Honestly, sparing no expense or time, this was the first time I attended a professional conference abroad. I don't regret it.
The size and organization of the event, as well as the number of attendees and presentations, far exceeded anything I had seen before.
There were talks happening simultaneously in at least eight locations, and judging by the crowd, there were quite a
few thousand of us.
I would basically categorize the talks into four groups: corporate culture, cloud, buy our product, and technology.
Cally Beaton, a media expert, gave a talk on how important corporate diversity is, what problems it can be a source of, yet how diversity can nonetheless increase creativity through collaboration.
Another talk revealed that when a company has people from several different cultures, performance increases by 33%; when the ratio of men and women is good (I hope that's what gender diverse means), we can book an extra 15% growth, and by the way, 70% of the English prefer to buy products from companies where all kinds of minorities work.
I've encountered the owner of Illy Cafe in several places as someone who uses Oracle products. Safra Catz (Oracle CEO) talked with him about the "revolutionary" changes that took place at his company after adopting Oracle's - of course, strictly cloud-based - products.
Well, their coffee really is delicious.
The closing talk was very interesting, where English astronaut Tim Peake walked us through the process of selection, preparation, launch, everyday life on the space station, and landing. I didn't quite understand how this connected to the conference topic, but I liked it a lot.
But what's really close to my heart is Oracle Application Express. Fortunately, I had the chance to listen to Marc Sewtz's talk; he leads a hundred-person team in New York developing this excellent product. I didn't need convincing.
What his talk did convince me of, though, is that anyone using this product to meet any kind of business need has boarded a good train :-).
