Oracle travels around the world

Oracle CloudWorld has officially started its world tour. The tour is bringing some of the most popular sessions and labs from the Las Vegas global conference to 5 cities around the globe: London, São Paulo, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Tokyo.

The London event has just finished, and we’re bringing you the highlights.

Day one  – Oracle Partner Success Forum

As it is already customary, whenever Oracle brings together top partners from our region, they organize a Partner Success Forum that usually precedes the main event. It was the same with this event, and the partner forum was held on Tuesday

Partners driving transformation

Partner Success Summit kicked off with a Transformation panel by Havovi Yazdabadi, Oracle’s VP of technology alliances & channels for EMEA, and Doug Smith, Senior VP, Head of strategic partnerships and global partner ecosystem.

Havovi and Doug discussed how partners are the ones at the forefront, engaging with customers, seeing both the capabilities of Oracle technology as well as the boundaries. This allows them to extend those technologies into many different areas. Doug invited Oracle Partners to be watchful of the repeatable opportunities and bring them to Oracle’s attention. This process has already made it possible to co-develop 40 industry solutions for different industries, such as finance, healthcare, manufacturing and retail.

Innovation in OCI

Next was the Innovation panel with Debbie Green, COO for Oracle applications, Rajan Krishnan, VP of Oracle product development and Clay Magouyrk, Executive VP in charge of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure product strategy, engineering, technical operations, and customer success.

This panel focused more on technology and how OCI can provide significant benefits for SaaS clients, for example, 30% improvement in performance security at every level and 99.9% availability, as Rajan stated.

Clay continued that the conversations they have been having with customers are not about one piece of cloud or individual technology pieces, but about solving business problems. In that sense, what they both see in the future is enabling partners to become cloud operators themselves.

The panellists touched on the topic of multi-cloud, and how Oracle has been investing heavily in enabling customers to have different technologies available right next to existing workloads.

Next level support for partners

The final panel of the day was the Executive Leadership panel with Dough Kehring, Executive VP of corporate operations at Oracle, Richard Smith, Executive VP of technology for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and Cormac Watters, Executive VP for EMEA applications.

In a rather relaxed atmosphere, the three VPs talked about the shift in Oracle’s perspective of success from profit towards customer satisfaction. They announced the launch of the Oracle Customer Success Services Organization in the new fiscal year, with the goal to make sure every one of their partners is successful.

The event concluded with a Listen and Share deep dive parallel sessions with local A&C teams and global speakers, followed by a networking reception.

Day two – Oracle CloudWorld Tour Opening Keynote

The Oracle CloudWorld Tour opened with a Keynote Driving Impactful Business Results, hosted by Oracle CEO Safra Catz. The conversation with her guests was focused on how they solved their most complex problems with Oracle, with a strong focus on data.

Safra’s first guest was Nicole Clayton, Global Chief Digital Officer at Nespresso. Nicole explained how Nespresso’s focus is on democratizing data, breaking the data silos and making sure to unlock the full power of data across their organization. The main lesson she shared with the audience was about being flexible to ensure success. Namely, should the data differ from your planned path, it is ok to pivot and shift direction based on that data

Second on the stage was Simon Goodman, Group Chief Information Officer from Network Rail. Simon talked about moving deep legacy systems from on-premises to cloud, and how that enabled Network Rail to develop solutions that improve customer experience and ensure safety and reliability. Working in cloud enabled them to move from being reactive towards being able to predict events and save money by better identifying the exact location of a fault and fixing it more quickly.

Next was Anna Manz, CFO at the London Stock Exchange Group, who talked about digital transformation through automation and streamlining. As Anna explained, the London Stock Exchange group grew through acquisition, which left their internal processes completely muddled. They used data to understand their customers’ needs and changed their processes accordingly. Anna highlighted that prior to implementing new processes into the system, there had to exist a deep understanding of why this is necessary, accompanied by behavioural change. In the end, the entire process led to revenue acceleration.

The final guest on the stage was Jessica Öhrblad, CEO of Logivity with the Volvo Group. Jessica explained that one of the major drivers for Volvo’s transformation is climate change, and one of their approaches to tackling the challenge was to increase utilization of vehicles. Hence, they developed Logivity, a digital ecosystem that supports sharing of transport data between different stakeholders in the transportation process. This enables flexibility and transparency. Jessica finished by saying that sustainability is the biggest drive for transformation and innovation, but it requires sharing data.

Beyond the Public Cloud

During his session, Clay Magouyrk, the same Clay from the Innovation panel on the Partner Success Forum, talked about major product announcements in OCI. Following a holistic approach to solving users’ cloud infrastructure issues, Oracle has made a lot of intentional investments into the breadth and depth of their offerings. With over 40 regions (and more on the way), the focus is on the types of regions available, such as national security regions.

Clay goes on to explaining that Oracle workloads are actually far more diverse than people think and offer a high level of functionality for the most demanding workloads. For example, Subaru is running high performance computing workloads using computational fluid dynamics on their platform to design their next generation of cars. FedEx is using custom analytics, Oracle database and their SaaS apps to manage their worldwide distribution.

He was joined on stage by Matt Cadieux, CIO of Oracle Red Bull Racing, to discuss how Red Bull Racing uses OCI for race strategy and simulations, and then later by Pedro Sardo, Vodafone’s IT Operations and Technology Centres Director. Pedro discussed their motivation to opt in for Oracle Dedicated Region and how they benefited from that.

Clay continued to talk about Oracle Alloy, a new platform announced during CloudWorld in Las Vegas. It is a platform that enables other companies to become cloud providers and roll out new cloud services to their customers.

CloudWorld tour continues

The rest of the day was packed with content that makes one think about how they can take advantage of all the different things Oracle brings to the table.

And while the London leg of the tour is over, there are still four dates and locations where you can catch these amazing speakers live.