RDB Consulting at Oracle OpenWorld 2012
By Antoinette Naude and Leon Rossouw, Oracle Database Consultants at RDB Consulting
I recently had the privilege of attending Oracle’s OpenWorld 2012 event, held in San Francisco in September. Attended by over 30 000 delegates from all over the world, the event is the world’s largest conference for Oracle customers and technologists.
Joined by Leon Rossouw, also an Oracle Database Consultant at RDB Consulting, the event gave us the opportunity to obtain first hand information on current trends and learn more about Oracle’s latest technology innovations.
This will benefit our clients as we can now impart our newly acquired knowledge and skills to them. It also provided us with the occasion to network and expose the RDB Consulting brand to the global market.
We have both attended the local Oracle User Forum previously, but the global event was in a league of its own. It allowed us to see just how big the brand and the industry we work in really is. The event was exceptionally well organised, and I think it is something every Oracle consultant should experience at least once in their career. 
A highlight for us was being part of the audience when Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, gave a presentation on where Oracle is heading in the next year.
One of the key messages from this was that the future is all about the cloud. Other keynotes were presented by major clients of Oracle including Audi, Fujitsu and PayPal. These presentations gave us excellent insight into how Oracle’s various products can be used across industries to deliver world-class service.
The workshops gave us a better view and understanding of how Oracle’s solutions can be applied in new scenarios and function in other industries, such as the automotive sector. We also learned a great deal about how Oracle’s hardware and software is engineered to work together.
Our customers will benefit from our attendance at Oracle OpenWorld, as we now have a more holistic understanding of upcoming Oracle technologies and how these can be applied to deliver value to our clients.
We also gained an understanding of new features in the latest releases of Oracle software. We crammed in a lot of sessions to get as much technical input as we could, and are looking forward to taking this knowledge back to our customers.