Category Archives: LinkedIn

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Becoming an Oracle Ace

09 Monday Oct 2017

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On Friday 29th September, 2 days before the commencement of Oracle’s most important event of the year – OpenWorld whilst attending the Oracle Partner Advisory Council I received word that I had been promoted to a full Oracle Ace.

For those not working in the Oracle ecosystem this is comparable to being confirmed as a Microsoft MVP, a SAP Mentor or Java Champion. These schemes recognize contributions made by non employees to the community and the parent company itself. These contributions range across public speaking, articles for journals, helping through the various community sites and blogging among others. Hoist the accreditation is based on contribution, to be a successful contributor you need to be deeply knowledgable in your specialisms.

The importance of the Ace recognition is important for my employer (Capgemini) and for myself for different reasons. For an employer the association of expertise can be a key value propositions, and some Oracle partners actually use the number of Aces they employee as a key part of their differentiator and market proposition. Secondly, being out communicating with the community raises brand awareness increasing the chances of both sales but also make the company more attractive as a potential employer. Finally, through participating with in events you get to know product managers and other scenario Oracle people. As a result, when additional support and engagement is needed you have the contacts to draw on. But is not just help, the opportunity to contribute to product development exists. In many respects this can become a virtuous circle – the more you do the more opportunities open up, the more you can do.

For me personally the Ace programme is a very friendly embracing community that whilst can be commercially competitive is very mutually supportive. This combined with the fact that the culture of sharing knowledge is actively encouraged, supported and acknowledgement of those efforts is always satisfying.

In the middleware space there are less than 50 active Oracle Aces of all grades globally. Four of those are in the UK  Luis Weir (Ace Director – Capgemini), Simon Haslam (Ace Director – eProseed), Mark Simpson (Ace Director – Griffiths Waite) and myself. I am also fortunate enough to count all three as friends.

Information Privacy

07 Tuesday Sep 2010

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I attended Ovum’s briefing Information Privacy & Protection in London today.  One of the presentations included the use of a rather effective video below, to help illustrate the data security considerations and numbers of channels data could now leak through.

In addition to that, there was a very good presentation from Alexander Hanff from Privacy International (http://www.privacyinternational.org/). Without any slides or other media to assist, Aexander’s presentation was very good, getting his points across about current privacy considerations going beyond just the Data Protection Act, but also what is likely to happen with the update, EA efforts, the impact of privacy concerns such as those around smart advertising by solutions such as Phorm (which may well end up filling for Chapter 11). Although Privacy International is very much a campaigning organisation in the vain of EFF, the presentation I thought was well balanced and not a ‘big corporate bashing’ view.

I think the only issue I had that Alexander mentioned is during a question and answer session, is that when recruiting you should not take into consideration any public posting potential job candidates have made on a social networking site, he is correct to say a case (in Germany I think) may have made a president. If the post is public, I would argue it is fair game (and comparable if questionable statement was printed in the traditional media). If Alexander’s view is to stand, then the value of LinkedIn for example is dead in the water as you can’t use such a site to assist in recruitment. Yet LinkedIn is a way of advertising yourself as potentially approachable for work.

It is a shame that there doesn’t appear to be a podcast of a similar style presentation – as it would serve well as a wake up call, to those complaicent about privacy.