Off On The Road (Again)

I saw a tweet linking to Heli's blog today, talking about the OTN EMEA tour we start tomorrow.

I think I am getting blasé about travel, I packed my suitcase on Sunday and have been in London since yesterday, and whilst I know I am flying to Portugal tomorrow, it doesn't seem that imminent.

As Heli said we have had an issue with our flights, how rescheduling flights by days is acceptable I don't understand, but even more worrying is the travel agent didn't point it out either. Anyway that is now sorted.

I remember after one long OTN tour in South America saying to the organiser that the itinerary needed to have cities with direct flights, as travel is tiring. Bjoern who has arranged this trip obviously never got the memo. Portugal to Jordan is via Istanbul (Turkey) and Jordan to South Africa was to be via Cairo but now via Dubai. However I will shut up now, I know just how much he has put into setting this up and it is very appreciated.

Earlier today I had another little panic, I checked the visa requirements; Bjoern did tell us it was all OK but I have been caught out before when speakers from different countries had varying visa requirements.

My phone app said I needed a Visa for Jordan, NOT GOOD when I leave UK in < 24 hours, but when I went to their website, it said I could get it on arrival. phew!

I am actually quite prepared for my sessions. Over the three conferences in Portugal, Jordan and South Africa, I have 3 different presentations all of which I have given before.

I am really proud of my PaaS4SaaS presentation, it talks about our Proof of Concept and has led to us working even closer with Oracle Development and whilst it is semi technical I love discussing what you can do technically and why?

My AppAdvantage presentation is based on a joint presentation I did with Oracle at last year's Open World, and I have updated it to include a bit on PaaS.

The third presentation on 'Do Oracle Applications Stack up' has been updated to include the story of JT Global, a Certus Customer who just today has been making an Oracle Customer Success video after being the first live implementation of Oracle Cloud Time & Labor globally.

As with each OTN tour I am looking forward to sharing with the local user groups and learning myself from the discussions. Making new friends and hopefully seeing a tiny bit of the places we get to visit.

Tours are hard work, lots of travel, and we still have to juggle the day job, but our world of Oracle Technology is in an amazing transformation and I am so honoured to be part of it.

Thank you OTN ACE program, Bjoern and the 3 user groups for making this happen.