Month: June 2006

This week I went to the North American sales meeting. Now, I’ve been to
other sales meetings so I knew what to expect. I brought my own straw
so that I could drink the kolaid at my own pace. Man was there a
variety of flavors. I work on the Tech side of the house and didn’t
realize that there was a just as powerful Applications division. I’m
glad that there is a division like this. I’m not sure that I could be a
generalist for both sides of the house.

It was interesting hearing about the new versions of products that have
been announced that no one else in the office has had time to research
or learn much about. I am personally excited about the Record DB and
Data Valut DB products. They both offer substantial value to companies
and I understand the application. The Record DB product offers a
significant tool to help with acquisitions and mergers. It allows users
to categorize documents and emails and reduce the time required for
legal discovery. This reduced time results in a quicker acquisition
time as well as reduced legal cost. I think that I am going to start
learning this product because I understand the concept as well as the
application.

My biggest task in the next few weeks will be to understand the sales
process and how to talk to everyone else in the organization about
potential deals and processes. At the same time I also need to learn
the products and market potential for the products. Since this is
something that I know nothing about, it will be exciting to learn. I’m
not looking forward to sitting in training but would prefer to view
webcasts or review training class material without having to sit
through five days of material. I think that I am going to request the
materials and try to review the material and get to know who the
experts in the office and area are so that I can pepper them with
questions. I am going to try to do this instead of sitting in a
classroom for five weeks to attend the classes that I want to attend.

One question that I do have….. is the certification process and
database administrator certification carry any value? I got the Solaris
9 certification and it didn’t help me but it did help the reseller that
I worked for.

more later. I will try to make these updates a little more often. I
didn’t have access to the internet while at the sales meeting other
than the kiosks provided in the comman area at the conference. later….

I just started this week at Oracle as a Systems Architect in the
Houston office. In this blog I will record my journey of learning the
product suite and processes and systems inside of Oracle.

My first impression is that things are very process oriented. There are
two levels of single-sign on that require different passwords, one for
communication/collaboration and one for self service applications
inside the company. I’ve talked about the concept of doing this for
years while I worked for Sun Microsystems and pushed identity software.
I also implemented the foundations of this for Texas A&M University
and Rice University as well as a couple of companies in Houston as a
consultant. It is interesting to see the depths that identity
management and business process management can be implemented.
Everything seems to be checklists and well documented processes. It is
amazing how efficient something like this can make a company. In the
last few companies that I have worked, everything was a manual process.
Automating simple things like direct deposit, getting business cards,
and getting keys for the file cabinets in my office really does
streamline things.

more later. Next week is our national sales meeting. I’m sure I’m in
for long days of listening to people I don’t know while I struggle to
figure out what they are talking about.

p