Oracle Open World - My Annual Jamboree!

Normally before I travel to Oracle Open World, I would post what I intend to get up to there; and it would always start with how I wear so many hats ...

This year is no different, I am just as busy, in fact so much so, I’ve now arrived in San Francisco and only now posting my plans.

This year I’ve been employee of Accenture for just 20 days. I’m still learning all of their processes and systems, but OOW is a great opportunity to meet many of the global team here. That alone could keep me busy all week.

I have no specific user group duties this year, as I’ve finished my time on the UKOUG board, but I am still hosting the EMEA ACEs session.  There is no user group Sunday this year and their sessions are spread amongst the week and our session will be on Tuesday, Oct 23, 03:45 PM - 04:30 PM | Moscone West - Room 3001. Normally this session is about the database but this year we are trying something slightly different and will be talking about mistakes and what you learn from them. I even have an example of my own!

I made a video with Bob Rhubart highlighting my actual sessions for OOW, worth checking it out.

Then on Thursday, yes Thursday there are general sessions this year right up until late. So Thursday Oct 25, 01:00 PM - 01:45 PM | Moscone South - Room 157, I have my other session with my colleague Tim Warner where we will show you how we took last years messages about chatbots and unpicked the marketing and put it back together again with the help of Product Management.   A chatbot working with HCM.  

I am also making a guest appearance had a session with the SOA Cloud Product Management team who are talking to our customers Skanska about the very the innovative way they approached their  HCM implementation. The integration work was carried out by our partners eProseed and Simon Haslam from there will be explaining how it was done.  Tuesday, Oct 23, 05:45 PM - 06:30 PM | Moscone West - Room 2002

As an ACE Director, this year we have our briefings on Saturday in the city, which is a deviation from our normal HQ briefings the week before OOW. I’m really looking forward to hearing all the messages before the main event. I did still arrive a few days early and I had a series of meetings at Redwood Shores today where I met the new leader for you UX Hillel Cooperman. 

Tomorrow I am at a Partner advisory board for PaaS, looking at how this is working with SaaS as this is becoming more and more prevalent in my day job. Then move into the city for the main event.

Alongside all of the Accenture meetings that I’ll be attending, there are a lot of receptions and customer events so hope to meet many of the global operations teams. I’m particularly excited about the opportunity to attend some of the Enkitech events, they too are part of Accenture and my friends there have been very helpful as I try and understand all the corporate policies.

If I find time I want to go to #OTW always fun.

Because this years OOW is Monday to Thursday, the normal free time on Saturday is gone and the off piste events have in the main gone, but hopefully only this time. For the first time in several years I will have no OOW triathlon. I do hope that I will at least get one walk over the bridge, but we’re not swimming this year which is very sad and I would just don’t have time to do the cycle ride. It’s sad but let’s hope that next year those things are back.

Sunday is the Partner Day, and then Monday it is OOW proper. I fly home on Friday landing back in London just-in-time for my grandmother’s 99th birthday party. 

It's going to be a long, long week but a good one!

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ODC Appreciation Day : Perseverance

Perseverance is a skill that you need when your career is an IT. My problem is that I struggle with the sheer amount of time that technology eats up.

I’ve been known to put off getting a new laptop and even phone because of the amount of time it takes to set it all up and migrate everything across. Even if you use some clever cloud backup, chances are you have to re-enter all the passwords etc!

However sometimes Perseverance is really worthwhile.
The ACE program gives me access to a very generous cloud account to play with Oracle technology and whilst I’m not the most technical in the program there are things that I want to give a go especially in the #Paas4SaaS area. Last year at Oracle Open World there was lots about chatbots and I came back and try it all out with the SaaS applications only to find that those new PaaS for mobile and chatbot modules were not in my trial account. I know that Jennifer tried all sorts of things to try and get that working but in the end had to create me a second trial.

Just as I got the second trial, Oracle combined the products into a single product OMCe and that was not in my trial, however  this time things were getting easier and I think there was a better route to talk to the provisioning folks. 

Then I still didn’t get what exactly what I needed and I was close to giving up! However another key benefit of the ACE Program is the access to product management (thanks again Grant and Rohit) and they helped me with a demo system, while we tried to get my account sorted. This meant I was able to get somewhere with my quest and present on how chatbots work with SaaS. Then just when I thought I was there, it changed again because autonomous mobile cloud would remove the need for me to manage the stack which as a non-technical person was an overhead I didn’t need and also I would stop me consuming my credits too quickly.

By this time that was the ability to simply raise an SR with MOS,  this is fantastic, self service, so  I asked for autonomous mobile and I didn’t actually take very long, but you guessed it, the product has changed again. Now it has been separated into two components, ODA and OMC, but on this occasion I raised the SR and the change to my provision in my account was made within 24 hours. So sometimes perseverance pays off, and sometimes what’s really slow for you, means that the others that come behind you have a much smoother life. 

Thanks again ODC for this benefit and for sticking with me during my fustration and all your support. And if you are interested in the topic of chatbots with SaaS, come along to my OOW session on the Thursday lunchtime.