I think the most surprising thing for me was how much I enjoyed the User Experience (UX) and Internet of Things (IoT) stuff. I did the UX Strategy Day and the “Oracle Applications User Experience Cloud Exchange” afternoon and they were really fun and interesting. The IoT session took me back to my childhood, playing with wires and breadboards.
For years the AppsLab folks have kind-of dragged me along into the future. Often I don’t get what all the fuss is about at first, then two years later it’s part of my everyday life. 🙂
The tech side of OOW16 was a little disappointing for me. I’m a tech guy and repackaging existing tech into a new cloud service isn’t really exciting to me. That’s not a criticism of the cloud services themselves, but a reflection of my interests. Even the release of Oracle Database 12cR2 was not that thrilling, because it’s not available for download yet, so I can’t get my hands dirty with it. In fact I was feeling really flat about 12.2 until I spoke to Chris Saxon and Connor McDonald, who managed to re-ignite the spark, leaving me eagerly anticipating the download. Let’s hope it comes soon!
Oracle continue to push their cloud agenda and as I’ve mentioned several times over the last few years, this is good for us on-premise users too. As a cloud provider Oracle have effectively become a customer of their own technology stack. Having felt the pain of what that can mean at times, the products are changing. There are a bunch of features added into their technology stack over the last few years that directly affect their ability to run efficiently in the cloud. There is a greater emphasis on reduced resource usage and better consolidation, which IMHO is good news for us too. I don’t know what the future will bring, but for the moment I feel the cloud is having a positive effect on Oracle products, which is good for me as a consumer.
One thing I’m conscious of is how few presentations I go to and how that might be perceived by those who’ve never visited OOW before. Presentations are the least valuable thing at OOW from my perspective. You will often get more value out of a 10 minute conversation at the demo grounds than you will watching a 45 minute marketing presentation. What’s more, you’ll make contact with the people that matter. The networking side of conferences is the number one priority for me as it gives me more access to information. Of course, I see a lot of presentations at conferences through the year and I have the ACE Director briefing before the conference starts, so my situation is a little different to the average attendee, but I would still advise networking over presentations.
I put out quite a few posts during this trip.
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Come and Play!
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Birmingham to New York
- New York City
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Newark to San Francisco
- It’s the little things that really matter!
- Cloud UX Strategy Day : #OAUX
- Oracle ACE Director Briefing – Day 1
- Oracle ACE Director Briefing – Day 2
- Oracle : Tech Company or Service Company?
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : User Group Sunday
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Monday – Day 1
- Cloud First : What does it mean to me?
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Tuesday – Day 2
- Community : Discussing the Meetup Format
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Wednesday – Day 3
- Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Thursday – Day 4
- OpenWorld 2016 : San Francisco to Birmingham
Big thanks go out to the Oracle ACE Program who made this visit to Oracle OpenWorld 2016 possible for me. What with the UX Strategy Day, ACE Director Briefing and OpenWorld itself, this has become a 9 day event, not counting travel on each side. I’m very grateful for the opportunity!
Let’s see what this next year brings!
Cheers
Tim…
