2024 SAOUG Travelogue

It was a real privilege to be asked to be keynote speaker at the revamped SAOUG, and it was a real whirlwind trip! When they asked and said it was end of October, I checked my calendar and thought, that’s great, then once I had made the commitment, I turned the page and realised I had to be in Dallas for a meeting early on the 1^st November. But I had made the commitment and "Commitment is doing the things you said you'd do, long after the mood you said it in has left you" Bear Grylls. 

The flights to South Africa are overnight both ways so I flew Saturday arriving early morning and Tony Cook from FudgeLearn collected me. As my friends know I am not good as a car passenger (blog on my travel woes) and I am a bit nervous about the reputation of public transport in SA. I saw Tony on the agenda so reached out on the off chance he was on my flight and we could travel together but he has a team in SA and was already there but would have someone to pick me up. When I cane through passport control, there he was. A great welcome, thankyou Tony, and to your colleague who drove us.

 

The event was at Misty Hills outside of Johannesburg, I have been there before with Dina Blaschczok who was the first person to host me in South Africa. The location has an amazing restaurant Carnivore which `I didn’t have time to eat in this visit but highly recommend.

 

The event kicked off with a dinner for those there the night before the conference and it was great to meet people and learn a little bit about what they were using Oracle first.

 

South Africa has something called ‘Load Reduction’ with planned power cuts, but in all my visits what I have learnt is that power cuts come unannounced and hopefully your hotel has a generator. This hotel did but for power cuts after 11pm they don’t use generator until 5am and my biggest 1^st world worry is that my phone goes dead, so it was always plugged in. Obviously locals are used to this, and when the power went off the first time (happened 4 times in the 50 hours I was there), everyone just carries on chatting and wait for that generator to kick in which is about 10 minutes. That included the band at the gala dinner who were cut off half way through a song.

I got to meet lots of amazing people but one that was really exciting was meeting a colleague of my ODTUG mentee. Kim Kannemeyer from Brovanture.

On the final day, I had hoped to stay till the end but British Airways bought my flight forward and along side the city traffic, took the opportunity to have a lift back to the airport with the SAOUG super volunteer Daniel Robus, who was the event MC.

And there it was, just 2 1/2 hours in South Africa for every hour flown. But worth it.

2024 South Africa User Group Conference

SAOUG like most user groups had seen a reduction in members even before covid, and they had struggled to rebuild. I believe that last year their event was poorly attended and so this year they started with a new board and support from Oracle. I know how hard that can be and I want to start by saying congratulations on being brave and how it paid off, the event was excellent, and the content engaging.

Being asked to be a keynote speaker was such a privilege and they asked me to do my roadmapping session. When I was talking to people the night before I found out that although South Africa now has an Oracle datacenter, SaaS is not yet available there, so that may present some challenges, but it hasn’t stopped many organisations implementing SaaS and did warrant discussion. I adapted my normal presentation to talk about on premise technology as well as applications and many people asked me questions relating to what they did during the rest of the conference.

I also used that session as an opportunity to explain the ACE program and tell SAOUG that they only have one ACE, Ahmed Jassat and that is not representative of the expertise they have in South Africa, and I did have a few people ask questions afterwards, so hopefully we can recruit a few more.

 

The Oracle country team also talked about what is happening locally and gave a roundup of OCW using local examples.

I attended other Oracle sessions and must say I was impressed at how they made them relevant to the audience. 

 

The theme of the event was Driving Innovation and Modernization in the Business Landscape. There were only 3 breakouts which ensured a great audience for each session. 

 

My session for the first day was Redwood, What is it, what’s behind it and how we use it in Fusion SaaS. We explored the brand, the concept, the development platform and what that means for SaaS, and then we looked at how Visual Builder is behind that user experience and how it can be leveraged. And yes I mentioned how it is a pre-requisite for the embedded gen Ai.

 

Ai was obviously an important theme and on the 2nd day, they had a keynote speaker , Arthur Goldstruck a local author who talked about Ai from his book ‘The Hitchhikers guide to Ai’. It was a great presentation and I took many notes, and was so humbled when after my plenary panel session which followed, we were each given a copy of his book.

 

I was the facilitator of the panel session, which was 3 customers, Ntellane Motsamai from Lesotho Revenue Services, Miguel Graca from safarmex, a medical company, Mahomed Asif Sultan from Tourvest Travel Services, a leading travel agency and Michele De Kreek a change management expert. The format of Q&A is so much more insightful than a carefully choreographed presentation. I only had one call with them beforehand and we kept it simple, they shared their stories in chunks and kept bringing it back to just how important change is in the success and Michele would add advice and though leadership here. As a facilitator your worry is if it doesn’t flow the panel session could just be a collection of random soundbites, but I had nothing to worry about here, they were excellent.

 

Conferences are not just about the sessions, the real value is the conversations in the corridor and the connections you make. What this panel shared will have resonated with many other delegates.

 

My last session was my 'All You Need to Know About Oracle', It's lighthearted and I have been doing this tongue in cheek session for newbies in the Oracle world in my organizations for years, and had never though of doing it publicly until someone at KSCOPE 2023 told me that was what they needed. Now it is fast becoming the 2^ndmost asked for (after my roadmapping ).

 

I had a very busy room of delegates and I had questions, laughs and ‘ah ha’ moment in the audience. I asked questions and we discussed different areas of Oracle. Each time I do this session I get such a buzz. Sadly I had to leave straight after for my flight but as I left a got a new request:

 

Two early career professionals, in this case graduates asked if they could have a conversation based on the session to explore the different areas of Oracle to help them decide were to specialize. I had never considered that as a use case before and what a privilege to be a tiny part of someone’s future. So I hope to do a virtual call with them soon.

Well done SAOUG for being bold, kickstarting your usergroup and believing in their value and to Oracle and the other sponsors. You exceeded everyone's expectations and pulled off an amazing event. I hope to be back.

The SAOUG travelogue