Monthly Archives: October 2022

Oracle CloudWorld Day 3

Posted on by Standard 2

If you missed my day 2, you can view it here.

Keynote: Driving Impactful Business Results

So my day 3 was actual the first proper day of the conference. I was already registered, so I had breakfast in the Caesars Forum as I passed through this building from the monorail to the Venetian where all the keynotes were. There was a long queue to get into the first keynote.

However, the queue was moving and it wasn’t long before I was in where I headed for the front and managed to find a seat spare.

It was a full house as you can see in the video on my twitter feed.

It was then time for keynote to start and Safra Catz the CEO of Oracle to make an entrance which was done in spectacular style.

Safra was first met on stage by Jensen Huang from Nvidia, who talked about how to accelerate workloads, whilst using less resources and costing less by using AI in the Oracle Cloud

Next was Gordon Mackechnie from Deutsche Bank talking about increasing demand, innovation, governance and scaling Mission Critical systems using Oracle Cloud

Next was Raul Obregón Servitje from Grupo Bimbo talking about their cloud first strategy and their ERP on-premises to SaaS Fusion in the Oracle Cloud journey

Next was Diane Schwarz CIO of Johnson Controls, a 137 year-old company. She talked about their Digital Transformation journey, reducing Tech Debt, Cloud First using Oracle Cloud for their ERP on SaaS Fusion. She spoke about the need to not embark on this journey alone, saying how she had spoken to other CIOs and the requirement for strong governance and leadership. She left with a saying “She who goes alone, goes fast. She who goes together, goes further”.

Next was Mike Macrie CIO and Lee Tsukroff CFO from Melissa & Doug, no. 1 toy brand in US talking about innovation, moving to professional back-end ERP Fusion so they can focus on what they are best at, making toys.

Final keynote speaker was Christian Horner, Team Principal of Red Bull Racing F1. He mentioned how airport immigration had recognised him but not his wife Geri Halliwell, hence how popular Formula 1 had become. He talked about how Red Bull are building their own engine using power of Oracle Cloud OCI, to do millions of simulations per second of fluid dynamics to get the most efficient design. And how they using a competitor’s engine would result at being second best, so they had to build their own as Honda pulls out of building engines.

Oracle Database Directions

After the keynote I headed to Andy Mendelsohn, Executive Vice President of Oracle Database Server Technologies. He talked about converged Oracle database, Oracle Autonomous database and talked about the new Oracle Database Service for Azure. One key point, he alluded to happen next year was the partnership with AWS to interconnect the Clouds together, just like the Oracle Azure interconnect. Watch this space!

Keynote: Solving the Most Complex Problems Across Industries

This was Larry Ellison, the chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle keynote.

He shared how we can take some of the most complex problems across entire industries with the right technology and strategy. Oracle had brought Cerner, more details here, and largely this keynote was talking about the challenges in the medical industry and how Oracle using technology can, with Cerner, resolve complex problems like the sharing of medical records, tracking of covid vaccines and providing systems to medical professionals to do their jobs easier.

Migrating VMware Workloads to the Cloud

Ray Kalmbach from Oracle and Troy Ligon from InComm Payments talked about how to migrate VMware workloads to the Oracle Cloud using Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS), more details here.

They explained how you can create a VMware ESXi cluster using OCI bare metal compute in the Oracle Cloud. Effectively extending your VMware from on-premises to Oracle Cloud. Allowing your Virtual Machines (VMs), to be migrated from on-premises to Oracle Cloud with a simple vMotion action. Then those VMs can be complimented with other OCI services, and then eventually go Cloud native if desired.

Oracle Database, What’s New, What’s Next

Jenny Tsai-Smith and Dominic Giles spoke about Oracle Database, What’s New, What’s Next. Explaining that Oracle Database 23c was the next long term support release, code name App Simple. Accelerating Oracle’s mission to make it simple to develop and run all data-driven apps. Oracle 23c is sum of 21c and 23c with 300+ new features and enhancements, with key focus on JSON, Graph, Microservices and Developer Productivity.

Also announced was:

One year of waived extended support for Oracle 19c, more details here from my colleague Paul.

Monthly Recommended Patches to replace Release Update Revisions, more details here.

Apex 22.2, more details here.

Golden Gate Free, but limited to 20GB, so useful for Database XE, more details here.

Arm Support, couldn’t find any more info on this.

MongoDB compatible API, more details here.

Tomorrow will be day 2 of the conference. Looking forward to it 👍🏽

You can view my day 4 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

Oracle CloudWorld Day 2

Posted on by Standard 2

If you missed my day 1, you can view it here.

So day 2 was registering for Oracle CloudWorld, then attending the Oracle Partner Success Summit in the afternoon and Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event in the evening.

Registering for Oracle CloudWorld

The morning was spent blogging about day 0 and then come midday, I went to Caesars Forum for registration for Oracle CloudWorld. Caesars Forum is a new building, which was pretty modern and grand. Upon arrival, I could already start to see the Oracle CloudWorld branding. It certainly had the redwood theme but the blue was a bit odd compared to the traditional Oracle red or the more recent modern redwood theme. It later transpired the blue was due to the global sponsor Deloitte, which made sense.

You could actually register at the Venetian or the Caesars Forum, the majority were registering at the Venetian with long queues. Whereas Caesars was much quieter and it made sense for me to register here as the Oracle Partner Success Summit was here at 1pm.

I registered within minutes allowing me good time to head to the Oracle Partner Success Summit.

Oracle Partner Success Summit

So I headed over to the Partner Success Summit, but on arrival the doors were closed, so I started to queue.

I wasn’t expecting too much to be honest but when the doors opened, I could see a very large hall with 3 grand screens.

Those who will know me, will know I like to get front row seats where possible and as I was one of the first people in the hall, I was able to get front centre seats 😎

Here I met Alexa Wagner and Ross Brown before the summit began. Once the summit started the host Doug Smith, Senior Vice President, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Global Partner Ecosystem at Oracle, introduced himself, said a few words then announced we had special visit from the CEO of Oracle Safra Catz 😲

As I was in the front row, I was as close as you could get to see her in person. It was a flying visit and she thanked the Oracle Partners, emphasized how important we were and closed with “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, but not the CloudWorld stuff, the other stuff” 😂

The summit was 3 hours long and in summary was:

Partner centric

Oracle is not scalable enough to do all the service work themselves, the key is the uniqueness the Oracle Partners bring and utilising them

Oracle has a reputation of always hard to work with, but if we put the customer success at the forefront, the customer, Oracle and the partner all win

Oracle is pivoting from a Product to Services business

Partners are industry experts, SME, IPs coming from partners

We will not be successful together if we’re not together

The trust between Oracle and partners is mutual

55 micro industries, Oracle want to work with partners to fill these gaps

Plan, adopt, innovate

New delta certification for partners, so reducing the effort required to maintain certifications

Multi-cloud

See adoption of multi-cloud becoming the new norm and how it’s going to adapt to this

Oracle dedicated region has now strink to 12 racks

Heatwave MySQL is now available on AWS

Best in breed, better integration

VMware

Best of VMwave on the best of OCI, deep engineering relationship

Run workloads on different shapes, allows customer to utilise higher resources

Once the summit was over, there was a reception for the 500-600 partner delegates that attended.

I hung around for an hour before heading for my evening event of the Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event.

Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event

In my role, I’m fortunate to work with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, be it the traditional on-premises, as well as the more recent models of Exadata Cloud @ Customer and Exadata Cloud Services. From this I’ve got to know the various Exadata Product Managers and in particular Gavin Parish, who invited me to this event.

It was a pretty cool location, as it was in the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay. We got to see crocodiles, snakes, but mainly sharks.

I got to meet:

Anthony Veltri

Amit Okhandiar

Alex Besler

Lori Clark

Sumit Kochar

Tomorrow I will be attending the first day of the actual conference – looking forward to it! 😎👍🏽

You can view my day 3 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

Oracle CloudWorld Day 1

Posted on by Standard 2

Apologies for the delay on getting my blog posts out, it was a hectic trip with little to no time to blog 🙄. I’m planning to catch up now that I’m back home to complete the series off 👍🏽

If you missed my day 0, you can view it here.

So day 1 was exploring Las Vegas in the day and attending the Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event in evening.

Exploring Las Vegas

With the -8 hours time difference, I struggled to get a good night sleep and was up bright and early!

My hotel was at the south end of Las Vegas strip, so I planned to go to the north end and central strip and explore. On my travels I came across Batman outside MGM grand 😁

Whilst I was at MGM, I thought I might as well visit the MGM lions I had seen when I first visited Las Vegas back in 2004. After struggling to find the lions, I asked a member of staff, she told me they not been there for over 10 years 😲, confirmed here.

Next I saw the Coca-Cola store, didn’t even know Coca-Cola stores even existed, but clearly they do. Was full of Coca-Cola merchandise, like clothes, bottles, glasses, etc and of course sold Coca-Cola in all flavours 😎

Next went to Target for a browse, it’s pretty much like our UK equivalent of Tesco, but this was a smaller store, so more like Tesco Express.

There was a cute target dog in the entrance.

Next went to central strip, had lunch at McDonald’s then had a wander and came across the superheros at the ‘I LOVE SUGAR’ store which seemed popular in Las Vegas.

Finally had a wander in the Fashion Mall, which despite its name isn’t just clothes but all sorts of stores. Bought some Apple AirTags from the Apple store (which came in handy later on in my trip 🤦🏽‍♂️) then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event.

Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event

The Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event was for all Oracle Partners across EMEA, which I believe approximately 150 people attended from approximately 60 partners of the approximately 500 in EMEA.

We were hosted by Stefan Diedericks from Oracle.

I met various people including but not limited to:

Michel Schildmeijer

Philippa Clifford-Davies

Philip Wilson

Jen Mitchell

Dylan Murugan

Nalinee Uppiah

Chiedu Okeleke

Francesca Tabolli

Finally I swung by the entrance to Oracle CloudWorld, where they were still preparing for the next day for registration.

Tomorrow will be registration and attending the Oracle Partner Success Summit.

You can view my day 2 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

Oracle CloudWorld Day 0

Posted on by Standard 1

Introduction

So as an Oracle Ace Pro, I’m very fortunate to be able to get a complimentary ticket to Oracle CloudWorld this year. And with my employer Version 1, covering travel, accommodation and time, which I am very grateful for, I was all set to attend Oracle CloudWorld, formally known as Oracle OpenWorld.

The Trip

Saturday the 15th October and the journey begins! All packed and ready to leave Manchester for Las Vegas OCW22 😎 A gruelling 16 hours trip!

The first leg is an 8 hour long flight to New York via Virgin Atlantic!

Got a lucky upgrade to Economy Delight and was next to the emergency exit, so had some decent legroom 😎 To be honest as I couldn’t select a seat at check-in and the flight looked to be full, I was glad to have a seat!

Bye bye Manchester!

Landed in New York, now for immigration, baggage collection/drop off and get to gate for connection flight all within 1.5 hours 😬

Made it, but only just and bumped into an old colleague Chris Hollies. So now the next leg is 6 hours to Las Vegas but as I was already in US, it was classed as domestic, so no meals and I was getting tired, hungry and jet lagged! 🥱

Finally made it, 16 hours later in Las Vegas. It was 1pm when I left the UK and arrived in Las Vegas 8pm local time but back home was 4am! So was feeling it and so wanted my bed! 😴

My place for the week is Sahara, which is at the end of the Monorail (Southbound), which I choose to keep cost down as the central strip hotels were full or expensive when I had looked to book.

Tomorrow will be exploring Las Vegas and attending the Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event.

You can view my day 1 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)