2015 LAOTN - GUOB

Brazil, Brasil, however you spell it, I loved it, it was the warmest temperature of the tour legs.

The GUOB event was pretty good as well. Oracle was joined by David Peake and I also had the chance to speak with the local Oracle Cloud Customer Success Manager about how the local market is reacting and adopting cloud. This is great feedback for me and what I am looking for from talking to others.

I also learnt from Dana Singleterry some updates on my PaaS4SaaS PoC so I was a very happy camper.

In Brazil they speak Portuguese and although I don't speak Spanish, Portuguese sounded very foreign to me after the earlier legs.

Alex Gorbachev joined the ACE team here always a fun person. The event was held in the hotel which meant fun carried on longer.

CLOUG leg

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2015 LAOTN - First Time in Buenos Aires

On my last southern LAOTN tour we didn't go to Argentina, so this was a first for me, and a new pin for the map in my kitchen.

We caught the ferry over from Uruguay, although it was 3 hours the crossing is for across the River Plate not a sea and walked to the Hotel. Earlier that day a whale and been stranded in the harbour and was happily released, but I wish I had seen it.

Cindy and I looked into a private tour of Buenos Aires and although it rained, and rained we had a great time. I was really moved by the drive past the Malvinas monument as my father's regiment where part of the Falklands Conflict. It was interesting to hear about it from the other side.

The highlight of the tour was the cemetery and in many ways it reminded me of New Orleans lots of grandiose mausoleum structures had so much history.

There were so many beautiful tombs with ornate glass windows and some that lacked the acre and attention they deserve, but our guide explained they are thinking of charging visitors to pay for the upkeep which I approve off.

The most famous of the tombs was that of Evita Peron which attracts lots of visitors. It made me feel like I was part of history, funny as it is all just based on the musical, I never studied history. Cindy however is a history teacher so she was much better educated.

We also went to the very colourful district of La Boca which had a number of monuments dedicated to volunteer firefighters. La Boca is also famous for a football club but that doesn't interest me.

Opposite the university where the event was held was one of the most famous cafe's in Buenos Aires so we were spoilt.

 We stayed in the Hilton and they also had a conference which may well have been for white goods. Something our laundry loving Tim got excited by.





After the 1st day of the event the AROUG took us to dinner in a traditional Argentinian restaurant, who did a really good job of feeding us early (the locals eat really late) and feeding Tim, vegetarians are not common in South America.

We left after the second day and were disappointed to be fleeced by a taxi driver we had booked. I believe it is one of the world's most frequent scams and it wasn't the last time on the trip either. However it didn't spoil Argentina for me and I will happily go back, hopefully when they have better weather.

Next Stop Sau Paulo

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2015 LAOTN - AROUG

Again AROUG was a 2 day event with me only doing the first day.


And again it was held in a university but with most of the delegates being professionals.

We were joined by Kerry Osborne from the ACE Program, Dana Singleterry and Bruno Borges from Oracle and it was great to see some of the Uruguay speakers come across the river to support the event and a whole host of local speakers.


Cloud was very prevalent even the translators were 'in the cloud' and many of the audience were existing applications users and very keen to hear what is happening around the world.

This was my first rip to AROUG and yet again a very hospital group of lovely people. I will be back.

GOUG leg

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2015 LAOTN - Fun in Montevideo

I arrived in Uruguay mid morning and was met by Daniel from the user group. I love Facebook, we first met 4 years ago on my last visit and although he doesn't have the best english it was as if it was yesterday. 


After a quick freshen up it was time to meet Ronald Bradford and his wife Cindy, it was great to catch up with Cindy who is expecting their first baby, I even went to their wedding.




We went to the home of Edelweiss and Nelson who run the UYOUG and we walked around the local street market. I was amazed at the colours and size of the fruits in what is their winter.

Then it was off for a great dinner with great friends.





The next day, Daniel and Pablo took the three of us to Colonia about 2 hours drive down the coast. It was a wonderful old city with lots of things to see and we had a really relaxed day.



It is mainly old cobbled streets around a ruined fortress full of quaint little shops and tea rooms. IT made me think of Cuba with lots of old cars parked, but each one was a table setting.




My favourite thing was the lighthouse, we all climbed to mid way and then Daniel and Pablo joined me at the very top.






We were very tired when we got back to the city and were quite pleased when Nelson and Edelweiss decided on a simple pizza feast  in their flat over looking the coast. Heaven.

The conference was two days and after day one all the speakers which included 3 from Argentina and Mike Dietrich and Tim Hall who arrived Sunday, had a great dinner in a fantastic restaurant as guests of UYOUG, Nelson, Edelweiss, Daniel, Pablo and Bruno.

I wasn't needed for day two where there were a few master classes so Cindy and I had a lazy morning and after lunch with everyone we went up the City Hall for a fantastic view of the City. Although my favourite view is this building right next to the hotel.

I love Uruguay and look forward to visiting it and friends again one day, their hospitality is wonderful.

Next Stop Buenos Aires

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2015 LAOTN - UYOUG

This is a wonderful user group with the most amazing hospitality.

The event was over two days in a local university. Day one was sessions and day two was workshops. 

No one wants an Apps workshop so I had the second day off, which I enjoyed. 

I did pop in to see a Q&A session with Tim Hall, Mike Dietrich and Ronald Bradford. If you can get an audience engaged Q&As are one of the best ways to get the most out of a conference. There were interpreters and this meant that neither the audience or the speakers were hampered by language.

One the first day I gave my two sessions and was really pleased with the audience size. It was good to have some questions and the mood has defiantly moved to this 'Cloud is real'.

Tim, Ronald and I were the only ACEs on tour, although that is not quite true, two almost locals also attended, Gustavo Gonzalez from Argentina and Alex Zaballa from Brazil who was a promoted to ACE Director that very week. Congratulations Alex.

Mike Dietrich from the Oracle Upgrades Team also joined us and the local speakers. Pablo Ciccarello from OTN kicked off the event.

Thank you to the UYOUG team, Nelson, Edelweiss, Bruno, Pablo and Daniel thank you for being such wonderful hosts and kicking off the most amazing tour.

AROUG leg

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2015 LAOTN -

A few weeks ago I said I was on the Latin America OTN Tour and now it is time to tell you all about it.

I did intend to blog as we went through the tour but I am always distracted by other things and trying to juggle the day job and UKOUG. However putting me to shame was my fellow traveller Tim Hall who appears to have done nothing else. If you have read all his blogs you will probably just find mine more of the same, just more interesting (and less technical).

I have written it all as a series of short posts, either read it from the bottom up (chronological order) , starting with this post, or as the events:

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

Then the travelogue:

Making the most of the travel although it was not all plain sailing but the after tour trip to Machu Picchu made up for it all - almost.

And finally the Summary, was it worth it?

Happy Reading :)

Going For Gold - Please Vote for Certus

Last year when I joined Certus I asked you to vote for them for the UKOUG partner awards, they were nominated for Cloud (Fusion) and Training. 

Certus won gold in both and well deserved, they have implemented more Cloud Applications than any other single partner in the UK, and deliver most of the HCM Training in EMEA for Oracle University, Oracle Alliance & Channels and independent training.

This year we are looking for your votes again, but also in a couple of other categories.

Cloud Applications (Fusion): 

We have another few customers live both HCM and Taleo and a few more in implementation phase. Our last customer to go live JT Global, have spoken at UKOUG and where on a panel at the Oracle Modern Applications Day. At OOW they will again tell their story and are being showcased as best practice in the midsize community, which is why we are nominated for the 

SME Community

This is a sweet spot for us, the Cloud Market is opening up Oracle Applications for the first time. This is something I have written about both in my own blog and for the HR Aspects Magazine, and why we created engage HCM for Midsize.

Training:

This is still a big part of what we do, and interestingly when we are training what would be our competitors they often come back to us. Tim Warner recently trained a competitors customer in the US because the competitor recognised we were the best.

Emerging Products

Last OOW Larry Elison announced PaaS4SaaS the answer to extending Fusion Applications. We have delved deeply into this, how does it work, does it do what our customers will need and does it make sense? I was asked to write about this in Profit Magazine and our PoC has been held up by many areas within Oracle as best practice. We won an Oracle Knowledge sharing award for this in EMEA and you can download the paper from our website. Oracle announced more in PaaS in June and we are working with Oracle Development to repeat the PoC with the announced Application Builder Cloud service with the intention of having a new white paper to be discussed at OOW

The latest Oracle Scene has two pages showcasing some of the things we have been doing. Certus is defiantly where it is happening, our team is growing along side our portfolio and it isn’t hype. 

If you think its impressive please vote for us