Oracle CloudWorld 2023 Day 2

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

I know it’s been 3 weeks since my last blog post πŸ€¦πŸ½β€β™‚οΈ, 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 πŸ˜‰) 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 β€œ2023 Oracle Partner Award Apps/ SaaS” for β€œInnovation” (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 πŸ‘πŸ½

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

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” πŸ†πŸ‘πŸ½πŸ˜Ž:

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 πŸ˜‚), and lived very close to each other at the time but we hadn’t really crossed paths properly till now! πŸ€·πŸ½β€β™‚οΈ

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 2Β 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 0

Introduction

Similarly to last year, 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 2023.

This year was slightly different in the sense, that I had a major bid before, during and after, which impacted my ability to blog in a timely manner. So apologies this blog series is a couple weeks late. Better late than never!

The Trip

Saturday the 16th September and the journey begins! Since last OCW, we’ve decided to get a kitten and it seems like he wanted to come with me, as he wouldn’t get off my suitcase πŸ˜‚

All packed and ready to leave Manchester for Las Vegas OCW23 😎 The same gruelling 16 hours trip as last year.

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

This time is was Fearless Lady that had the pleasure of taking me πŸ˜‰ Bye bye Manchester!

Landed in New York, and similar to last year, I had to go through immigration, baggage collection/drop off and get to gate for connection flight all within 1.5 hours! 😬

Last year was close call, making it to the gate just in time, but this year was bad! The immigration queue was an hour apparently. I advised I needed to be at my gate in an hour, they kept just saying “let’s hope you make it” πŸ€¦πŸ½β€β™‚οΈ

It got to about 15 minutes to boarding, and only then they put me to the front of the queue! There were other people in similar situation, that had been waiting for some time. One person had totally missed his flight due to the long queues. I was fortunate, I had made it through immigration, picked and dropped my bag off and headed to gate, but the final hurdle was the security check which was another long queue! At this point I only had 5 minutes left, and the lady manning the queue said just go to the front and tell people you need to board. So that’s what I did and another lady followed me. We both made it through security, at which point I realised she was also on my same flight and also going to OCW23! 😲 We both had to “leg it” to the gate which took us about 15 minutes! We were worried we may miss the flight but they were still boarding when we arrived at gate, phew!

So now the next leg is 6 hours to Las Vegas, I was lucky my fare was economy+, so I had nice comfortable seat, some snacks and most important free WiFi!

Finally made it, 16 hours later in Las Vegas. It was 2pm when I left the UK and arrived in Las Vegas 9pm local time but back home was 5am! Surprisingly wasn’t feeling the jet lag like I did last year.

My place for the week is Sahara, which is the place I stayed last year. It’s reasonably priced, decent hotel and is at the end of the Monorail (Southbound), so easy to get to the conference in the middle of the strip.

One final thing before going to bed, was to have dinner. So I went to Mcdonald’s which is just across the road from hotel. I didn’t realise when I asked for a large Filet-O-Fish meal, I’d get a double filet, fries that are double the size of UK and a 1 litre drink! 🀯

Tomorrow due to my bid work, will be working in the day and then attending the Oracle EMEA Partner Reception Event in the evening.

You can view my day 1Β 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)