My Thoughts About Oracle CloudWorld Tour London

It won't surprise you I'm going to talk about is AI. It was the topic of the Oracle CloudWorld (OCW) Tour in London and in particular for me, the AI Agent Studio which was announced on the day of the London event 20th March. 

Rather than just read the announcement I suggest that you watch this short video from Bob Evans where he discusses the AI Agent Studio with Steve Miranda. Bob has a great ability to get points over easily and make them stick. 

What I really want to talk about is the general narrative around AI in Fusion Apps.

There was a partner call the week before the event, when Steve Miranda shared his strategy and hinted at this upcoming announcement. Steve also said conversations around AI he was now having with apps unlimited customers is getting them excited in a way that previously they haven't been and as I said in my recent webcast on AI in EBS; I think this could be the tipping point.

 

The day before the main London event Oracle kicked off with the partner summit and Chris Leone again hinted at what he would be announcing in the keynote. He built up the excitement, and when the announcement came, the ability to extend and orchestrate agents in your system at no additional cost, he did not disappoint. This is again, continuous innovation delivered by Oracle

As I talked to many people, Customers, Oracle and other partners, everyone was talking about the announcement. I did hear some feedback from a couple of people that they felt things had been repeated in every session so whilst they enjoyed each of them, the 1st ten minutes was the same message and the same slides. I think this is just where we are in the cycle of AI, you must set the scene, you must make sure that everyone's on the same page. What the different flavours of AI are and the evolution of what is being delivered. The pace is so fast so you can easily miss an announcement, or your thinking remains where you last heard about it.

I’ve been using the Oracle Slide above to set the scene between Classic and Gen AI but now I think my favourite Oracle AI slide of the moment will be this one:

Despite what I think, OCW was not just about applications, Oracle is the whole stack. I attended the keynotes where, as you would expect, we heard about the latest AI in all the Oracle offerings. 

It was impressive that Oracle UK had Baroness Jones, minister for the Future Digital Economy on stage talking about how AI and specifically Oracle can help the country grow and support the UK Government deliver on its vision for AI innovation and adoption. This was the theme of another recent announcement where Oracle is investing £5billion in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI, in the UK.  

 

Everything delivered in Apps is built on OCI, but Oracle have embedded it for us and for free, and now we can link or extend them to address our needs. 

 

I later attended a over subscribed hands-on-lab and switched on AI and played with it in a demo system, not my first time obviously, but switching it on isn’t the difficult bit, it is which bit makes sense for you, your organisation? 

 

The day after we had a HCM Strategy partner day led by Yvette Cameron, and there was an open discussion on AI adoption. Nothing I heard changes my mantra that it should be challenge lead and not just what 'can you do with this shiny new tool'. But equally many customers are coming to us with a ‘we need to adopt AI’ approach, as if there is a single switch. You still need to drive adoption. We also discussed governance, your organisation will have an AI strategy and that will include approvals to use it. Oracle will pass any bar set but you need to address them. Then which of the over 150 innovations added in the last 12 months makes sense for you?

 

These are conversations I love to have and if it resonates with you, reach out and let's have a chat.

So a busy few days, and the pace doesn't slow down, by the global OCW in October there will be new things to hear about and customer stories about how Oracle brings those promised benefits. 

 

 

Goals for 2025

As 2025 is about to begin you will see lots of plans that people have and I do too, but a little bit different.

I have a new role at Inoapps as thought leader and advocate, not hugely different than what I do today except all of my work will be planned and executed in sprints, because my goal for 2025 is to (scuba) dive my bucket list.

 

When I reached 60 many of my peers we're retiring early, COVID caused us all to reassess what was important and for many that was slowing down. For me the thought of giving up work, which I love was horrifying, but I'd also had 18 months when it was difficult to engage in my passion, my leveler, my time out, my scuba diving.

 

I did manage to dive occasionally during lockdown or between lockdowns. I don't live that far from the sea but it's the North Sea and the amount of kit that I need for always less than 10°C water was quite a struggle. Once we were able to travel it was about choosing somewhere that was open, dealing with the restrictions and just getting out there and into the water. There are so many places I still wanted to dive and signs of getting older in my joints made me think I ought to do them sooner rather than later. I didn’t learn to scuba dive until I was 50 (as a dare) so I did have a lot of catching up to do.

 

Inoapps allows you to buy extra vacation, which I took full advantage of, and I would manage 3 or 4 proper diving trips a year. Normally on a liveaboard where you eat, sleep and dive, repeatedly for a week at a time. Then a great friend gave me a series of presents, a book, “fifty top dive sites to dive before you die” and a diving map of the world and I felt that this should form my bucket list. At this rate my body would give out before my list was completed so perhaps, I did need to retire and get it done whilst I still could. 

 

So, in 2022 I started on a plan, 2025 would be my bucket list year. I visited a few dive shows and collected brochures of the different places I fancied going to. Then in 2023 I started to book those trips, in fact the last trip in 2025 is to the Great Barrier Reef and I had just put down an obscene deposit on three weeks for the November. Before I'd even paid that credit card bill, I had a fall at home and broke my shoulder. My first question to the doctor, when I finally saw one, was how long I would be out of the water, and he was the first of many medical people to say “at your age you can't expect a full recovery”. I was devastated, did this mean that I wouldn't be able to do dive again, let alone do my bucket list? After much physiotherapy I got back in the water eight months after breaking my shoulder and I was more determined than ever than 2025 would be my year.

 

At the start of 2024 I told my boss that I was retiring at the end of the year and that if after a year I still wanted to come back I would consider contracting. After much laughter and hilarity later, and having originally being told no, we discussed it seriously. I was reminded about the many arguments at work as to when I could and couldn't travel during my long recovery. It had also taught me how much I loved my job. So quite quickly retiring morphed to being a gap year.

Initially it was suggested I just take a sabbatical but one thing that is important to me is my ACE Director and the access that gives me to things I really enjoy, sharing my knowledge and so taking a full year out would make that difficult. My plan is that I will travel for six weeks, come home for a month repeatedly through the year, so we looked at how we could make this work. With a lot of help from HR and the Inoapps leadership team we worked out that I could continue to do the things I loved, talk to customers, provide content, tell stories, speak at events and still do my year away. 

So, I've changed my contract, I'm now only working a total of 18 weeks through the year some of that is just keeping up with what's going on, after all that Oracle continuous innovation needs keeping up with. I've already got webinars set up with Inoapps and with Oracle during my first work Sprint at the end of February which will include CloudWorld London, the summer is a little more fluid as I have a few more things to work around and obviously I'll be around at CloudWorld in Vegas. 

 

I cannot believe how amazingly supportive Inoapps have been, but one of the things that I tell my mentees is if you're adding value then you can have say in how your job looks.

 

And where do I start? I'm flying to Singapore on New Year's Eve and hoping that British Airways will celebrate each midnight as we pass through them. On to Thailand for my first liveaboard and then three locations within Indonesia. Some of the trips are on my own but once you've spent a week with nineteen other divers on a boat you've made friends for life and some of the trips are organised with people that I've met on previous trips.

2024 UKOUG Thoughts

Last week was UKOUG annual conference and it was back to its traditional date, the first Monday in December, Super Sunday was back and it was back in Birmingham.

I know how hard it is to put on a usergroup event and this was a really good event. It felt busy, there were lots of conversations going on and looking at the LinkedIn posts people really enjoyed it.

There did seem to be a lot of streams so attendance in each session was not enormous but I had good attendance for my sessions, so I was happy.

Super Sunday is a very technical day and I went along to learn. I didn't attend too many sessions but did have a chance to catch up with a lot of the speakers I haven't seen for a while. 

Monday the main event kicked off and I had the first time slot for my All You Need To Know About Oracle presentation, which I gave for the first time publicly at UKOUG last year and it got me shortlisted for best session. Again I had a good turnout and whilst I recognised a few faces, there were newcomers to our ecosystem and I hope they learned something.

In the afternoon I was on a panel for long term mentoring, sharing ideas and stories to encourage others to become or ask for a mentor. I was joined by Sarah Dow who is my mentee from the ODTUG WIT mentoring scheme but also a SHINE mentor, Neil Chandler from the MASH Program and his mentee Rishin Mitra, who is actually an almost neighbour of mine in N Ireland! We were excellently facilitated by Grace Honeysett.

Tuesday I spoke on the value of Redwood, and was a little nervous there were several sessions on Redwood, second only in volume to AI! It demonstrated how important Redwood is to organisations using Fusion. I wrote a little more about this on LinkedIn.

I then supported Sue Duncan who did demos on Visual Builder, the technology behind Redwood. My last contribution was to support the HCM Executive Round Table where there was more discussion.

There wasn't a lavish party. but there was the opportunity to network on the Monday evening and the event finished on Tuesday with a motivational speaker Bonita Norris, the girl who climbed Everest. 

Actually it didn't finish there, UKOUG have put a lot of effort into their SHINE mentoring program and there were a couple of sessions and a celebration of their two cohorts. Bonita stayed to be on panel and it was lovely to see so many men stay on.

UKOUG wasn't back at the traditional ICC in Birmingham, numbers and sponsors have to return to much higher levels to make that affordable. This decline had started before Covid, and affects a lot of usergroups.

In keeping with my trip down memory lane I stayed near the ICC and walked through it everyday. Part of me wishes I hadn't, that perfect date has been taken over by the SAP usergroup. They are growing, and why? Well I talked about this in an article a while back, but it is still true, A usergroup needs an engaged community, all year round and not just an annual event. 

UKOUG had a number of executive round tables, turn them into Special Interest Groups and get the people together every few months. 

Thankyou to the Oracle ACE Program and my employer for supporting me to attend.

2024 SAOUG Travelogue

It was a real privilege to be asked to be keynote speaker at the revamped SAOUG, and it was a real whirlwind trip! When they asked and said it was end of October, I checked my calendar and thought, that’s great, then once I had made the commitment, I turned the page and realised I had to be in Dallas for a meeting early on the 1^st November. But I had made the commitment and "Commitment is doing the things you said you'd do, long after the mood you said it in has left you" Bear Grylls. 

The flights to South Africa are overnight both ways so I flew Saturday arriving early morning and Tony Cook from FudgeLearn collected me. As my friends know I am not good as a car passenger (blog on my travel woes) and I am a bit nervous about the reputation of public transport in SA. I saw Tony on the agenda so reached out on the off chance he was on my flight and we could travel together but he has a team in SA and was already there but would have someone to pick me up. When I cane through passport control, there he was. A great welcome, thankyou Tony, and to your colleague who drove us.

 

The event was at Misty Hills outside of Johannesburg, I have been there before with Dina Blaschczok who was the first person to host me in South Africa. The location has an amazing restaurant Carnivore which `I didn’t have time to eat in this visit but highly recommend.

 

The event kicked off with a dinner for those there the night before the conference and it was great to meet people and learn a little bit about what they were using Oracle first.

 

South Africa has something called ‘Load Reduction’ with planned power cuts, but in all my visits what I have learnt is that power cuts come unannounced and hopefully your hotel has a generator. This hotel did but for power cuts after 11pm they don’t use generator until 5am and my biggest 1^st world worry is that my phone goes dead, so it was always plugged in. Obviously locals are used to this, and when the power went off the first time (happened 4 times in the 50 hours I was there), everyone just carries on chatting and wait for that generator to kick in which is about 10 minutes. That included the band at the gala dinner who were cut off half way through a song.

I got to meet lots of amazing people but one that was really exciting was meeting a colleague of my ODTUG mentee. Kim Kannemeyer from Brovanture.

On the final day, I had hoped to stay till the end but British Airways bought my flight forward and along side the city traffic, took the opportunity to have a lift back to the airport with the SAOUG super volunteer Daniel Robus, who was the event MC.

And there it was, just 2 1/2 hours in South Africa for every hour flown. But worth it.

2024 South Africa User Group Conference

SAOUG like most user groups had seen a reduction in members even before covid, and they had struggled to rebuild. I believe that last year their event was poorly attended and so this year they started with a new board and support from Oracle. I know how hard that can be and I want to start by saying congratulations on being brave and how it paid off, the event was excellent, and the content engaging.

Being asked to be a keynote speaker was such a privilege and they asked me to do my roadmapping session. When I was talking to people the night before I found out that although South Africa now has an Oracle datacenter, SaaS is not yet available there, so that may present some challenges, but it hasn’t stopped many organisations implementing SaaS and did warrant discussion. I adapted my normal presentation to talk about on premise technology as well as applications and many people asked me questions relating to what they did during the rest of the conference.

I also used that session as an opportunity to explain the ACE program and tell SAOUG that they only have one ACE, Ahmed Jassat and that is not representative of the expertise they have in South Africa, and I did have a few people ask questions afterwards, so hopefully we can recruit a few more.

 

The Oracle country team also talked about what is happening locally and gave a roundup of OCW using local examples.

I attended other Oracle sessions and must say I was impressed at how they made them relevant to the audience. 

 

The theme of the event was Driving Innovation and Modernization in the Business Landscape. There were only 3 breakouts which ensured a great audience for each session. 

 

My session for the first day was Redwood, What is it, what’s behind it and how we use it in Fusion SaaS. We explored the brand, the concept, the development platform and what that means for SaaS, and then we looked at how Visual Builder is behind that user experience and how it can be leveraged. And yes I mentioned how it is a pre-requisite for the embedded gen Ai.

 

Ai was obviously an important theme and on the 2nd day, they had a keynote speaker , Arthur Goldstruck a local author who talked about Ai from his book ‘The Hitchhikers guide to Ai’. It was a great presentation and I took many notes, and was so humbled when after my plenary panel session which followed, we were each given a copy of his book.

 

I was the facilitator of the panel session, which was 3 customers, Ntellane Motsamai from Lesotho Revenue Services, Miguel Graca from safarmex, a medical company, Mahomed Asif Sultan from Tourvest Travel Services, a leading travel agency and Michele De Kreek a change management expert. The format of Q&A is so much more insightful than a carefully choreographed presentation. I only had one call with them beforehand and we kept it simple, they shared their stories in chunks and kept bringing it back to just how important change is in the success and Michele would add advice and though leadership here. As a facilitator your worry is if it doesn’t flow the panel session could just be a collection of random soundbites, but I had nothing to worry about here, they were excellent.

 

Conferences are not just about the sessions, the real value is the conversations in the corridor and the connections you make. What this panel shared will have resonated with many other delegates.

 

My last session was my 'All You Need to Know About Oracle', It's lighthearted and I have been doing this tongue in cheek session for newbies in the Oracle world in my organizations for years, and had never though of doing it publicly until someone at KSCOPE 2023 told me that was what they needed. Now it is fast becoming the 2^ndmost asked for (after my roadmapping ).

 

I had a very busy room of delegates and I had questions, laughs and ‘ah ha’ moment in the audience. I asked questions and we discussed different areas of Oracle. Each time I do this session I get such a buzz. Sadly I had to leave straight after for my flight but as I left a got a new request:

 

Two early career professionals, in this case graduates asked if they could have a conversation based on the session to explore the different areas of Oracle to help them decide were to specialize. I had never considered that as a use case before and what a privilege to be a tiny part of someone’s future. So I hope to do a virtual call with them soon.

Well done SAOUG for being bold, kickstarting your usergroup and believing in their value and to Oracle and the other sponsors. You exceeded everyone's expectations and pulled off an amazing event. I hope to be back.

The SAOUG travelogue 

Oracle Open Cloud AI World - The Messages

Well, it my time to share my thoughts on OCW which was 10 days ago but I still keep finding scraps of papers with notes and to-do lists!

The announcements on AWS partnering with Oracle, were very well received and the message definitely was from all parties that customers want and demand the option to pick and choose what works for them. Seeing Larry onstage with AWS was I suppose inevitable, despite how unlikely it would have seemed in the past, all the other cloud providers already had agreements.

 

Then it was all about AI, at all levels, how AI in the infrastructure is being used to stop cyber-attacks, which themselves are using AI to be ever devious. How AI is being used to take coding to a new level, DevGen allowing the magic to happen from the database up to the applications, but only because the infrastructure now supports it. The analogy Juan Loaiza used of upgrading from to a supercar but not getting the benefit if you are still on a dirt road was perfect. You have to upgrade the infrastructure too.

 

I loved Safra’s keynoteI continuing the CloudWorld mantra that customers are partners, the Oracle technology need’s a customer use case to shine. Her approach of telling the stories through these customer partners is key. The CIA section made me smile, their speaker, the La'Naia Jones CIO started as a DBA, and remember they were Oracle’s first database customer. I am going to use her as an example the next time a DBA asks me if their job will go, aim high! 

 

As an applications person, Steve Miranda was the highlight for me. The generative AI he promised last year, has been delivered, in fact over a 100 examples when he promised 50! The AI agents he showed promise so much and the speed of innovation in cloud makes me confident. The demo of him needing equipment on a business trip and doing everything from receiving a quote in Japanese on a piece of paper, photographing it, emailing it, the requisition and PO being auto generated and eventually being paid, all through his mobile was brilliant. I loved that he also pointed out that Mastercard virtual payment card was now available, another promise from last year and Inoapps were the first customer to use this as mentioned in the Mastercard Earnings call.

 

I’m mainly an apps person but the technology fascinates me and I need to know how it works, In Inoapps we have been working at using the native AI offered with OCI and Autonomous and it was great to see other use cases and explore the different components that make it all possible. I had loads of questions but had the advantage of visiting a great friend Michelle Malcher after OCW, who works in Database PM and she answered all my questions. 

Success is not just winning

 The UKOUG Annual Awards were held last week and I attended with the unbelievable honour of being shortlisted in 3 community categories, Woman in Technology, Inspiring Individual and Best Speaker.

When the short list came out the one I was most proud of was best speaker. This list is simply the 3 best scores for speakers at the last UKOUG event. My presentation that scored so high was 'All You Need To Know About Oracle', a session I put together many years ago for new colleagues as a whistle stop tour around the Oracle world. I believe it is funny, irreverent and educational. It is always being updated but I had never given it publicly. 

The event was held at the very impressive Oracle Red Bull Racing HQ in Milton Keynes.

Last summer at KSCOPE I was doing the newbie orientation session and one delegate said afterwards he had hoped the session was about Oracle rather than just first time attendees. I told him about my session and offered to do it as a webcast just for him if he would give me feedback, and then I might do it externally. He loved it so I submitted it for UKOUG and they accepted it. The room was packed, many existing Oracle people who wanted to get a broader picture and many new to our world delegates. I was a bit nervous to see Jen Nicholson who keeps all the ACEs in check in the room, but her feedback was great. So to achieve a top 3 score for the entire event was real confirmation that it was a good session. I have since gone on to deliver this at other events and it is on the  agenda for this year's KSCOPE in just a few weeks. With Jen's encouragement I also presented it to an intake of Oracle's graduate program in their Austin HQ earlier this year. 

The other speakers on the shortlist were Connor McDonald and Chris Saxon, both from the Oracle Ask Tom team. I have known Connor for ever and Chris for a long time, and there is no doubt they are top presenters. I knew Connor would win, his presentations are beyond great. To be on the list with him was a real box ticked.

For the Woman in technology category I was shortlisted with Lydia Maksoud and Michelle MacDonagh. I had never met Michelle before but was sat next to her in the awards dinner and want to stay in touch. I have posted before about my love of mentoring, and the payback when a mentee has succeeds in their field. Last year I posted about Lydia Maksoud, one of 4 new ACE Associates I had the privilege of mentoring through the process, giving them the self belief in what they do. So when Lydia won the award it was amazing a young woman at the early part of her career is recognised for her contribution, and like a proud mum I felt a tiny little bit of that was my encouragement.

The final category I was short listed for was Inspiring Individual, I was nominated here by Abi Giles- Haigh, who herself was shortlisted and Philippa Clifford Davies. Both ladies are amazing WIT advocates and leaders in their field, so I was super proud to win the category. I took the opportunity to thank everyone, especially my employer who sees the value of what I do, encourages and support me. 

My manager, Fiona Martin is also a very dear long time friend and I couldn't have been more pleased when she was recognised with joint  Leader award at the end of the evening. 

We aren't always recognised for what we do, but when we are it is a great feeling. Take the time to recognise those around you, encourage them and watch them flourish.