Posted by The OTN tour came to APAC this year, so it’s been a pleasure and privilege to be able to participate in some of the legs. Being Perth born and bred, I know all too well that any travel to Australia from … well… anywhere except Australia, is a long haul, so I’m very grateful to the array of overseas speakers who gave up their time and comfort to make the journey.
My first stop was Sydney and I was glad to get back there for a few reasons. One of them was to catch up with family and offload, oops, I mean “share” my young boys with their grandmother. The highlight of the trip for them of course was travelling back home to Perth unaccompanied 🙂
But another reason Sydney appealed to me was that even though there is a large Oracle community, somehow it has always been a struggle to get events there. So to have a full day of content, with all rooms full of enthusiastic attendees was a highlight.
One change I am noticing and am particularly grateful for, is the growing willingness of Australian audiences to participate and engage in presentations. In most of my time as a speaker, or attendee, at Australian conference it has always been the norm for the audience to “bear silent witness” to the topic being presented. But we seem to (finally) be undergoing a shift toward accepting that speakers are just IT professionals like ourselves, and there is a growing confidence to share ideas, interact, and engage in conversation. I hope this trend continues – after all, it is probably the meeting of minds, networking of common goals and experiences that is of more value than anything else at these events. I think of as being similar to AskTom – the ability to share and collective solve the challenges of software.
Next stop was the Gold Coast, and similarly, there was a relaxed yet enthusiastic audience. At both cities, I’ve been talking about 12.2 and Exadata Cloud Express. If you’re keen to get a look at 12.2, but don’t have the time or in-house facilities readily available, then this is a great way to do it. You simply sign up, download a credential file and voila…a 12.2 database is yours ready to go. (I’ve got a small blog post here showing how easy it is).
A big thanks also to the Ace Program and Francisco Alvarez who invested so much time and effort into making this run so smoothly and successfully.
Learning is not a spectator sport 