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.