COLLABORATE14: A week in review

The week of COLLABORATE organized by some of the most dedicated people was filled with many presentations of varying quality. The event took place at the Venetian Palazzo and Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. While there are many uncountable events, people, presentations, and slot machines I am going to just highlight a few of my experiences on my first trip to Las Vegas.

RAC ATTACK!
My first and probably favorite of all the presentations was "RAC Attack!" Provided by the group at racattack.org this session was a hands-on interactive help session for learning how to setup a two node RAC database. As a disclaimer I don't profess or market myself as a DBA, but I do like to have some what of an understanding of the systems that I use even if my useage of them only touches the surface. Setting up this cluster provided a good insight of what DBAs work with on a daily basis. The group provided much help where ever it was needed, but the instructions they had laid out in the first place were very descriptive and helpful. They tried to have us emulate the setup as if we wouldn't have direct access, which is typical in most settings. Often times a Unix/Linux administrator will have done a lot of the beginning work and have approved programs install, appropriate ports opened, and necessary sudoers access provided. In lieu of needing to emulate the Linux Admin role in addition to the DBA role all security was uprooted: firewall disabled and selinux disabled. The group incentivized people to get engaged by awarding attendees with T-Shirts and at the end providing those who had made it the furthest with prizes. Overall I would call it a rewarding experience, this helped me understand what my colleagues in the DBA role deal with on a daily basis as well as provided a good insight into some of the workings of the Oracle Database product.

More updates may appear here as time progresses.

My failed Google Glass experience

At the Collaborate 14 conference, @hdost lent me his Google Glass to try out for a bit.

AHMED: Okay Glass. Call John Doe. (I tried someone I knew was in his address book.)

GOOGLE GLASS: (Nothing happened.)

AHMED: (I see a menu that is now giving me options of what to say.)

AHMED: Okay Glass. Make a call.

AHMED: Hey Harold, it says "Mom" here in the dropdown.

GOOGLE GLASS: (Starts dialing Mom.)

AHMED: Cancel!

AHMED: Google Glass cancel!

AHMED: Okay Glass, cancel call!!!

Fortunately, Harold quickly ended the call from his phone. It would appear I need a little more practice before trying it out in the real world!

I thought I was cool until I accidentally started dialing Harold's mom

Harold Dost III now an Oracle ACE Associate

Harold Dost III, Senior Consultant at Raastech, is now an Oracle ACE Associate!

Becoming a member of the Oracle ACE Program highlights an individual's excellence and technical proficiency. Harold joins an elite group of about 460 individuals, including Raastech's Ahmed Aboulnaga (Oracle ACE), to be recognized as Oracle enthusiasts and advocates. Harold's impressive credentials, 6+ years of experience working in the Oracle community, and enthusiasm to contribute on higher levels are qualities that validate his merit in becoming an Oracle ACE Associate. Congratulations Harold!

Anyone in the Oracle Technology and Applications communities is eligible to apply for consideration, or nominate someone, for one of the following tiers: Oracle ACE Associate, Oracle ACE, or Oracle ACE Director.

Harold can be found on Twitter at @hdost.


Oracle ACE Program:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oracle-ace/index.html

"Crazy or Courageous?": Impressive C-level presentation on the importance of branding and selling a project

Last week, while attending Collaborate 14 in Las Vegas, one of the sessions I attended was Crazy or Courageous? Lessons Learned From Making it Happen by Patrick Ott from Amway. Patrick shared his experience during the first global implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite at Amway across 31 European markets. This was a C-level presentation, targeting managers and especially managers outside of IT.

Patrick Ott, Operations Directory, Amway

* Disclaimer though. Raastech, the company I work for, currently supports Amway in a consulting capacity, and I have personally met Patrick in passing several times over the course of the project but have not directly worked with him.

Patrick talked about the challenges of selling the Oracle E-Business Suite solution to company executives, employees, and their customers. The job was made more challenging after what was considered an unsuccessful rollout of a similar solution several years earlier.

Here are a few personal takeaways from the presentation.

Selling to Upper Management

To get their attention, you have to convince the executives and the board that they're either sitting on a gold mine... or about to fall off a cliff.

The Spinning Plates Example

The project management team sometimes felt like the guy trying to keep the spinning plates balanced, always jumping back and forth making sure when things appear that they're about to collapse, bringing them back on track.

A Single Dashboard Slide

Project statuses to the executives were kept under 5 slides. The main project dashboard slide was in fact one page, depicted very simply and in easy to understand graphs, at the expense of detail obviously. By doing so, it allowed management to drill deeper into each of the status areas by asking questions. This level of interactivity could not have been achieved going through a 50 slide project update.

Branding a Project

How can you get everyone to feel passionate and proud about their involvement in a project? The same way people pay ridiculous amounts for Starbucks coffee instead of the generic brand. It's partly about branding. It was not the rebranding of the "ATLAS" project, as it's called, that made the project successful, but it was one of the aspects of convincing the executives, board, employees, and customers that things this time were different... which they were.

Old Logo	New Logo

Overall, it was a very good presentation by a very competent presenter who clearly understands the challenges it takes to make the rollout of a global enterprise project successful. His examples were impressive and completely relatable, highlighting how project success is not always about technology, but about people as well.

Two minor problems with Collaborate 14

Note: I paid full price to attend Collaborate 14 and it was absolutely worth the cost of admission.

It was an excellent conference, excellent venue, much improved presentations, and overall an extremely well organized conference. I highly recommend it, and most definitely recommend it over Oracle OpenWorld.

With that being said, I highlight below the two biggest problems I personally found with the conference.

Problem #1: Limited exhibition booth time

Collaborate 14 is a 5 day conference, from April 7 to April 11. The exhibition hall was only open for 2 days, and for a period of 4 hours each day, from 10:45am to 3:15pm. The exhibitors lose an hour dedicated to lunch, so there's essentially only 6 hours to roam the vendor booths. That's 6 hours total for a 5 day conference!

Bad planning? Intentional? Either way it doesn't matter. Personally I was disappointed and the vendors I talked to weren't too happy either. I would have liked to spend more time socializing and engaging with the vendors, as well as spend more time at the Oracle stands.

Ahmed roaming the exhibition halls, happy at something, though he's not sure what exactly.

Problem #2: Late publishing of agenda causes presenter planning challenges

Many presenters were unsure what day they were presenting, so they were unsure when to book their travel, opting to stay for the entire 5 days, not by choice. Now granted as an organizer I would love/encourage/plead with presenters to stick around for the entire conference, it's unfair to some of them who may have other commitments. Give them the choice I say.


Don't read too much into these criticisms. I merely raise them to highlight areas of improvement and they reflect my opinion alone (although a lot of people I met agreed or shared similar concerns). This was an excellent conference and I will surely be back next year. I had a blast, I learned a lot, and I met some old and new colleagues. Hats off to the IOUG, OAUG, and Quest for once again organizing a great conference.

4 under-recognized presentations at Collaborate 14

I attended many, many sessions last week at Collaborate 14. Big data. OEM Grid Control. Cloud. SOA. Engineered systems. Many were great. Few were disappointing. Attendance among the presentations were mixed. Some were a full house while others had only a few in attendance.

In today's blog post, I highlight four presentations in particular which were extremely impressive but lacked the turnout that they deserved.

Some presentations were early in the morning; clearly a major disadvantage for a conference taking place in Las Vegas. Others were later in the afternoon, a time when people were just getting ready to enjoy the evening and great weather. Some of the presentation titles could have definitely been made to be more attractive (judge for yourself below). And in one case, the name of the well known presenter was not in the agenda on the mobile app. Marketing also has something to do with it, and perhaps the presenters spreading the word a bit in advance might have helped.

These four presentations were all standout presentations, and I give each of them a 10 out of 10. Let me explain why.


An Alternative to Exadata for Large Scale ERP Deployments
Cliff Burgess, Director of Information Technology, Gentex Corporation

Cliff talks about their experience at Gentex and why they upgraded the commodity hardware running Oracle E-Business Suite R12 instead of moving to Exadata. Typically you don't find too many anti-Exadata presentations out there, so it was refreshing to see a different perspective.

What I learned:

• Exadata is not just hardware, it's also software so don't forget about the ongoing support cost.
• Who administers Exadata? The Oracle DBA? System administrator? Network admin? Storage admin? Training is clearly an issue.
• Though Oracle sells Exadata as a means to stop finger pointing among the various administrators, this clearly was not a factor for Gentex.
• On their commodity hardware, Gentex increased their CPUs by 50% but their RAM by 1000%. This was clearly to get as much power as possible while controlling Oracle licensing costs, which is licensed by the core.
• To minimize licensing cost, Gentex went with the highest end CPUs at the time.
• Given enough time and effort, you may be able to prove that Exadata performance gains may not be drastically better than commodity hardware for OLTP based transactions, something that Gentex confirmed themselves through an extensive POC.

It was a great presentation with some good insight on how Gentex saved $2 million by not moving to Exadata yet were able to resolve their performance issues with their E-Business Suite R12 environment.


Fusion Middleware-Heart of Fusion Applications, Tips and Tricks to Maintain, Install a Successful Fusion Application Install Base
Manoj Machiwal, Consulting Director, Jade Global

Manoj talks about what it takes to install Oracle Fusion Applications, an extremely new topic area. I'll be honest with you. I didn't have high hopes for this presentation, but as the presentation progressed, I realized that this one was a hidden gem.

What I learned:

• Fusion Apps requires a lot of the Fusion Middleware infrastructure, such as the application server, identity management, and integration products.
• Other Fusion Middleware products such as OBIEE and WebCenter Portal are optional.
• Users are now stored in an external directory (i.e., the concept of FND_USERS no longer exists).
• The Fusion Apps Vision instance requires 8 CPUs, 220 GB of memory, and 2 TB of disk!

Well done Manoj. Sorry I had to leave the presentation a little early, but what I saw was impressive.


Real-World Cloud & On-premise ERP Integration Simplified with Oracle SOA Suite
Vikas Anand, Senior Product Director, Oracle

Vikas talks about cloud integration and walks through a demo of a two-way integration between Salesforce.com and E-Business Suite using the new Salesforce Adapter. I attended this presentation at the last Oracle OpenWorld conference, but this one had a few new interesting twists. If you're interested in knowing why I think highly of this presentation, see my review of that OpenWorld presentation.

What's new that I learned this time around:

• Session managed to the external service provides (e.g., Salesforce.com) is fully managed by the adapter (i.e., the SalesForce Adapter).
• The adapter supports the ability to provide a response interface for Salesforce events to invoke.
• The BMC Software use case, on how their CIO gave a directive to move the majority of their services to the cloud, was interesting (and scary!).

I know it doesn't seem like much, but remember, the majority of the content was similar to what was presented last October at OpenWorld, so check out my last review to find out more.


Human Task and ADF: How-to
Harold Dost III, Senior Consultant, Raastech

Harold presents a live demo creating an ADF based form to handle Human Tasks in Oracle SOA Suite 11g. Unfortunately, both the presentation and the abstract should have had some reference to Oracle SOA Suite 11g, as Human Task is one of the many components of this suite.

What I learned:

• You do not have to rely on the awful BPM Worklist to be the UI that users navigate to manage workflow actions.
• The ADF custom developed workflow management forms can be hosted externally or embedded within the BPM Worklist.
• Seeing a live (working) demo and walkthrough is always welcome and enhances the understanding.

This is a presentation that's mostly geared towards Oracle SOA Suite developers or those who rely on Human Task for workflow purposes. Since it's an area I specialize in, it is of particular interest to me.

There you have it. Four under-recognized yet excellent presentations at Collaborate 14, and ones that I'm extremely glad I attended.

Ahmed Aboulnaga interviewed in Oracle Magazine

Ahmed Aboulnaga, Technical Director at Raastech, appeared in the March/April issue of Oracle’s flagship magazine. With a subscribership of around 550,000, Oracle Magazine provides unique viewpoints on business and technology. The Peer-to-Peer article, on page 27, by Blair Campbell titled "All for One", features Ahmed (Oracle ACE) alongside Lakshmi Sampath (Oracle ACE) from Dell and  Bjoern Rost (Oracle ACE Director) from Portrix Systems and highlights the different ways groups can motivate and inspire.

Ahmed, having 18 years experience working with Oracle products, discusses why whiteboards are his favorite tool for fostering teamwork and collaboration, where he would like to see Oracle go in the future, and more. Below is a link to the current issue.

Link to current issue:

http://www.raastech.com/raastech/library/OracleMagazineQ12014.pdf

To subscribe to Oracle Magazine:

http://www.submag.com/sub/oc?pk=OTNRHL

Link to digital edition (subscription required):

http://www.oraclemagazine-digital.com/oraclemagazine/march_april_2014#pg30

Online article:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/issue-archive/2014/14-mar/o24peer-2147189.html

Oracle ACE Program:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oracle-ace/index.html

Ahmed’s Oracle ACE profile:
https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=19297:4:0::NO:4:P4_ID:6700