Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Oracle Open World 2016 from a PeopleSofter point of view: Sunday 18th and Monday 19th

In every crisis there is an opportunity.

This is what I thought as I woke up for the second day in a row before 2.30am due to my jet lag here in San Francisco. So I decided to use this marvellously quiet time to write my first blog article about my experience here at Oracle Open World 2016.

Sunday was good to warm up our engines. We completed the event registration. I am saying we because as I was very lucky to come here with two of my colleagues (César García Galán and Carmen Larrumbide) plus Daniel Plaza from Consum.


Unfortunately I missed Sasank Vemana's session on Sunday morning on hacks for PeopleSoft Development. I read on Twitter that it was a great session. On Monday I had the opportunity to meet Sasank personally and it is easy to see he has a lot of knowledge share (you can check his blog for some samples).

Then I attended a very interesting session on PeopleSoft HCM Networking [SIG7845] conducted by Christina Yue from the Quest International User Group. I found this session very valuable, mainly because of customers' willingness to share their experiences and challenges with PeopleSoft HCM.

Next on the menu was the welcome keynote featuring Larry Ellison among others. There is no much point in me describing the contents as you can access the recorded keynote here. Attending his keynotes is always an interesting experiences. Two things surprised me in this case:

  • The number of times he mentioned Workday as a way to compare Oracle Cloud Application growth against theirs. I have attended the same opening keynote two years ago, and it is surprising how much the time dedicated to hit Workday increased. I guess this is the ultimate recognition of the strength of the competition between them, which I think it is good for the industry.
  • The focus on making Oracle a leading provider of Infrastructure as a Service, directly competing with Amazon Web Services. This will be a tough one for Oracle from my point of view, but one thing you cannot deny about Larry is that he is never shy on the challenges he picks.
Monday was more intense from a PeopleSoft point of view. I have attended a couple of general sessions in which you could sense that on premise applications like PeopleSoft are totally secondary in Oracle applications strategy. Still, I have to say that the PeopleSoft team at Oracle did a great job putting up a great sessions agenda for this event. So kudos for Marc Weintraub and the rest of the PeopleSoft team at Oracle.

There is no better event guide for Oracle Open World as a PeopleSoft professional than the session held by Marc Weintraub and Greg Parikh: PeopleSoft Talk Live! Your Event Guid [CON7031]. This gave a quick overlook of what are going to be the hot topics regarding PeopleSoft in this event, of which I have noted:
  • Elastic Search
  • Cloud Manager
  • Fluid interface
  • Selective adoption
Also some interesting announcements were made. I've particularly found interesting the launch of Spotlight Series videos giving in-depth reviews of certain topics. You can find them in PeopleSoft Information Portal. Another very interesting announcement is that sample PeopleSoft Test Framework scripts will be delivered with PeopleSoft images from now on. You can check this in My Oracle Support.

Just a bit later, I attended the great Graham Smith session on PeopleSoft Cloud Architecture and its Practical Applications and Use Cases [CON3672]. I have always been a fan of Graham's PeopleSoft blog, so being able to attend one of his sessions was a great experience. There are more of his sessions to come, so this is just the beginning!

My day ended with our own session about how we improved User Experience through the use of PeopleSoft Fluid [CON2405]. This was my first experience presenting at Oracle Open World and it certainly was a great one. I would like to thank Consum and Daniel Plaza for giving us the opportunity of sharing the lessons learned in our Fluid project with them in this session.


The only thing I regret about speaking at Oracle Open World is that our session was at the same time Jim Marion's one: Getting the Most of PeopleSoft: PeopleSoft PeopleTools Tips and Techniques [CON7070]. I guess it was a great one as usual. I can't wait until his presentation is released in the conference site!

This is all for today. Stay tuned for other updates. I would prefer sleeping a bit more, but acceptance is the way to happiness.






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