LAOUC 2025 Tour - Costa Rica

The second leg of the Latin America tour was Costa Rica. 

I arrived with most of the other speakers on Saturday late afternoon and we had Sunday free before the event on Monday. We did think about visiting a volcano but the trip is pretty full on and stressful and we just didn’t get around to looking at it early enough, so we downloaded an audio app of places of interest and just went walking, listening to the app like a guide. The city of San Jose is quite compact but full of green areas and parks with lots of museums and spectacular monuments. It was a really enjoyable morning. 

We went to an Argentinian restaurant for lunch and it was amazing.

The event on Monday started quite early although it was a much less stressful Uber ride to the university and then after a kickoff at 8:45 am, the sessions followed. I again did my roadmapping talk to a room mainly students and again adapted it for them. After lunch which was provided by Pythian sponsorship, I gave my talk on AI comparing it with between EBS and Fusion applications. There wasn’t really a large audience but what I did have was a great conversation with fellow speakers about what is required to make applications work with AI on premise.

At 6 pm when the sessions were over, all the speakers Again became a panel for the audience to ask AI questions. 

This session was deliberately aimed at the students and over 65 stayed right to the end at gone 7pm. We had the obvious questions. 'Will AI take the jobs?' etc but we also had a few thought provoking questions like 'did we think AI would stifle music?',' Did we think that our thirst for AI would use up what precious resources we have left'. 

After this there was a speakers reception so a very long day but so worthwhile thank you Eddie Molina for having us back and for me my fifth visit to Costa Rica.

LAOUC 2025 Tour - First Stop Mexico

I wrote about my excitement of joining the Latin America Oracle User Community tour this year not having been part of it since before Covid.

The tour started in Mexico City. I arrived early the evening before having taken the opportunity to go diving in the north of Mexico prior to the event, so not too long ago flight from Cabo San Lucas. A number of speakers were staying in the same hotel and we all met at breakfast before boarding Ubers to the university where the event was being held. Mexico City has a population of about 22 million and I think all of them were out in cars at that time. Eventually #3 at the university and guess what - we were not at the right one, so another quick Uber to navigate a sprawling university and we were there.

I was on in the first session time slot and set up included finding a rather old projector with a VGA connector and whilst we had HDMI adaptors it was a little temperamental. My first presentation was my roadmapping session and I had made an effort to translate the content into Spanish. Unfortunately the projector wasn’t helping people to be able to read it! After my session the AV people did manage to improve the presentations so the rest of the day was better.

I’m always worried at events where English isn’t the attendees first language, what effect this has on the audience and when an event is held in the university, what the mix of actual users and students will be. I shouldn’t have worried, it was mainly students in this first session about 3/4 of the room and those that were Oracle users were in the main consultants so I actually talked about why organisations have on premise applications still in use and not just the shiny new applications or technologies that the students are learning about at the moment and we had a very good conversation.

One audience member said that Costa Rica you can do an internship in Cobal and if successful and get a job, you’ll earn four times the national wage in your first job. I think this was a great discussion and a lesson for the students that many of the organisations they may work for will have some older but mission critical systems. My roadmapping is relevant to them all, what factors should they be looking at.

Just before an amazing lunch there was an Ace Director panel where we discussed our experiences with AI. It was very well done with questions being asked across the panel. We’re five of the 78 directors were Spanish speaking and then when the English speaking myself and Kai Yu, the user group leader Ronaldo Carrasco translated although most of the audience didn’t need it.

My second presentation was comparing AI in E Business Suite and Fusion applications and I spent some time beforehand thinking about how I could make that more generic if my audience was again student centric as it had been in the morning. However I had a smaller audience but most were EBS users and we had a great discussion as I gave this presentation. 

After the event which was such a success for ORAMEX the Mexican user group. It was time to go back to our hotels and a large group of speakers went out to a local taco bar for dinner.

Next up is Costa Rica. Many are travelling today although some are spending an extra day in Mexico City to see some of the sights.

(Thanks to Gilson Martins for many of the photos).