My OOW16 - ACE Director Briefings

As a proud ACE Director, OTN is my sponsor at Oracle Open World.

We are asked to attend two days of briefings at HQ the week before OOW, and in fact the User Experience day, the day before the briefings is also an offshoot from the ACE program.

You can never have enough photos of Oracle HQ

The briefings are great and as I said before, the highlight for me is the Thomas Kurian session and he didn't disappoint. Yes everything is under NDA, but some of that gets lifted during OOW itself. The advantage of Thomas going first is that all other speakers know how much he has actually shared. He even talked about SaaS so I felt special. I have to explain again that whilst not being a technical practitioner it is understanding what and how the technology works and how it can help SaaS users that is my value to Certus.

The real value of the ACE briefings is to hear everything as close to reality as possible and not simply a marketing session.

The format of the briefings also changed, with breakout sessions giving more people options on what to see. It was basically split into database and middleware or perhaps I should say IaaS & PaaS, as cloud was defiantly the only thing on the agenda. I was actually impressed at the number of people who went to the sessions outside their normal area of interest.

My favourite session outside of Thomas was the very last session I attended from Jon Huang who talked about future direction for #PaaS4SaaS. Defiantly under NDA and defiantly worth keeping an eye on.

Another advantage of the ACE Director program is that we get extended Cloud trials in exchange for giving feedback. I was very surprised to be 2nd on the leader board for feedback but articles and blogs all count and I have given a couple of webcasts to Product Management.

My most recent article is in the current Oracle Scene.

It is a long time since our mascot Stanley was lost but we have a new one now, Lumpy who Bjoern Rost introduced at Kscope this year. I promised to make him a Stanley Jacket and I did. There was a small wobble when I realised the measurements I had didn't quite work but the day was saved by Stewart Bryson ho donated me his ACE Director lanyard. I was also really impressed by Bjoern's wife Connie who volunteered to help Jennifer for the week.

I was also given a present for work I have done during the year but I think it is really just to help me have fun on the road, a more portable drinks mixer. You can only just see it in the picture but the flask is engraved with the ACE Director logo.

 I can't thank OTN and the ACE Program enough for looking after us and bringing us out for OOW. Jennifer does a wonderful job for us.

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