Guatemala

180 people attended the GOUG event which was fantastic and much more than the 100 they expected and 150 they wanted.

Less so was the length of our trip, we arrived at 10pm after a long afternoon and evening flying to Panama (where I bought a hat), and onto Guatemala. and we left today at 10am, 36 hours in what we believe is a beautiful country, a land of perpetual Spring. Still we spent a long time in the tourist shops at the airport looking at postcards of what we should have seen.

We had quite an empty flight for the last leg and were well looked after by the attendants who seemed to think asking for a whisky meant a VERY large glass. So when we arrived at the airport a trip to the bar was in order, mainly for some food. Graham Wood joined us and it was great to catch up.



Graham Wood Presenting

 The agenda had changed constantly but these things happen and I gave two presentations, Should You Upgrade or go straight to Fusion Applications and my non serious Consolidation to the Cloud. Every session was full and I even got questions which in itself is great as the culture is few people will ask a question in the room, they wait till afterwards. This was also a spanish seaking country where we were not translated, I never ceased to be amazed at how good other people are with languages.



Full room looks on as Tim Hall clears something off the bottom of his shoe

 All the presenters were interviewed by the Galileo University where the event was held and they were capturing thoughts on why the user group and universities should work together. Something as you know I am keen to do in UKOUG.

My name in lights

After the event we were taken for a meal close to our hotel to sample the local food and we had a great, relaxing evening with wonderful people and good friends. Thankyou Carlos and your team for the invitation.

Trinidad

First Impression of Trinidad was how big it was. I have visited Barbados, Antigua and a few other islands before but Trinidad was not quite what I expected. It is beautiful but I without stepping in the ocean doesn't quite feel like we have been in the Caribbean, however the welcome from our hosts was truly Caribbean.

We are staying in the Hilton, known locally as the upside down hotel as reception is on a cliff top and the rooms are on floors beneath. We must stop going to Oracle travel hotels and find out in advance which is closest to event. Last night after the conference we were entertained by the user group in the Hyatt next to the event which would have been easier to stay in.

The conference was hosted in a government building with a mixed audience so I think each of us tweaked our presentations a little but it was fun and a good debate around Oracle Licensing rounded off the day.

Patanjali gave his great How Fusion Middleware Built the Fusion UX presentation and I followed with a demo of Fusion Apps and the great 'Should I upgrade or go straight to Fusion Apps?' question. There were a number of organisations in the audience asking just that question.


I was particularly impressed that my employer Fujitsu was one of the two sponsors at the event and I had the opportunity to meet with them earlier in the day.

The Trinidad User Group or their official title of Eastern Caribbean Users' Group have been going 20 years and it was great to be able to talk to them about UKOUG and how to encourage local speakers. Afterwards one of the board, Ryan took us back to the hotel and gave us a little tour including eating young coconuts from one of the many sidewalk vendors.

As ever too short a visit, new friends and great memories.

Latin America North OTN Tour

I had the honour of taking part in the #LAOTN North Tour of Central America. I missed the first two legs, Columbia and Ecuador because it was UKOUG Volunteers' Day and Paper Selection Day which obviously I did not want to miss.

I actually took part in the tour whilst on vacation, but being a European I have far too much vacation anyway. I flew into Barbados where I took a holiday afterwards to go diving.

The legs of the tour I did were:

    9th July Trinidad
  11th July Guatemala
  13th July Honduras
  16th July Costa Rica 

I also got to see a little of Honduras , Learn even less Spanish and go exploring in Costa Rica

Thank you to Lillian, Viki, Justin in OTN and especially Francisco Munoz Alverez for making it happen.

 It was great to have Oracle friends like Tom Kyte, Graham Wood , Shay Shmeltzer and Patanjali on board.






  Local Oracle who joined the trip, Sergio from Brasil and Mauricio from Costa Rica.










Fellow ACE Directors Sheeri and Tim Hall

And most of all the local ACEs Plinio Arbizu from Peru, Joel Perez from Venezuela and Ronald Vargas Quesada from Costa Rica. 

Everywhere we go we try to encourage the local talent to take part and share their knowledge with their neighbours.

Volunteers' Day

UKOUG only works because of its volunteers and so a very important day in our calendar is the Volunteers' Day each July where we get the opportunity to say thank you.

This year we hoped to build on previous year feedback and ensure that as well as saying thank you the day is valuable to those who attend. All of us continue to have more pressures from work, family etc on our time so it has to be a worthwhile day and not just the opportunity to have a nice meal at the end of the day.

Council member Jeremy Duggan was the MC and the man behind the event, but as always every great man needs an even greater woman behind him and in this case it was Aimee from the office. (Only joking Jeremy).

Too much time is wasted on hearing reports so Jeremy had each of us limited to a short talk, although and I know  keep going on about it, why was I limited to 10 minutes and yet Lisa got 15? (Joking again). Still it worked, the audience appreciated the quick summaries of what we had done. Fuller reports were all made available before the event, although I already see the call for us to have them as youtube clips for next year. This could be my chance for fame.


We then spent the rest of the morning in community groups followed by a great Lunch. The afternoon was given over to volunteers having the opportunity to hear about and contribute to Council Task Groups. This I thought and feedback confirms was the best part of the day. All too often we ask for input and it is the next year before volunteers see if we have listened. These task groups are working now, making decision about UKOUG works and our strategy. At the end of the day the decision was drop the community time, the volunteers work as communities already but give them more input into UKOUG working.

He may not have liked it but those attending decided Jeremy did a great job an hired him again for next year and he agreed subject to Aimee being on board.

And of course we finished off the day with a great dinner, chat and putting the world to rights over a few glasses of red wine.

Just to confirm it as the badge says, we love our Volunteers' Thank You

Oracle Academy and UKOUG - a great team

Back in January I wrote about the Oracle Academy coming to the UK, or specifically coming to Oracle Scotland.

At the OUG Conference last week the Director responsible for this initiative Caroline Stuart gave us an update on how this initiative is working and I was very excited by it. I want to encourage people into IT careers, I think Oracle is a great discipline to work with.

I often say I am not particularly worried about the 'Women in IT' question but just last week before this update, I was speaking with Sarah Lamb founder of GirlGeekDinners about how to encourage more girls into IT initially and think this program which covers not just university by which time the inequality has already started but also colleges and especially 6th Forms, has the opportunity to help address the balance.

So the Oracle Academy in Scotland has signed up 150 instructors to qualify to teach Database Design and Programming with SQL and another 50 for Java Fundamentals. Of these 200, who have almost completed their 10 week virtual training, 98 are from the UK, the rest from the wider EMEA. Their next step is a weeks bootcamp in Scotland next month.

This is fantastic, well done Oracle I know our next generation of IT students will benefit, but I want to reach out to them from the user group, help them see how what they learn is used and the types of careers people using these skills have gone on to develop.

So working with Oracle, we will talk to these Oracle Academy delegates at the start of their bootcamp, tell them about UKOUG and invite them each to attend a day at our annual conference in Birmingham in December. We will also work out a way of them being able to bring their students at cost price to experience the world they will by then have started to learn about.

I'm also looking at how we can link up our partner members with these educators, so they can share their expectations and make sure the students who ultimately benefit from this Oracle Academy initiative get the best possible start in their careers. Perhaps in years to come they like me will be able to say 'I love my job'.

OUG Scotland - another Great Day

Last Wednesday I had the  privilege of attending the 9th Annual conference for our Scottish Community. It was held in Oracle's Linlithgow building and I must thank Oracle for allowing us again the use of this, especially as the area we used had not been out of commission for several months and had to be cleaned just for us.

The evening before there was a dinner for speakers and volunteers which I am afraid I missed as I didn't travel till the next day, but it was a lovely idea to say thankyou to all those who helped make it such a great event.

Smiles from the UKOUG Staff

The actual day for me, and for some others of the UKOUG staff was a really early start as we travelled up to Edinburgh on a disgustingly early flight, but even at 6am they were all smiles. A great welcome awaited us with bacon and sausage rolls and breakfast pastries. I have to say the catering was fantatsic all day.

Everyone was looking forward to a great day, with a great agenda when the Fire Alarm want off. So out we all went and luckily, unlike London that day the sun was shining so it wasn't too bad, and for all those of you who say the networking time is the best part about these days well we added more and everyone took up the opportunity.

Even Tom Kyte had to go out for the Fire Alarm

The Team get ready to kick off

Once the excitement of this additional 'session' passed we re-entered the building and calmly the UKOUG and the committee re-cut the plenary sessions so that we could recover as much time as possible. Peter Robson, The Council Member responsible for Scotland started and was followed by Thomas Preslie the Scotland Community Chairman. Caroline Stuart spoke for Scotland and she talked about the Oracle Academy coming to Scotland next month and I have an exciting post about that coming up. And then our keynote speaker, the ever popular Tom Kyte.

My presentation was after the afternoon coffee and I had a presenters' nightmare. I was late for my session a misunderstanding over the revised timetable. One of my audience came out to get me, I was horrified. Luckily I had already set my PC up before the break and I was ready to go, but this was a new presentation for me on the various ways to Tailor Fusion Applications. Luckily the ACE Fusion Advocates program gives us fantastic training and I was I think able to pull it off, and as ever my measure of success is the questions I get and they were good. The worse thing about starting on the back foot was not knowing when the session was due to finish.

The agenda was a full 6 tracks with excellent content. As well as Tom Kyte from the US we had other overseas speakers from France, Finland, Slovenia and Holland. We had great speakers from all over the UK but more importantly we had local speakers and local customer case studies, the committee got the balance just right and I must thank them for this. 

The day finished we a social event and I personally deposited the last 6 delegates back safely in Edinburgh, as I went to my hotel for another early start back to London the next day. However the excitement wasn't over, my hotel was also home for the night to the Olympic Torch entourage. I felt quite special, and certainly safe, there was a big police presence; but I also felt quite sorry for them , they thought they were part of the most important event in Edinburgh that day........................but we know different.

Oracle Cloud Webinar - my thoughts and a warning

Oracle put on quite a show last night, or at least the pre event hype suggested it. The Oracle marketing machine which I greatly admire went into overdrive and Larry even joined twitter. The event, a live webcast (but available for replay) was to talk about their Cloud and Support offerings.

I am not sure I learnt anything, but I did see a cool demo from the boss himself of  Vitrue one of the latest acquisitions (coming thick and fast at the moment).

Larry talked about all of the Cloud Offerings at Oracle Open World 2011, he did a great job, wove a really integrated story and did the demo himself. I was really impressed. Most wasn’t available then but that is what OOW is about, the roadmap, what are they working on, it was good. There was something for everyone, from the database to the applications, the hardware to the new and exciting social tools.

So last night I expected to hear more were available, but I think all I heard new was that Oracle are now using Fusion CRM, “we eat our own dog food and it tastes great”, and a new to Oracle buzzword of Social Relationship Management.

Read blogs (this is a good one) about what was said at the OOW11, and compare with the press release from yesterday.

So why did yesterday happen? I am sure there were reasons, kick start their new Financial Year, answer questions of their critics or just show off the new toy, but to me there was a horrible feeling of déjà vu. Their Cloud offerings sound fantastic, their Fusion Applications are fantastic, but after the enforced quiet period (6 of the 7 years Larry referred to last night), we had over a year of hype with no delivery. They were worth waiting for, but many customers looked elsewhere during that period as there was no clear availability which the competition exploited. Don’t do it again Larry, give us a timeline.

Support was what was first alluded to at the Sun Townhall in Jan 2010, so nothing new there either, but be careful, when Mark Hurd says you are paying no extra, he means than Premium Support, not the basic 22% most of us pay.

I am still uncomfortable with the American need to 'compeditor bash', I used to think it was just Larry, but the tweets last night showed yet again it is a national sport. We British are just too nice.

 

I doubt Larry reads my blog, but it doesn’t matter, now he has the tools to understand in real time how we feel about last nights event, it was certainly fun to be part of the twitter flow, it was very busy with one notable exception.

@LarryEllison Next Tweet Please