OTNTourLA 2016 - Guatemala

Oracle User Group Guatemala 

Guatemala was probably the most laid back leg of our tour. Having the event in a hotel, and then staying in that hotel means there isn't too much to worry about logistics.

We arrived mid afternoon and I took the opportunity to bank a few hours sleep. Then Tim, Alex and I went for a very nice local meal. Our hotel I am guessing was classified as an airport hotel as there were several hotels in the 2 blocks either side of ours and from the roof we could see the airport.

Unfortunately it was also an area with a lot of construction and they suggested at check-in I would prefer a high floor. What they didn't tell me was my 'penthouse pit' on the top floor was next to the elevator and directly under the jacuzzi and gyms the roof. Loud does not describe it and this is the first time I have given a 'named' hotel a BAD rating.

The translators

Anyway, the conference was very well organised and as well as ACE directors and Oracle it had attracted many speakers from Latin America; what a great testimony to a user group.

They had 3 streams in Spanish and 2 that had translation. I always worry about translation but apparently they like my 'beautiful English accent' as well!

I had 3 sessions nicely spread out, 'Is Cloud the same around the World?', 'PaaS4SaaS' and the 'Digital Disruption' session. I love this last one, people haven't really thought what a business model change Oracle and the whole eco-system is going through.

One of the other speakers who was on the tour told me afterwards that although he works for Oracle he hadn't appreciated the impact, and how much my session has given him to think about. That really encouraged me, the original idea started in a blog posting and then I was asked to expand for a OTech magazine article.

What I Came for

In the evening there was a speakers dinner that was held a golf club. Last year they were there as well and people like Heli who had attended said how much fun it was but I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. We all had a go on the driving range and some people were better than others and I think had we have had the Zacappa before the golf instead of after the dinner I may have climbed the rankings!

We had to say goodbye to Alex Zaballa who finished the tour here as well as Kamran from Azerbaijan but we will see them again soon at OOW

Tuesday was a free day, so Deiby the User group leader, his fiancé and sister, took Tim, Carlos an ACE Director originally from Mexico but long time based in the US, and I to Antigua. I had been two years ago, Cesar and his wife Amy took me, and I loved it. Cesar was at the user group event but I didn't get to see Amy again as she is expecting a baby very soon.

Antigua is a beautiful city, locked in time. We started by looking over the city, which isn't that big, from the Cerro de la Cruz. The story is the people lived by the Volcano, but when it erupted they moved into the valley. They then chose to move back but the volcano filled with rain and eventually exploded flooding the village, so they had to move again. The volcano is now known as the water volcano.

Then we had a private tour of a previously closed order of nuns in the Capuchinas Convent. It was amazing, how they lived but to me the architecture of the building and how cool it stayed despite the blistering heat. I was flagging. My favourite part was the echo chamber beneath was a courtyard of individual prayer cells formed in a circle. We were encouraged to sing, which I can't but a couple of lines of "How Great thou Art" did sound appropriate.

Tim was in heaven because they had a laundry in the convent.

No tour of anywhere can avoid the locals trying to sell you something, In both India  and China we had to endure factories, and here it was Guatemalan jade which is harder than Chinese jade.

Then we he a fantastic local meal, whilst the daily rains had their fun. Then we drove around the amazing cobbled streets looking at other landmarks and stopping for a few churches, looking at the floats for the Holy Week ceremonies, and then finished up with a little shopping to local crafts. It is no wonder that Dieby and his bride have chosen to get married in Antigua.

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P.S. If you read Tim's blog you may think I simply copied him but it isn't true. We both wrote them on the flight, which we did not sit together on, he is just quicker at publishing them. So I am getting my own back by posting this picture of him with the Laundry in the convent.

OTNTourLA 2016 - Mexico

Oracle User Group Mexico 

One of the problems of travelling with Tim Hall (there are many more) is that he always gets his blog out first, and I have to struggle to write something different. Tim described the event as a mini Oracle Open World, and that is exactly how it looked, all red and white with a central marquee that was surrounded by the breakout rooms and the main hall. 


A partner CertficaTIC had an Oracle Penguin walking around the event and at the end of the day gave away with the user group several training and certification packages for Oracle certification; an amazing initiative.

The event kicked off with the OraMex team talking about how they had grown, and to me the is the true value of these OTN Tours. It supports local user groups, brings them top speakers they wouldn't normally have locally, and encourages them to grow local talent. Many of the local region speakers on these tours would count themselves as part of this success.

After their talk, Pablo did his bit telling the OTN story and then Tim was keynote. Quite funny as I don't think he was expecting it, but he did a great job and had the audience engaged, despite the language difference. This made it so much easier for all the sessions going forward as we knew the delegates (300+) were up for a great day.

OraMex did not make the mistake of having too many sessions and that meant everyone had really good numbers for all their sessions. I was in the Cloud track, and had two sessions. The first was to be 'Upgrading to Cloud from EBS' but although my room was full, standing room only, only 2 people were Oracle Apps users. About half were students and most of the rest were people in the first stages of their career. So I changed the content, easier for me to do than some of the more technical presenters; as my sessions are more story telling and thought provoking (I hope). 

I talked about why Cloud Applications and then how in my role within Certus, spend time with customers understanding how to get the most from them, how to approach a migration and all the things you need to consider, data archiving, migrating, integrations, user adoption etc. I used Oracle and our customers as examples, and hopefully what they heard is relevant to what a career in this area is all about.

Afterwards Pablo who was taking photos as my session was closing, told me he had heard lots of really positive feedback about my session; that made me feel great.

Although it was a big event, I only had two sessions here, because there were a lot of ACE Directors at this event and as I already said a lot of fantastic local talent. My second session was my Digital Disruption session and again very easy to make it so relevant to the again packed audience. I was on such a high; I really wanted to do the PaaS session as well as the room next door was dedication to Fusion Middleware.

There was a great networking session after the event, which most people stayed to. It was really rewarding to talk to the delegates that had spent the day there and understand what they got from the day.

Most of the speakers - photo from OTN

Then it was off to a speakers' dinner, traditional Mexican food in La Destileria in the Reforma District, where all our hotels were, although traffic meant a long trip.

Photo thanks to OTN

The dinner was lovely and again the chance to speak to local user group leaders and speakers and I really want to thank Rolando Carrasco, Rene Antunez and Plinio Arbizu for their great event and hospitality.

The next day was saturday and Rene hired a car big enough for Tim Hall, Tim Gorman and Kellyn, Kuassi, Kamren and I and took us to the Teotihuacan pyramids. I went two years ago and loved it. So to go again was a real privilege and again I managed to get to the top (just). Last time I needed Hans to help me, this imd I had a nordic walking stick!

Then we finished the day with a lovely meal. I can't thank Rene enough for his hospitality.




Also see the photos taken by Pablo from OTN in Mexico


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OTNTourLA 2016 - Costa Rica

Costa Rica User Group 

This was my third user group event in Costa Rica, first in 2012 and again in 2014, on both those occasions I had the chance to explore the country, which in part made up for the fact that this was a flying visit. Arriving Tuesday afternoon, speaking Wednesday, leaving Thursday morning.

The journey to Costa Rica was quite uneventful, and it wasn’t too long in the taxi to the hotel, which felt almost like home. Both Tim and I had stayed there on previous visits. We arrived just after lunch and had a very lazy, quiet day, which included the hottest ever outdoor jacuzzi I have ever been in, matched only by the coldest pool I have ever felt despite us being in a very warm Costa Rica.

I have started to use my alarm to tell me which country I wake up in, saves that "It's Monday so it must be........." moment.

Adriana my student Helper

The next day we met up with Kamren and after breakfast made our way to the Universidad Cenfotec which hosted the conference. I am not sure of the numbers but there were 6 streams and really good session attendances. It was so well organised, and as in previous years the Costa Rica user group arranged for each speaker to have a student helper, mainly to help us with logistics and language. In the past I didn’t appreciate these enough, and this time we all took time to ensure we included them in the sessions and discussions, and I hope have encouraged them to get involved in communities and presenting to help their own careers.

My first session here was my Digital Disruption and as in Panama we had a great discussion. It was a good ice-breaker because when the audience are not native English speakers it is a big thing to ask questions, and this is a very non technical session and makes it a little easier for them. The students enjoyed this, although I am not sure they believed how basic IT (or TIC as they call it) was in my day.

Next up I gave the PaaS4SaaS again with a live ABCS demo. My audience included EBS, JDE and PeopleSoft users so I was really pleased with that. The JDE users came from Chiquita, the banana people and their concerns are around data security in the cloud so I encouraged them to attend my third session, ‘Cloud around the World'.

The User Group then took us out to dinner; we experienced their Traffic and eventually arrived at the restaurant. Those of you who know me can just imagine how much I enjoyed that, in a city where trains hit cars on the unmanned crossings every day! Not bad enough for my top 10 worst journeys but defiantly a contender for the next 10.

Tim and I had the privilege of sitting for dinner with the University TIC Facility leader and two gentlemen from CAMTIC the national body for people in digital technologies. We had a really good conversation about the importance of technology and opportunities in Costa Rica, and in return they wanted to know all about Brexit!

All too soon our trip to Costa Rica was over, thank you to everyone who made it such a great event, and us all so welcome.

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OTNTourLA 2016 - Panama

This was my second visit to OUG Panama

Their President Edgardo Sanchez was a fantastic host, I didn’t realise when I accepted his invitation to dinner on the Saturday evening I was the only person in town, but he took me with his family to Tinajas a very traditional Panamanian restaurant that included an amazing show with all the costumes and dancing indigenous to Panama.

On the Sunday Edgardo took Alexis Lopez from Columbia, his wife Clara and I to see the Panama Canal. When I was here in 2014 I missed this trip so was very keen to do it now. Edgardo works for the Panama Canal Company so the tour was the public tour, to see the locks operate etc, but also the headquarters, the amazing setting and you can’t fail to be in awe of the setup. We were also incredibly honoured as the Canal Extension; an addition canal for even bigger super ships has only been opened for less than a month.

The Panama Canal in Action

Next to went to see traditional buildings from different time periods in Panamanian history and crafts, then we finished the tour with a great meal in the marina. Half way through there was (another) thunder storm and although we did get a bit wet at our open air table the staff obviously get plenty of practice of bringing down the awning to keep out the rain, although they did have to fight the near hurricane winds accompanying it.

I can’t thank Edgardo and his family enough for their hospitality and I simply fell in love with his little daughter

The Panama Conference was held in our hotel, which was actually in a shopping mall, convenient for Tim Hall who had to do emergency shopping due to KLM thinking he didn’t need his luggage.

Since we were staying in the conference hotel, it was a quick start to the day. The event had 120 registered and 3 streams, it kicked off with a quick plenary session from Pablo Ciccarello talking about OTN and the ACE program.

Over the weekend a couple of Oracle speakers had pulled out so I volunteered to do an extra session here, which meant 4 but that isn’t an issue, once you are at an event you may as well be contributing all you can.

My first presentation was “what to consider for an move to Cloud Apps” and in the audience I had several people from the Panama Canal Company who are big EBS customers and several PeopleSoft customers, so it was great for me, and quite interactive. This is what I love most about the opportunity to present worldwide is the opportunity to hear what organisations are thinking and doing. The Panama Canal Company are also implementing Hyperion Planning, so I was able to include a discussion on how essbase is embedded into Cloud ERP.

Next up was my presentation on “Digital Disruption and what that means to the Oracle Economy’ - people think they know all this but when you start the discussion and look at all the changes in what they are doing the discussion always brings up new examples, I can add to the next presentation.

My third presentation was on PaaS4SaaS and I think I am going to have to either split this into two or severely cull some of it. When I presented it for the first time at Collaborate 2015, I had our Proof of Concept from January 2015 to share. Since then I have that story as it has extended, improvements made by Oracle in the integration and then here in Panama I for the first time did a live demo of Application Builder Cloud Services. Just an hour having presented my findings to the Product Development and Management teams in Oracle over a webcast at lunchtime. 

In the penultimate time slot there was a session entitled “Cloud HCM’ from a local partner. I knew it was in Spanish but thought it would be great to see how it is positioned locally. After just a few minutes I realised it was a presentation (and very salesy) on Taleo, which as I have explained myself if Oracle HCM, but not the original Fusion application I was expecting. Perhaps I should read my own blogs.

I was to present ‘What’s the Weather Like Where you Are? Are Cloud Apps the same the world over?” in the last slot but the timings for the day had progressively lost synchronisation with the agenda, and that combined with an Oracle session that for some reason waiting 20 minutes before starting, meant there was no audience left to present to. Never mind, 3 was defiantly enough and I had a great day.

After a very long day, Edgardo invited us to dinner again but Tim, Karmen and I had a fairly early flight to Costa Rica, and politely declined.

Thank you to everyone in the Panama Oracle User Group for making us so welcome, and kicking off the OTN Tour Latin America so well.

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OTNTourLA - Before we started

First stop on the tour was Panama, and I took the opportunity to go a few days earlier and mix business with pleasure and go diving.

I wanted to dive in two oceans in one day, however their rainy seasons has over run and that means rivers are running into the ocean and bringing lots of mud with it. This creates poorer visibility but I don't care, I live in N Ireland and seeing my fingers means good visibility sometimes.

This poorer visibility meant that the Caribbean side of Panama was the only side worth diving in. I found an amazing PADI dive shop online (Panama Divers) who came and collected me, took me on two dives on Friday, I stayed in their on site hotel, did two more dives the next day, despite the lack of sleep from the constant rain on the tin roof, and then took me back to Panama City.

The first two dives were all about the number of lobsters on the reef, both dives were about 50 feet not nothing too taxing, only a gentle current and for me very acceptable viz. I wore a 2mm wetsuit, much better than the previous weekend in N Ireland when I wore 2 (yes TWO) 7mm wetsuits. The water was for me a great temperature.

My favourite sponge of the day

What I loved best about these two dives was the amazing ocean structures, especially the sponges, every one is unique and these are living creatures.

That rain I mentioned, well I honestly thought it was going to stop the diving on say two, but no we still did.

I found a Moray eel, there was a sting ray a few feet away from us, and some amazing fish, including the biggest Parrot fish I have ever seen.

I also went to see a wreck of a twin engined aircraft close to Drake's Island, the resting place of Sir Frances Drake, although the locals call him a Pirate. 



Between dives we sailed past the remains of the old fort, that protected them from these pirates.



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OTN Latin America Tour 2016

I hope you followed us on twitter with the hashtag #OTNTourLA.

This is my 5th Latin America Tour, I am so privileged to have those opportunities, an employer who sees the value and no family at home to moan about me being away.

The OTN Tour in Latin America is split between North and South, and full details (in Spanish) are on the OTN site. The OTN Latin America Community is run by Pablo Ciccarello.  If you follow each link you can also find Pablo's photos from each event.


This year I am on the North Tour, I did this tour previously in 2014 and in 2012


August
Before it even started
1st       Panama 
3rd       Costa Rica
5th       Mexico
8th       Guatemala
The journey to Colombia
11/12   Colombia 

Enjoying Colombia

The Long Trek Home    

A few statistics:  13 flights, 40+ flying hours,15,839 miles flown, 8 hotels.

As well as local speakers ORACLE ACE Directors: Tim Gorman(USA), Tim Hall (UK), Osama Mustafa (Jordania), Alex Zaballa(Brasil), Debra Lilley(UK) did various parts of the tour, although only Tim and I did the whole tour.

This happens because the co-ordinators Nelson Calero and Gustavo Gonzalez create the tours so a big thank you to them. Also thank you to the individual user groups and especially to OTN and Jennifer, who fund our travel. 

Thank you for all your help and support.

First Thoughts on Application Builder Cloud Services - another PaaS4SaaS

If you are a regular reader of my blog you will know that I am on a mission to use PaaS to extend the SaaS HCM & ERP applications, and now I am finally getting to play with ABCS

A year ago I was excited about a new Oracle offering Application Builder Cloud Service, a PaaS offering for the Citizen Developer. This should heave been just what I need, no development skills – remember ‘I’m not technical’ and connected to SaaS, Oracle Cloud (or Fusion) apps.

I saw my first demo at Kscope15 and my thoughts at that time were:

• This is a totally new product, developed, I hope, specifically for building simple extensions to SaaS
• How will this connect to SaaS when I have the lack of APIs highlighted as a constraint for Java Cloud Services?

However I volunteered to repeat the Proof of Concept I had for PaaS4SaaS that used JCS. A few weeks later my suspicions were confirmed, it was working with CX but not HCM & ERP. This is not the fault of the ABCS team, the APIs needed to come from apps development.

When we got to Oracle Open World, in the ACE briefings, this was still being ‘sold’ as PaaS4SaaS, rather than PaaS4CX. This annoyed me, it showed a lot of promise but simply didn’t work with my SaaS, the HCM & ERP. The ACE briefings should be about discussing with technical experts (my ACE colleagues), where Oracle are and where they are going. This is not the arena for marketing.

However this year in June OTN bought the ACE Directors together again for a PaaS Developer Challenge, and in an update at that event it was announced that ABCS was in beta testing for HCM. I was excited at this prospect especially when it was explained that it was because there are now REST APIs from HCM, but rather disappointed that I hadn’t been asked to be part of the beta program, I guess in my inflated opinion of myself I thought I would be an obvious choice.

Anyway I soon got that resolved and got a trial version of ABCS. Thanks again to OTN the trial is being extended, so I can build demos and include them in my presentations. 

The APIs are in controlled release, I was told there was a patch that was needed and I raised an SR for this, to be told they were standard in Release 11, and the patch was only valid for Release 10. As Certus beta test Cloud HCM (&ERP) for Oracle we were already on R11. 

By this time it was Kscope16, exactly a year after I first heard of ABCS, and I attended a 'hands on lab' session to build a stand alone (not integrated) ABCS application. My honest belief was this isn’t a Citizen Developer, you do need to understand a few basic concepts, but these can be fixed with some kind of training. There are some youtube videos and documents and I think that a simple sample application and perhaps a script to replicate the 'hands on lab’ would help even more.

ABCS is simple to create your own apps

I arranged to spend a day with Oracle in the UK replicating the PoC and was very excited. Susan Duncan in the Product Management Team and I sat down and started. The first problem was that although I had the APIs they were not authorised (or rather switched on). 

Thanks Oracle Support, when I raised my initial SR to have the patch applied, was it not obvious I wanted to use the APIs? Telling me they were already there at R11, does not make them available, at this stage they should have told me I needed a business justification to be included in the controlled release, but no, I had to raise another SR to get that information!

Very Simple to create screens based on custom objects

However Susan had access to the APIs on a sales demo system so we were able to start our testing. Neither of us really knew how to use ABCS with apps, but with a bit of trial and error we did find our way around and create a simple record we wanted to populate. Two of the fields needed to come from HCM, which in the original PoC we had to extract using BI Publisher and populate in JCS periodically. Now using the API the list of values came direct from HCM. 

SUCCESS, this is a big step forward. 

The LOV comes from Cloud HCM, via the new EMP API

However, whilst we could select a record from HCM we could not save it in ABCS, this is because the rowid in HCM (&ERP) is alpha numeric and in CX it is numeric. Not a big issue to fix, and the next patch (the beauty of the Cloud) will fix it for everyone. Thanks to the UK developers who were able to tell me this straight away and save time.

What I really, really like is the UI. ABCS offers either a SaaS or an Alta UI. The SaaS UI really does look like SaaS, which means my extensions will not be obvious to the standard SaaS user. This is a fundamental objective for any extension that Certus delivers to customers. 

There were a couple of things in this current release that disappointed me: 

• There is a wizard that builds your objects in ABCS. As you follow it, it creates a view, an edit and a create page. If you edit after the wizard you are editing just one of the three pages. This is a different UX to what we have in SaaS, the pages behave differently. However it doesn’t detract from the functionality.

• There is a concept of Save & Continue, which allows you to edit a record you have just created. This is set up by the wizard and in most use cases I can think off we would want to add another record in a data entry mode. Product development tell me I can do what I want through editing, but not via the wizard. Again a different behaviour. 

I am very excited about moving this forward. This week I have presented to the development and product management teams and am confident that like the error, things will move quickly, this is the beauty of cloud. I said I had shown this to colleagues and to our development partners at eProseed. In fact Luc from eProseed has also been testing ABCS from a stand alone perspective and together we will find more and more ways to exploit this. 

And yesterday whilst on the OTN tour of Latin America I gave my first live demo of ABCS!

I am positive as I use more and more of this it will become easier and I do see lots of opportunities for us to use this especially during implementation projects, and for simple customer requirements. The JCS option adding the processing, integration, document storage and mobile clouds as needed is still the answer for more complex extensions, and the APIs are available to any of these options.