The Importance of Winter Sunshine

Many of us would love a wee holiday in the sun in January, if like me you live somewhere when winter comes calling at that time of the year. So a trip to Oracle HQ at Redwood Shores where the temperature although chilly for Californians is a balmy 18’-19’ C is my winter bliss. How do I manage this then?

 Oracle has an independent user group model which means there are simply too many, and each different for Oracle to work with individually at a global level, so we come together under the International Oracle Usergroup Community IOUC, which holds its annual summit each January. I previously blogged about how the IOUC works and the post is still very relevant although some of the committees have changed.

 The summit is long enough after Oracle Open World for everyone within Oracle to have made sense of the messages and drill down into the detail, and early enough in the year for them to share their marketing initiatives with usergroup leaders. More importantly for me is that all the groups that come together can share ideas and challenges and we always come away with things to try and working initiatives with other groups.

James Haslam our CEO and I are attending on behalf of UKOUG and it will be 3 days of intense meetings and briefings, but of great value to us in our planning. There are also opportunities to spend time with particular product teams, tours of the User Experience labs, and Maria Colgan has arranged a day on the in-memory database for those usergroup leaders who are technical. Being at Oracle HQ means we can follow up on specific initiatives and we have meetings around booking executives for our conferences. Personally I am staying an extra day to catch up on some User Experience training I missed in December and the AppAdvantage team who I am a guest blogger for.

 So a chance to catch up with old friends, make new friends and walk in the sunshine, makes up for the 15 hour journey each way…. just.