Next Up Latin America (Again)

One of the wonderful advantages of the Oracle Ace Program is that at ACE Director level you can apply for funding to take part in speaking opportunities overseas. The best of these are the organised ACE Tours, were usergoups in a region arrange their events in a time frame that allows a group of ACE Directors to travel together and cover several events in one trip.

They are hard work, for the speakers who have a lot of travel to do, and juggle their day job, but even more so for the individual who co-ordinates them, bringing together the local user groups, local speakers, Oracle speakers and the ACE program.

On of the most established tours is the Latin America Tour, or should I say tours. It is now so successful that the tour has to be split as it takes almost a month to work its way through the continent. This is arranged by Francisco Muñoz who is the President of the Chile Usergroup, despite living and working in Australia. He now has plenty of help locally from Nelson Calero from Uruguay.

The first Latin America tour, now know as LAOTN was in 2010, and I first took part in 2011, In 2012 it split into two and I did the Northern Leg , I skipped Latin America in 2013 (doing Australia & South Africa instead) but last year I was back again. This year I am doing the Southern Tour, many of the places I visited on my first tour plus Argentina where I have never been before.

• 3/4 August  Urugauy          UYOUG  
• 5/6 August  Agentina         AROUG
• 8 August     Brazil              GUOB
• 10 August   Chile               CLOUG
• 12 August    Peru               PEOUG

I am speaking on Cloud Apps Maturity and PaaS4SaaS, so I will be in my element. I will be travelling with old friends and making new friends, it will be great fun.

Almost Too Technical

I bet you saw the title and thought I was talking about myself, well I wasn't, I was talking about the recent UKOUG ERP Community Applications Innovation Day held in London.

This was the 2nd of three events where the relevant SIGs came together to look at what opportunities there are to move forward with their applications. The first event was the HCM Community Applications Innovation Day at the end of May and this was a great success with this article in Oracle Scene telling you why? The day was exclusively around Cloud HCM and very well received.

Anyway back to ERP, and the volunteers for the event, taken from the SIG committees, decided on a wider remit. I have to admit I was a little concerned, they asked for an APEX session, and then also selected a PaaS and a Cloud Extensions session, as well as cloud presentations. The agenda looked really random and wide to me, but we worked hard on the marketing to ensure that those attending knew what to expect.

Julie Stringfellow

At the HCM Day we had 3 customer case studies, which I know is what SIGs love best, but ERP Cloud is behind HCM on the adoption curve, although there are lots of organisations currently implementing there are very few references today, but this will change quickly. That meant we had a lot of Oracle sessions, but I still wanted a customer to endorse what they were saying. I approached Julie Stringfellow of Reading Borough Council, who has been live on ERP Cloud for quite a while now but she was unavailable for the whole day, however she did say she would pop in if she could be first on.

Julie talked about the benefits Cloud had brought Reading, and why she thought people should consider this.

Alex Nuijten

Next Up was Alex Nuijten from Ordina in The Netherlands talking APEX with EBS. Alex is an APEX ACE Director and last year I asked him to speak in Liverpool on this subject. He said yes and then looked at EBS for the very first time. He has since given the presentation at several events around Europe and every time he gets new questions.

Adil Khan

Next up was Adil Khan, FulcrumWay who came from the US and talked about moving to a role based security in EBS, which is the way security is also handled in the Cloud.

Adil had lots of questions too, as many in the audience have used the traditional EBS security model for many years and it takes a little bit of unlearning before this concept makes sense.

Adrian Griffiths

At the Oracle Modern Business Applications Day in May, KPMG had people turned away from this session on what the Cloud meant for Finance, so I was really pleased to be able to have Adrian Griffiths come along to this session.

Liam Nolan

One of the great things about Cloud is the continuous innovation with updates twice a year. Liam Nolan who is no stranger to UKOUG was on hand to tell us what is new in the next release of ERP. Whilst none of the audience has yet to move to cloud they are a pretty knowledgeable lot, their communities within UKOUG have a watching brief on Cloud.

Tracy Bishop

Another great favourite with this community is Tracy Bishop and she came along to give a demo on Accounting Hub Reporting, the cloud service that sits above an on premise ERP system and gives you the amazing essbase and analytics reporting that are embedded in the ERP Cloud. This is a product I think that along with Planning Cloud, every ERP customer should be looking seriously at.

Peter care

Next up was Peter Care from FXLoader. Peter has a product that looks after the maintenance of your foreign exchange rates. He has developed this to work with ERP Cloud as well and here has used PaaS4SaaS and even got his product listed on the Oracle MarketPlace.

This tied in very nicely with the presentation from Alex as the development tool here is APEX. This was not a direct product pitch as Peter was sharing how he did it, rather than what it did.

Peter and I have given #PaaS4SaaS sessions along side each other at a few events recently, my session is looking at extending SaaS rather than feeding into it as Peter's does. I hope I will get to present mine at the next Apps Innovation Day as well as at APPS15.

Richard Bingham

Finally was old favourite Richard Bingham, who talked about how we could extend Cloud Apps. The content was great but I was frustrated about how many times Richard said customised. It isn't his fault, Oracle are using the term when changing artefacts in the Cloud, but the traditional concept of customisation is NOT allowed. There is a lot of ways to tailor and I will continue to push those subtle differences.


It was a great day, and as I mentioned at the start of this blog, much more technical than I expected, but the audience were very engaged and I was able to relate back to what Julie had said about their experience of Cloud, at every stage so the story did come together.

The final in this series of 3 is the Tech Community Applications Innovation Day  on 6th October, where the agenda's of the co-located Apps Server and Development SIGs will have a third tangent looking at how their disciplines can add innovation to Applications.

Digital Disruption - Catching Up With A Legend - Ray Wang

Over the years I have spoken to many analysts about what Oracle are doing and what that means to their users.

Some analysts are just about the figures and that is also important but those that dig into the impacts on users are my kind of people, and top of my list are Ray Wang and Den Howlett. Interestingly on the surface they seem very different but both really care and are real gentlemen. 

Ray and Den also are both experts in the area of digital disruption. Something I have been thinking about recently in our Oracle World, Customers, Users, Usergroups etc. My latest article appeared in the current OTech Magazine

Me, Ray and Craig Dale (SAP User Group)

Ray Wang never stands still, literally and even if he is at an event he swops in and swoops out and it is so easy to miss him, although a few years ago we did play truant at Oracle Open World to go try out the local doughnuts.

Ray is part of Constellation Research and in 2011 I was honoured to be asked to join them as a user advocate, and my main role has been with their annual supernova awards where I am a judge and advocate.

Ray has written an excellent book on Digital Disruption and is currently on a tour promoting this. recently he was in London and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to met up with him.

The event was not just some learnings from and promotion of his book, he also had some round tables looking at how this was affecting the business we do today.



Not only was it a great chance to catch up with Ray but with other people who appreciate his unique take on the technology world from a user perspective. Craig Doyle from the UK SAP Usergroup was there plus Mike Simons editor of Computerworld UK.

This year Oracle Open World is much later and I will be able to attend the Constellation Event - Connected Enterprise the following week, more quality time to hear from Ray and many other experts on the wider world of technology. 

Follow Ray (and Den) on twitter to keep up with them.

2015 KSCOPE - PaaS4SaaS

Earlier this year I wrote about our PaaS4SaaS proof of concept and the white paper I wrote and I gave this presentation at Kscope.

I submitted it for the Editor's Choice Award for which I got a T shirt with a great quotation from the Dalai Lama “Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.” 

What is interesting is that our customers and other users have discussed with us what they might need in PaaS and to date we have been able to do whatever they need by clever configuration of the SaaS, but this will come once people understand what PaaS delivers. There is always a gap between launch and mass takeup of technology. Something that Den Howlett talks about in his write up.

I once wrote a paper on the use of Fusion Middleware (the development tools now available in PaaS), and at the time the conclusion was, those adopting were doing old things with new technology, but that has changed and now it is about the cloud lowering the barriers to entry.

Whilst Kscope was on Oracle announced their next wave of PaaS including Application Builder Cloud Services which were previewed by Product Manager Brian Fry at the Kscope event. Our development partner, eProseed, were there and Lonneke Dikmans was very enthusiastic about the opportunities and we talked about how we could perhaps repeat our proof of concept prior to OOW.

Sue Duncan one of the Oracel Product Managers based in the UK and a great friend of UKOUG arranged for me to meet with Brian and share our stories. We know hope to work together on this and present back hopefully at OOW.

This is a really exciting area to be in at the start of, I have several articles published along with the white paper and I hope that ABCS will make it even easier to extend Cloud Applications with the same rich user experience as the Applications themselves. After all we wouldn't just add a generic roof rack to a Rolls Royce, simply because it does the job.

I'm not knocking other forms of PaaS, in the APEX blog I said I would use it where it made sense, and there have been some great examples of PaaS being used for data collection and processing prior to being loaded into Cloud Applications. 

The Oracle UX team recently wrote about PaaS4SaaS and I had a few mentions in that too, and the A&C SOA team released this video (not sure about the dog at the end).

Constellation Research, Diginomica & Market Realist opinion on announcements

Back to main 2015 Kscope page

2015 KSCOPE - Always on Duty - UKOUG

I mentioned that this was a work based conference for me, funded by my employer, but our worlds all  run into one and I am of course representing UKOUG in all I do.

There were no formal user group meetings at Kscope, but on the Saturday, Mary Lou Dopart from Oracle who is responsible for the umbrella organisation IOUC, attended the Community Service Event and we spent a long time exploring what user groups could do around catering for the growing number of Cloud Application users. Look out for news over the coming months.

The Kscope Board who I know from my own experience, hardly have time to breath at conference, held an informal reception for visiting user group leaders on the Sunday evening, and it is always great to catch up with friends and share ideas.

Kscope does Hyperion, from Financial Close through Essbase and all the applications really well, and I am always keen to see how we can replicate that in our own Hyperion community. I spent time with one of our volunteers exploring this and with Rich Wilkie the keynote speaker from our event the week before. Both agreed the London Event was as step in the right direction.

I also talked to several Product Managers about what they have planned for UKOUG this December and I know we are going to have a great conference.

I mentioned it earlier, the gamification of Kscope with the UX Scavenger Hunt and I met with that team as the intention is to have its second outing at UKOUG, should be fun.

I also met with the wider UX team about their content in December, there is always so much support from this fun team and I'm looking forward to agenda launch to share some of it with you. Keep up with how our planning is going at www.ukoug.org/conferences2015

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2015 KSCOPE - The Day Job (still loving it)

Certus Solutions, my employer recognise much of my value is from understanding the technology, and we agreed Kscope is where I should attend, but you can't just take a week off work. Kscope is not funded by OTN, this was a Certus investment.

We are working on a number of bids at the moment, life is really exciting, the Cloud Applications market is really taking off.  One of these bids was coming to it's final days and I was part of the bid team. I know many people who would have had to cancel a trip, but we discussed it and I was confident I could do my bit from Florida.

I answered lots of questions they had asked on the flight over, good use of some of the 10 hours, and put together some words for the final presentation. I worked all Sunday both US and UK time and then did the final QA of the bid when the UK closed on Monday, working 6 hours straight.

I loved it, this is such an amazing opportunity and things are going really well.

I also talked to the UX team about how Certus Customers can help at OOW and our first session has already been confirmed. What Does It Take to Make Oracle HCM Cloud Work? The JT Story [CON9059]

I was also honoured to present on our PaaS4SaaS proof of concept but will cover that in a later post.

Have I mentioned, 'I love my Job' ?

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2015 KSCOPE - Women in IT and the ACE Director Program

I love the ACE Program, I love that it recognises people who share knowledge and I love the opportunities that it gives me.

I do believe the number of Women in IT is low (most sources state it between 13 - 18 %) and we need to increase that, which is why I love the Community Service this year, working with Children and STEM and the children who attended where evenly split between girls and boys.

We have had conversations in the ACE program about our representation, there are 123 ACE Directors today (including Stanley), but only 10 are female. I don't want women to be included to make up the numbers but do agree we should be seeking women who deserve recognition and  encourage them to step up for the program.

The ACE Directors who happen to be female are:

       Sheeri Cabral               MySQL

       Lonneke Dikmans       FMW

       Heli Helskyaho           Database

       Marcelle Kratochvil    Database
       Debra Lilley               Apps Tech

       Michelle Malcher       Security
       Tracy McMullen         Business Intelligence / EPM
       Gwen Shapira             Database

       Mia Urman                 FMW

You will notice that the list above is only 9. The 10th was announced at Kscope:

        Sarah Zumbrum         Business Intelligence / EPM

I was so pleased for Sarah, I have always been a fan, and championed her last year for the ODTUG Board elections. Earlier this year Sarah asked if I would champion her for ACE Director and I was really happy to. I really believed in what she did. At the time several people had approached me and it is easy to say yes when someone deserves it but less so when you are not sure, so I wrote a blog that included my thoughts on this, and Sarah has since told me she thought my final comment about Oracle not agreeing with my assessment was directed at her. It wasn't and I have to admit I did know she had been successful, but OTN asked me to stay quiet and even help them delay their response to her so they could give her the news at Kscope.

Congratulations Sarah, well deserved and and I think this picture shows it really was a surprise.

One of Sarah's first jobs was to assist in the WIT Lunch on the Wednesday, and I was honoured to be part of this event. In the planning it had been agreed to try something different and have tables discussing different topics, smaller more intimate discussions and less of a presentation. At UKOUG we are looking to do something similar this year, but over breakfast.

The main theme of everyone's thoughts was encouragement.

Encouragement from an early age, before girls have even heard of IT, at school through STEM, in the community through organisations like Girl Scouts. Encouragement through college and through recruitment, and throughout their whole career. 

Thank you KSCOPE for a fresh look at WIT and some great conversations, now we need to continue that encouragement through networking.

And talking of ODTUG and WIT, check out this great article on Kathleen, founder of YCC, the team behind ODTUG.

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