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

Keynote: Customers Winning with the Cloud and AI

Today was the first proper day of the conference with keynotes and sessions. I headed over to the Venetian nice and early, had my breakfast and went to the keynote in hall A.

The hall was rapidly filling up as it was time for keynote to start and Safra Catz the CEO of Oracle to make her entrance.

She mentioned:

• How OCI is built different
• With performance and security at the heart of it
• Open to everyone, in Azure, GCP and now AWS
• Full Stack infused best technologies
• She thanks her employees, partners and the audience

She then welcomed Bill Hornbuckle, Chief Executive Officer and President at MGM Resorts International to the stage.

Safra asked, “How do you stay ahead?”

Bill talked about:

• The digital experience, use of virtual check-in used by 48% of guest
• Less expensive and quicker check-in
• They use Oracle Fusion since 2020, which reduced their labour by 25-30%
• They recieve 15-20k calls a day, and successfully moving 20% of the load to AI digital assistants
• Interesting fact of 50% of their gambling custom comes from 1% of their customers!
• The use of AI to tailor the experience for their customers

She next welcomed La’Naia Jones, Chief Information Officer at Central Intelligence Agency to the stage, who probably had the best trainers on stage 😋

La’Naia talked about:

• Thanking Oracle for the partnership and the shared mission to keep the nation safe using the best technologies.
• How CIA is all Oracle.
• How she used to be an Oracle DBA.
• Innovation, disruptive technology, opportunities to bring best solutions to make best decisions without compromise.
• Shift to cybersecurity focus, using data with GenAI to help what they do.

Safra said, Oracle don’t consider anything GA, if it can’t be available in a classified disconnected manner required for the CIA, as they are one of it’s critical customers.

Next she welcomed both Bernard Gavgani, Group CIO and member of Group Executive Committee and Jean-Yves Fillion Vice-Chairman Board of Directors at BNP Paribas to the stage.

Safra, Bernard and Jean-Yves talked about how:

• The expansion of the partnership, by BNP Paribas going to the Oracle Cloud.
• They are in 80 countries with 60 currencies.
• The relationship is not vendor and customer, it’s a true partnership.
• Is part of BNP Paribas success.
• Oracle is success when customers are successful.
• They use AI to help prevent cyberattacks.
• Security is top priority for their customers.

Next Safra welcomed Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder, President and Chief Operating Officer at Cloudflare to the stage.

Michelle blow me away, with how kickass she came across, she a co-founder and really knows her tech! 🤓

She explained:

• They have 157B cyberattacks a day!
• That’s 100M just in time she came to stage! 😲
• All protected automatically without any human intervention!
• Safra said “When a deep technology company choose Oracle, it makes Oracle proud”
• Why did they choice OCI, because it built for performance and security posture.
• Nimble and agile.
• OCI is out there, doing so much!
• Priced for performance yet efficient.
• How they need to ensure it fast and snappy and OCI gives that!
• “Focus on customer and partnership”, says Safra.

Finally, Safra welcomed Antonio Büchi Buc, CEO at Entel to the stage.

Antonio talked about how they:

• Increased revenue by going to Oracle Cloud, increased the user experience, increased NPS.
• Used AI, to predict network quality and performance.
• Taking advantage of what available to get ahead of the market.

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 Multicloud of Oracle Database at AWS, which Andy had alluded at his same session 2 years ago at Oracle CloudWorld 22!

He mentioned how Oracle is going back to core DNA, of we will run our database software anywhere! He explained how C-level make cloud decisions without speaking to the techies, then make a deal with a cloud provider, then tell the techies to use the credits but there no Oracle! ☹️ Now with the partnership, you can use Oracle at public cloud provider and use their credits! 😃

He finished off talking about the new ‘Select AI’ allowing you to query your data in natural language query and ‘AI Vector Search’ allowing for optimised searching of documents, images, patterns and data that have similar semantics.

Keynote: Oracle Vision and Strategy

Next I attended Larry Ellison, the chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle keynote.

He explained how customers use Multiple Clouds and Multiple Applications, but some customers want to move Oracle Exadata Databases and Applications to AWS, use Oracle Exadata Database Services inside AWS.

MultiCloud interconnect makes that possible, but not easy to use and not fast to run.

Thus the announcement of embedding Oracle Datacentres inside AWS, give highest performance, easy of use and fault-tolerant & scalability. Oracle Exadata Database runs inside AWS, going live in December 2024 in Phoenix.

Next Larry welcomed Matt Garman, CEO at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the stage, which many years ago would been unheard of.

Larry briefly discussed the partnership, “how competitors are now partners”, bringing the best in class to the customer. Then he welcomed Andrew Zitney, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer at State Street to join them on stage.

Andy explained:

• How they are a Big Oracle Exadata customer, but also a big AWS customer
• So Oracle Database@AWS is perfect for them and they very excited to use!
• This will mitigate latency issue, put the data where it’s needed.
• A 2 straw partnership with Oracle and AWS.
• Plan to go live in Virginia first.
• They are in 43 locations, looking to scale back to 30-40.
• Want to move from their data centres to AWS data centres with Oracle databases.

Larry then explained how the Open MultiCloud Era where services on difference clouds work gracefully together. They are open.

Larry then concluded his keynote talking about user identity, how biometrically authenticated login can do away with passwords! And network security with Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR).

Oracle ACE Lounge, Exhibition Hall and Evening Meal

The final part of the day was visiting the Oracle ACE lounge and meeting my fellow ACEs.

The Version 1 ACEs 😎 (Rishin Mitra, Graham Smith and myself)

Meeting new ACEs from around the world, here is Manish Naik from USA 👍🏽

Then a wonder around the exhibition hall, talking to vendors and partners, as well as collecting some SWAG 😎

With the very last part of the day, having a lovely italian meal with my colleagues from Version 1 😁 (Rishin Mitra, Charlie M. Yousef, Tim German and Jeremy Simmons)

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)

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:

• Martin Jenkinson
• Leona Chauhan
• Lucia Hustatyova
• Kerry (Stuart) Wilson
• Philip Wilson
• James Herbert
• Richard Pepper

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)

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)

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)