2018 OOW - Before the party starts

In the past there have been briefing sessions at Redwood Shores (Oracle HQ) in the days leading up to OOW. These few days are of more value to me than the actual conference, and although the ACE briefing was in town this time on Saturday I still had a Partner Advisory Council on the Friday and had arranged a number of meetings for the Thursday.

It doesn't matter how many times I go to Redwood Shores I never tire of the beauty of the campus, just as I never tire of San Francisco.

Thursday, I had meetings with Hillel Cooperman, the new leader for Applications’ UX or user experience. This is an area very important to me and it was good to hear what he is concentrating on and that he looks forward to working with the ACE program in the future.

  

I ran into Lancy Silveira whilst visiting Hillel and it was really interesting to discuss what we are doing with customers and VBCS and what they are looking at within the apps. I can’t share details, but I like the direction of travel. In fact, later in the week I did some UX testing on some of the ideas and it only excited me more for the future.

Friday was the Cloud Platform Partner Advisory Council. I had a number of Accenture colleagues there, so we were able to cover most of the multiple streams. I attended integration and apps development. Most interesting to me was the changes to chatbots, or rather, the enhancements to a full digital assistant solution.

The council was split across the conference and visitor centres at HQ and I found myself in the Derek Williams Room. Derek was a friend and helped me a lot in Japan when I worked for Fujitsu. This is a wonderful way to honour him and I did reach out and ask if they could add a photo and explanation as to why the room is named as such.

I also popped out for a meeting with Steve Miranda, the EVP for Applications. I have had the privilege of working with Steve since the first code was cut for Fusion and it is always good to see how far it has come. I went to see him in his office and on the windowsill, he has a large photo of the Fusion Nation team taken at the product launch. I am in that photo.

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