Category Archives: Oracle CloudWorld

Oracle CloudWorld 2024 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 and Oracle ACE promo video recording session in the afternoon and attending two events in the evening:
1. Oracle EMEA Welcome Reception
2. Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event

Registering for Oracle CloudWorld

The morning was spent blogging about day 1 and having breakfast.

Last year Oracle CloudWorld was split over The Venetian mainly and parts of Caesars Forum, however this year it seemed it was limited to only The Venetian with Caesars Forum for SuiteWorld. I went to The Venetian midday for registration for Oracle CloudWorld, it was starting to get busy.

However, I registered within few minutes along with my colleague Rishin.

In the corridor, I met Jeremy the American Sign Language interpreter for all the Oracle CloudWorld keynotes. I had met him first in 2022 when he did his first CloudWorld gig. Now I meet him every year and catch up. It’s really good that Oracle provide this service for the deaf and making the event inclusive.

Oracle ACE CloudWorld Promotion Video Session

Jennifer Nicholson who heads the Oracle ACE Program had asked all the ACE to come record a CloudWorld promotion video from the Oracle ACEs. So we all took part and follow Connor McDonald instructions.

Sai Penumuru on camera 😎

And Osama Mustafa!

You can watch the video here, which came out pretty decent 😎. Well done all that were involved 👍🏽

Oracle Partner Success Summit

After the Oracle ACE CloudWorld promotion video session, I headed over to the Partner Success Summit, which the doors had already open. I headed over to the front as close as I could get. The room was getting pretty full.

Leah Yomtovian, Senior Vice President, Partner and Operations Strategy was the host and welcomed us all.

She had mentioned:

  • Shifting from product oriented company to service oriented company
  • Achieve more with less
  • Win more together, succeed more together

She then welcomed Jason Maynard, Executive Vice President, Revenue Operations to the stage.

Jason, mentioned how Oracle has over 100 OCI regions.

He also mentioned, 3 success factors:

  1. Great products (innovation)
  2. More oriented to customer success
  3. Partner alignment

He talked about:

  • How partners are the ones that guide customers
  • Oracle was able to close its book in 9 days! Oracle is one of the customer success itself
  • Incorporating GenAI for account planning
  • Sales people can use time selling and less admin
  • Oracle centralises it’s Enterprise Applications when it does mergers and acquisitions, to gain efficiency and save money
  • Standardisation is key, Oracle Fusion
  • Oracle is everywhere, announcement today of the partnership on AWS!
  • Oracle at any hyper-scaler cloud provider
  • Oracle taking approach of making Oracle available everywhere
  • Bring AI to your data

He next went onto explain that AI transforms everything.

Leah then went on to talk about working with partners, ISV, to help them go to market.

She then went onto talking about partner credits.

Next she welcomed Rod Johnson, EVP, Applications North America and Mark Hura, EVP, North America Cloud Infrastructure to the stage.

Mark talked about:

  • Incredible performance and scale, with efficient costs
  • Perform at difficult scale, benefit for customers
  • 2/3rd of OCI consumption is not Oracle workload!
  • It’s not Oracle on Oracle as people perceive
  • Cost saving and flexibility
  • Economic differentiation
  • Provide customer choice on how to use Oracle infrastructure, how to optimise, most flexible deployment options
  • We live in a multi cloud, giving customer choice and flexibility
  • Oracle 23ai, enables customer to be AI data capable

Rod talked about:

  • Oracle in a category of 1, integrated suite of Enterprise Applications to allow efficient core solutions. All under one Oracle stack.
  • Applied AI, AI driven enterprise
  • AI assist model
  • We’re just at the begin, profound shift to come

Next, Leah welcomed Andy Mendelsohn, EVP, Database Server Technologies to the stage.

He talked about:

  • Oracle database founded in 1970 and still going!
  • Not many tech companies can claim their product still going that strong.
  • 98 of fortune 100 run Oracle database.
  • AI vectors search, allows search on unstructured data. Do suffocated searches.
  • Differentiators, converge database, can do all types of workloads, not just one.
  • Agility and simplicity.
  • Autonomous database, anyone at push of button can get a suffocated database.

Next, Leah welcomed Gary Miller, EVP, Customer Success Officer to the stage.

He talked about:

  • Partners said Oracle hard to navigate, Oracle is simplifying account management, to work easier with partners.
  • Customers more happy due to partners bring more customer success.
  • True partnership, is when customer can’t tell when it’s Oracle or partner.
  • Amazing technology but it’s not enough, Oracle needs partners to bring this to customers.
  • Partners have the relationships, can bring the potential, and why Oracle investing in partners.
  • Partners to be that trusted advisor.
  • Training for partners to ensure know the products.
  • Collaborative working together approach.

For the final segment, Leah welcomed Douglas Kehring, EVP, Head of Operations to the stage.

He talked about:

  • Converting our install base on existing license model to cloud licensing.
  • One of the fastest company to be able to close books and report finance earnings.
  • Oracle wants customers to achieve the same.
  • Transform from traditional on-premise to cloud product.
  • SAP, Workday, and Salesforce getting dropped by customers to go to Oracle Apps.
  • Oracle is here not to compete with partners but to work with them.
  • Win together and succeed together. New dawn.

Once the summit was over, there was a reception for the 500-600 partner delegates that I briefly attended and spoke to Steve Ramsay from Oracle and David Schmidt from Syniverse.

Oracle EMEA Welcome Reception

Richard Smith was hosting the Oracle EMEA Welcome Reception, so I thought I’d make an appearance before heading to my 2nd event of the evening. It was at the Cheri Rooftop.

It was pretty busy, but I managed to catch up the following people:

After an hour or so, I left this event to catch the remaining of the next event which was more my area and I wanted to catch up with the various Product Manager in the Database and Exadata space 😎

Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event

I decided to walk from Cheri to Madam Tussauds in the Venetian where the event was held.

I got to met Karl O’Connell, CIO of Irish Cattle Breeding Federation and a very good customer of Version 1. We manage their Exadata Cloud @ Customer / Exadata Cloud Services.

Also got to met Alex Blyth, Exadata Product Manager, who I know quite well 😊

Also got to meet some old friends from last year when I attended the same event 🤣

I also got to meet:

Dominic Giles

Gavin Parish

Martina Keippel

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 2024 Day 1

Posted on by Standard 2

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

As there was no Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event like the past couple of years, today was simply enjoying Las Vegas and getting over the jet lag.

Enjoying Las Vegas

First thing first, after getting up and sorting a few things out, was to get breakfast. My colleague Rishin Mitra, is staying nearby and walked over to my hotel. We went to Zeffer’s restaurant, which I have been before and recommended.

Rishin had chicken and waffles and I had french toast, massive portions!

Next, I went exploring and Rishin went back to his hotel to rehearse his presentation. He was fortunate to be selected to present 👍🏽 It was hot hot hot in Las Vegas with temperate hitting nearly 40oC 🥵

I’ve recently got into cycling and brought an eMTB, so thought I’d check out a cycle store in US to see if it had better range then UK, where I’ve struggled to get certain body armour like knee pads, etc. The nearest store was some considerable distance and pretty costly in an Uber, but I noticed in Uber app it offered me $3 for the bus, so I thought why not, it’s an experience 😊

45 minutes later, I arrive at the ‘Las Vegas’ Cyclery’.

There was a ball made out of used inner tubes 😲

After having a browse and deciding not to get anything, I went to the Fashion Show Mall back at the strip, for some window shopping and met up again with Rishin. As our breakfast, was so filling we’d both skipped lunch and thought we’d swing by Oracle CloudWorld conference to see how preparation so going on. It seemed like all ready for tomorrow.

Here’s a map of the layout of the conference, should anyone attending and be interested.

After, this we had a wonder down the LINQ promenade to look for a place to eat. We couldn’t find a place to eat, but we did wonder in this cool ‘ I LOVE SUGAR’ store which I had been to in the past.

I suggested we go to ‘The Cheese Factory’ in Caesars Palace shopping and food forum. So we had a wonder over to there and eventually ended up in ‘The Cheese Factory’.

The meal was as filling as our breakfasts! 🤦🏽‍♂️

That was the final thing we did before heading back to hotel and wrapping up the day.

Tomorrow will be registration, attending the Oracle Partner Success Summit, EMEA Welcome Reception and Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event.

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 2024 Day 0

Posted on by Standard 1

Introduction

Similarly to the past couple of years, as an Oracle Ace Pro, I’m very fortunate to be able to get a complimentary ticket to Oracle CloudWorld. Again, with my employer Version 1, covering travel, accommodation and time, which I am very grateful for, I was all set to attend Oracle CloudWorld 2024.

Fortunately this year, I don’t have any critical pre-sales work during the conference, so I will be able to more enjoy and hopefully have this blog series out in a timely manner 😎 Unlike last year where a bid dominated my visit and consequently wasn’t able to complete my blog series (apologies!).

The Trip

Saturday the 7th September (earlier than last year) and the journey begins! All packed and ready to leave Manchester for Las Vegas OCW24 😎

A gruelling 16 hours trip! Starting from Manchester Airport.

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

This time it was ‘Lady Love’ that had the pleasure of taking me 😉 Bye bye Manchester!

Landed in New York, now for immigration, baggage collection/drop off and get to gate for connection flight. But as we landed early, I had 3 hours not the 1.5 hours in the past 😐

Made it to the gate in reasonable time, as there was a wait at immigration but far less then last couple of years. But annoyingly the flight to Las Vegas was delayed.

Wasn’t too bad in the end, as was only an 1.5 hours delay as the plane came in late.

I met Jerry Seager, who happened to be on my plane to Las Vegas. He was coming from Heathrow and myself from Manchester, but common 2nd leg to Las Vegas. Jerry is from Sopra Steria and is my colleague from UKOUG James Herbert‘s boss. So now the next leg is 5 hours, making up lost time to Las Vegas.

Finally made it, 16 hours later in Las Vegas. It was 2pm when I left the UK and arrived in Las Vegas 10pm local time but back home was 6am! So was starting to feel it 😴 but did manage to get a power nap on the flight which helped.

My place for the week is my usual spot of Sahara hotel, which is at the end of the Monorail (Southbound), which I’ve always chosen to keep the cost down as the central strip hotels are expensive. I went for my standard tier, but I was very fortunate this time they didn’t have that room available and gave me an complimentary upgrade to a suite 😃

Oracle usually have an Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event with the EMEA Awards on the Sunday, but they not having this year, so tomorrow will be exploring Las Vegas and preparing for CloudWorld by getting my agenda all sorted!

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)

Oracle CloudWorld 2023 Day 2

Posted on by Standard 1

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

I know it’s been 3 weeks since my last blog post 🤦🏽‍♂️, just been extremely busy, but with many people asking me when am I going to finish the series, “the suspense is killing me”, it gave me motivation to just get it completed! 😎

Oracle CloudWorld Registration

Oracle CloudWorld actually starts on the Tuesday but you can register from Monday, so after spending the morning on bid work, I headed over to The Venetian Convention Centre, where the conference was held.

I would use the Las Vegas Monorail daily, and on route I would see The Sphere, it would light up in many different way, but inside was a concert hall. Pretty cool, below is how it looked as I passed:

Once arrived, it was surprisingly starting to get busy:

I heard over to registration, which thankfully wasn’t that busy:

Many people working on the registration desk, getting through the queue:

Right that was me registered 😎:

Oracle Partner Success Summit

I attended this event last year, it was pretty good and Safra made a flying visit. So I got there early to get front seats:

As expected Doug Smith opened up the Oracle Partner Success Summit:

And then welcome Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle to the stage 😁:

Safra started with thanking the Oracle Partners:

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, every single one of you, we’ve had the most incredible year, because you have been a huge part of it, and you made our customers incredibly successful!”

Then Doug and Safra went on to discuss:

  • Innovation is key to success
  • Doing things fast, costs less
  • Benefit from economies of scale
  • Growing 45% year on year in OCI
  • Minimising labour, maximising efficiency
  • AI, data everywhere, the cool startups coming to OCI
  • All about customer success, change is hard, it’s the sociology, partners working with our joint customers for their success
  • Enterprises harnessing the AI for their customers/end users
  • Speed and security is important for our joint customers where their data is their Crown Jewels
  • Microsoft announcement, Azure with OCI, allows customers to bring Oracle workloads to the Azure Cloud. Openness is key, allow customers to choose what is best and not be locked in. Customer free choice, opens up for more and more business and success.

Next Jae Evans and Mike Sicilia came to the stage:

The topic was “Innovation: Building Solution Together”.

They talked about:

  • Integrating applications together is the most costly element. Oracle has end to end applications along with industry expertise.
  • Better, faster, cheaper Cloud. Differentiate by the ability to right size different option of Clouds. Sovereign Cloud, Cloud@Customer and Alloy.
  • Openness, integrate not only for Oracle apps, but others, the data fabric, the public APIs, presenting the best solution for the customer.

Next Jason Maynard, Mark Hura, Garret Llg and Cormac Watters came to the stage:

The topic was “Business Impact: Achieving Go-To-Market Success Together”.

They talked about:

  • Partners bringing industry expertise to enable customer success. Oracle helping partners navigate Oracle, so partners can help our customer to gain success.
  • Partners to do 70% of implementation.
  • Engaging early with Oracle, single account exec model. Industry focused, technology platform, utilising innovative.
  • Have to commit, and follow through together! To gain better outcome.
  • Partners as trusted advisors, advising customers to better gain success.
  • Start-ups, ISVs, Enterprises and Government, 4 types of customers. What is the architecture and transformation. Migrate, manage, and transformation.
  • 80% of go-lives via partners for Oracle Apps. Partners then bring innovation to the customers.

Key takeaways:

  • OCI differentiates from a technical and commercial perspective
  • Engage early, partners are more closer to customer
  • Mutually commit, and see it through together

Next Dan Haller and Ross Brown (I sat next to Ross last year at the Oracle Partner Success Summit 😉) came to the stage:

The topic was “Business Impact: Winning Together”.

They discussed:

  • Building differentiated solutions together
  • Leaning in, look at the whole of OCI to bring value to customer
  • See the economic benefits
  • Looking at workloads, moving them and then looking at the rest
  • Understand the distributed services
  • Clouds are built not bought
  • Build more together
  • One Oracle with you the partners

The final segment was Doug and Gary Miller:

The topic was “Customer Success: Delivery Together”.

They discussed:

  • Driving customer success together
  • Getting the value from Oracle technology
  • Working together, getting it right first time
  • More demand than capacity by two fold, so if more partners are up to speed and trained, can do more business
  • Don’t engage reactively, but proactively

Next Doug mentioned the Oracle CloudWorld Tour, so if you missed Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas, you could attend one more closer to home:

Doug closed the Oracle Partner Success Summit by announcing the Global Winners of the 2023 Partner Awards:

Version 1 had won the EMEA “2023 Oracle Partner Award Apps/ SaaS” for “Innovation” (more info on day 1), so we were entered into the global tier for judging but unfortunately we didn’t win. Well done to the Partners that won, detailed below:

After the Oracle Partner Success Summit, was the reception in the foyer, where hundreds of people from partners got the opportunity to network:

I met a few familiar faces, had a few soft drinks before heading to my next installment 😊.

Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event

I’ve really enjoyed the Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event in the past, as I get to met the majority of the Database and Exadata Product Management team, discuss challenges, customers, what would be good, etc. So was looking forward to this one! Especially as it was at the Madame Tussauds Las Vegas:

In association with AMD, no surprise seem as chipset in Exadata switched from Intel to AMD, more details here:

I took photos of every wax model, too many to share, but I will share a few below.

No idea who this is, drop me a comment if you know who she is:

This neither:

This I know is Vin Diesel 😎:

This is Whoopi Goldberg:

Johnny Depp:

The one and only “The Rock”:

Brad Pitt:

Evander Holyfield:

A favourite, Snoop Dogg:

The legend, Michael Jackson:

My all time favourite Tupac:

Pretty surreal, as his murderer was found in Las Vegas only days after Oracle CloudWorld 😲:

A good friend of Tupac but later rival The Notorious B.I.G.:

The American Boxing promoter Don King:

The legend Mike Tyson!:

On the way out, a wax model of Spider Man!:

I big one of The Hulk:

After playing a 4D game with Sai on the exit of Madame Tussauds, it was a trip back to the hotel on the Las Vegas Monorail and capturing some more Sphere photos:

Tomorrow will day 1 of the actual Oracle OpenWorld conference 👍🏽

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 2023 Day 1

Posted on by Standard 2

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

Due to bid work, the day was consumed with that, with the evening attending the Oracle EMEA Partner Reception Event at the Commonwealth.

Oracle EMEA Partner Reception Event

The Oracle EMEA Partner Reception Event was for all Oracle Partners across EMEA, which I believe approximately 150-200 people attended.

We were hosted by Stefan Diedericks from Oracle.

I attended this event last year, however this year was different as Stefan was hosting the “Oracle Europe Middle East and Africa Partner Award“. We were proud to be finalist in the “2023 Oracle Partner Award Apps/ SaaS” for “Innovation” against Fujitsu for UK & Ireland. Our submission was based on our Cloudbridge Suite, which is our comprehensive set of tools designed to accelerate Integration, Data Migration, and Automated Testing for Oracle Cloud SaaS services, thereby helping our customers meet their business objectives with ease.

My colleagues Colm Gillard, Tim German, and Joel Acha hadn’t arrived in time, so I had the pleasure of representing Version 1 with Graham Smith should we win any awards.

Version 1 won the UK & Ireland “2023 Oracle Partner Award Apps/ SaaS” for “Innovation” 😁, along with Innoapps for “Business Impact” and Infosys for “Customer Success”:

We were all finalist for the respective EMEA Award, and it with great pleasure that we won the EMEA “2023 Oracle Partner Award Apps/ SaaS” for “Innovation” 🏆👏🏽😎:

It was great to be recognised for our innovation at an EMEA level, it’s a great milestone and I’m proud to be a part of it. You can read more info here.

After the awards, I met various people including but not limited to:

Friends from Vertice, Tony Cassidy, David Heraty and Abigail Giles-Haigh (now at Oracle).

Leona Chauhan the CEO of Magia Consulting and Philippa Clifford-Davies Oracle Channel Strategy Leader for Applications MidMarket.

Philippa had introduced Leona to Tony, David and myself as part of Unity programme to get partners that can compliment each other, to work together.

They say it’s a small world, but in conversation with Leona, not only did I realise she went to the same university I attended, but at the same time and was on the same course! 🤯 To add to that, we were born only 6 days apart (I’ll let you work out who’s older 😂), and lived very close to each other at the time but we hadn’t really crossed paths properly till now! 🤷🏽‍♂️

Other people I met:

Philip Wilson

Chris Mason

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

Tomorrow will be registration, attending the Oracle Partner Success Summit and the Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event.

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)