has an increased emphasis on Azure moving forward, recently having become a strategic Microsoft partner with the ambition to become the leading development and integration partner around Azure technology. Something Cegal believes they have already achieved and sustained with Oracle technology. Combining these two domains make Cegal extremely relevant to spearhead the green shift towards renewables, from a software development and digitalization perspective, within their customer base in the energy sector. Cegal is actively cooperating with both vendors to spread the word on modern technology, up-skill their software engineers, and go to market with their customers.

Take a look at: Cegal shines as a Microsoft Gold partner.

Take a look at: Cegal is the leading Oracle partner in the Nordics.

The blog is recommended for those who work with integrations, are developers, or are generally interested in Cloud technology.

Francisco Arturo Viveros, Director Integration

Having grown from 5 possible contributors to more than 850, this blog will allow people to contribute more easily and allow for better maintenance and the functionality that a NextGen Tech Company requires. 

With its initial launch, we have selected 12 initial posts. Moving forward, we will continue creating new content and revisiting some old posts with updated content.