Quistor @Oracle CloudWorld Tour London

Last week 8 intrepid Quistorians from the UK & BeNeLux attended Oracle’s CloudWorld Tour at the London ExCel. The venue, its size and scale, never ceases to amaze me. Cloud computing is well established and yet it does not stay still, rather we continue to see innovations in this space, so it was a welcome return to witness Oracle’s flagship Cloud tour event come to London.

This was the perfect chance for Oracle, Oracle Customers, and fellow partners to get together to experience thought leadership from Oracle and to meet and network those we only speak to on video links. As many of you know, our focus over the past few years has grown beyond #OracleJDE to #Oracle Infrastructure as a Service, #Oracle Platform as a Service, #Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, #Oracle Analytics Cloud and NetSuite, so this was an important event.

The agenda was packed with a strong keynote from Safra Catz, CEO Oracle. But this keynote was different. Often the keynote speaker dominates the first 30-45 mins expelling the virtues and successes of their respective organisations products; instead Safra basically handed the floor to Oracle’s customers.

Our takeaway were two key Digitalisation themes running (1) how Oracle are stronger with their Partners and (2) the abundance of customer stories sharing the experience of digital transformation by bringing together data from across their organisations, leveraging the power of technology to drive change, thorough faster, more granular data. Again, the emphasis from the customer stories, was business impact and how data is used rather than a discussion on the
technology itself. Below are the 4 speakers and organisations from the keynote:

• Anna Manz, CFO, London Stock Exchange = changing the way data is used
• Nicole Clayton, Global Digital Officer, Nestle Nespresso SA = extending to end users
• Simon Goodman, Group CIO, Network Rail = act faster with real time data
• Jessica Ohrblad, CEO Logivity, Volvo Group = reducing waste; white space in transportation

“Partnership is the new leadership.” This message courtesy of Safra Catz is about how in today’s world organisations that are sharing data with other organisations and working together to achieve success can lead the market. We see this every day, we know our customers appreciate a true partnership when we work on projects together, and we know from our research and education customers the importance of using open data and open technologies. A
good recent example is Oracle’s partnership with Nvidia, this deep partnership see’s Nvidia using OCI to deliver its powerful AI platform and in turn this improves access to Nvidia’s leading GPU’s for OCI’s customers.

“Data is putting organisations in the driving seat.” Another key message from Safra, the abundance of data that is being generated is enabling business innovations and allowing for greater control and almost real time decision making. Quistor can help take raw data and turn it into actionable insights with our Oracle Analytics Cloud consultancy.

Before Safra Catz, came our own customer success story, just off the main hall with over 70 people attending. Our Kenny Claessens, Account Manager BeNeLux joined Lex van der Schoor, IT Manager and his team, from Interfood. The compelling story covered Interfood’s rational and strategy for their journey to a multi-cloud platform. After moving their #OracleJDE application to OCI, they went on to explain how this opened doors to new opportunities. Rather than spoil the story here, please follow this link to our site.

There were too many smaller customer-experience sharing sessions throughout the day to cover here, so I will focus on the 2 guest speakers during the Built To Win session at conference close, Christian Horner (Team Principal, Oracle Red Bull Racing, F1) and Gary Neville (Football Punit and ex Manchester United player).

Gary admitted that the FA, EFL and associated football organisations were slow to adopt the technology being used elsewhere in sport but now the journey has started Fans are loving the ability to get statistics straight from Premiership Games.

Although Christian focused, like the other customers, on what the power of the technology is delivering for F1, I thought it appropriate to share the Oracle Products here for context.

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (yes it can do much more than host an ERP system!)
• Oracle Analytics Cloud
• Oracle Data Science Platform
• Oracle CX

In 2022, Red Bull Racing used Oracle Cloud to run billions of race simulations during the season, allowing the team to optimize the car setup prior to the start of each race, and to make more informed strategic calls while they’re on the track. In fact, the team says it was able to run 25% more simulations thanks to Oracle Cloud, giving race strategists more timely inputs to consider.

Recognizing that its fans are engrossed by these technology-driven changes, Oracle Red Bull Racing has been feeding that interest, even during the winter break, by using modern technology to engage its fans. One of the ways Oracle Red Bull Racing is connecting more closely with its fans is through a new loyalty program called The Red Bull Racing Paddock. The strategy behind The Paddock is to provide fans with a way of feeling closer to the team. It does this by sharing content that is available exclusively to members and then rewarding members’ ongoing engagement with redeemable points.

In summary, a conference that focused on the business impact rather than pure technology – great.