Author: Jen Thomson, Associate Consultant, Namos Solutions
Myself and fellow Associate Consultant, Bhavya Batra were chosen for Oracle’s Freshtalent programme this year, which is a tailored Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) programme designed to help people new to the field get their heads around Oracle Cloud. In this blog series, I will explain what the sessions were all about!
Day 1
Oracle’s Partner Development Manager, Anne Hornborg-Franck who had organised the event began by introducing us to some Game Masters!! Was this going to be some kind of IQ test, with me being declared unfit for purpose? Thankfully, because we were divided into groups, my ignorance could be concealed under the guise of ‘Teamwork’!
As with any break out room activity there were the usual technical problems, but before long we soon got started with our first task, which included numbers, shapes, and confusing hints, but we worked well as a team and once we got warmed up we were away. I thought we may have been in with a chance of winning, but two questions from the finish line and another team had been crowned the winners; unfortunately my digital self will be locked in the escape room for all eternity!
After we had recovered from overusing our brains, we sat back to listen to Faruk Jazic, Oracle’s Sales Director of Applications, who introduced us to the Oracle SaaS products and how he likes to promote the solutions to potential clients. ‘Oracle eats what they sell’ he said, referring to Oracle’s ability to build everything in-house, as opposed to many other tech firms, which rely heavily on third-party vendors to run their business.
Day 2
Next up was Oracle’s Director of Partner Development and Advisory, Sarkis Kerkezian who spoke to us about Solutions vs. Requirements. I had attended a similar talk of his last month, where he was evangelising that we must ‘Show’ and ‘Tell’ rather than ‘Ask’ and ‘Do’ to minimise client requests for customisations. We must keep them focused on the product while also aligning them with Oracle’s Modern Best Practices.
He likened the SaaS model to renting a house, you are paying for the rent, so you want to get the house ready and enjoyable to use as soon as possible to make the most of your tenancy. Because this is not a plug and play product there is a lot of configuration we need to do, so a rapid time to value is our challenge as implementors.
Sarkis discussed the two main development methodologies which are agile and waterfall. Which one to use is heavily dependant on the nature of the project and the circumstances. This, I feel, supports what I’ve heard from my colleagues at Namos, that it needs to be a little bit of both in reality, as running an implementation strictly as waterfall or agile causes problems.
We were then shown all of the learning paths and given homework to read both of the Modern Best Practice e-books and to finish a number of the Oracle learning paths, so I better get started…
Watch out for the next instalment of this blog series, in which I begin Day 3 and learn everything I can about Oracle architecture, cloud environment and operation basics, consulting abilities, and PaaS4SaaS!
About Namos Solutions
Namos Solutions are an award-winning Oracle OPN Modernised Partner specialising in the implementation and support of ERP, EPM and HCM business solutions, both in the Cloud and on-premise.
Although based in central London, we work wherever our clients need us to be. Many leading organisations located all over the world trust and rely on our expertise to deliver industry-leading business solutions. Namos customers can currently be found in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, North America and Africa.
For more information, please visit www.namossolutions.com or email info@namossolutions.com.
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