OUG Ireland - My Home Conference

Favourite Conference in March was Ireland, this is my home conference, and this year we were back at Croke Park, a beautiful stadium that means so much to the Irish.

Faye Wood was the project manager and this is her last Ireland conference, and I want to say a big thank you to her, she is still working with the Irish community SIGS.

Roel Hartman

The evening before the event there was an ACE dinner funded by OTN where we invited the few local end users who were presenting. It was a lovely dinner and I should say, nice to catch up with people, although I had seen Alex, Roel and Brendan in Norway. Thankyou OTN.

Tim Hall

Tim Hall did put in an appearance but simply flew in and out the same day as did Jonathan Lewis, Tim is making the point that if you live in the midlands or further North a day trip to Dublin booked in advance is cheaper than the train to London.

My first presentation in Ireland was on behalf of Jeremy Ashley, the VP of User Experience. The UX team are great supporters of UKOUG but did not have a presenter available and I was honoured to be able to help as a OAUX.

My second presentation was about how being a Cloud Customer is different, and I was not well enough prepared. I have already written about this, but have learnt and did better the next time.

Alex Nuijten

Our keynote speaker was Jon Paul from Ireland telling us where Ireland fits into the wider Oracle story and there are some great customer stories emerging.  We also had Nadia Bendjedou who is another great supporter of UKOUG and always the one EBS users want to hear. On the tech side we had Maria Coglan, a local girl done good. Maria is originally from Dublin and we have tried many times to get her over from Oracle HQ, and in fact the date this year was driven by Maria’s availability.

Following on from last year’s success with a one-day master class from Tom Kyte the day after the event, Maria did the same for us. Thank you.

After the event those who were not flying straight out went for a meal and I suddenly felt very tired and unwell, I put it down to exhaustion from owning the Ireland event but by the next day knew I had an awful cold. I blamed it on Brendan Tierny who was ill when we arrived but clever people told me you are not contagious when you have the symptoms, but I would like to point out that Brendan was also in Norway with no symptoms. I wouldn’t normally mention this except it got worse over the weekend and when I arrived in Holland I was worried my voice would not hold out. I think however I then passed the germs to others as the Tierney lergy made its way around the ACE program.