Oracle Academy Tech Chat

Oracle Academy is Oracle’s philanthropic education program. In this episode we chat with Alice Goodchild, Head of Oracle Women’s Leadership for Europe, Middle East and Africa.  She shares her views on how to inspire girls and women to follow STEM studies and careers, why we need more women in tech, how diverse talent is important to the economy and IT and how Oracle is investing in developing, engaging and empowering current and future generations of women leaders at Oracle.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;28;02
Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders. Of the Future. Let's get started.
 
00;00;28;05 - 00;00;54;27
Welcome to Oracle Academy, pictured where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare a next generation workforce. I'm your host to Oracle Academy Program manager for Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Albania. Crushed by North Macedonia cluster in just a few days. We are celebrating International Women's Day, but numbers don't lie. And that is definitely true when it comes to the number of women in tech.
 
00;00;54;29 - 00;01;25;05
Globally, we see a low percentage of women selecting STEM studies and the percentage drops when it comes to the actual number of women graduating, women entering the market, climbing the hierarchy ladder and becoming tech leaders. How can a company like our approach help women develop their leadership and skills? My guest today is Alice Goodchild, head of Oracle Women's Program for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
 
00;01;25;08 - 00;01;47;00
Alice joined Oracle seven years ago with more than 15 years work and experience as a senior aides or business partner in companies of the IP and investment banking sectors and is currently based in UK but has a long living and working experience in countries like Japan, France, Spain and Australia. Alice, welcome.
 
00;01;47;02 - 00;01;50;15
Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you today.
 
00;01;50;17 - 00;01;55;21
Thank you. Please give our audience a bit of out of your background, then your role at Oracle.
 
00;01;55;24 - 00;02;27;09
Absolutely. Thank you. So I am the head of Oracle Women's Leadership for the Europe, Middle East and Africa Region, a hugely diverse region with over 50 countries represented at Oracle and Oracle women's leadership. Well, it started as a grassroots initiative in 2006 and has now grown organically into a global strategic program dedicated to the leadership and professional development of Oracle women across the world.
 
00;02;27;12 - 00;02;59;23
And we started off with a few communities in certain countries, and now we have over 120 Oracle women's leadership communities across the globe, which is quite incredible. And in AMEA, the region I represent and we have 40 communities across 35 countries. And in terms of our team structure, we are a global team of eight. And we also have an executive steering committee for Oracle Women's Leadership.
 
00;02;59;23 - 00;03;26;11
So we have very strong support from our senior leaders. And I remember when I saw this role advertised, I was working as a business partner in a telco organization and I saw the role and I was like, I can't believe they've got a program dedicated to Oracle or to women's leadership. And I honestly think that I've got the best job at Oracle.
 
00;03;26;11 - 00;03;29;29
So that's a bit of my background for you.
 
00;03;30;01 - 00;04;00;03
I have to say that Oracle is one of the leading IP companies that they invest a lot in, in diversity and inclusion and of course in the women's development program. But if we want to go a bit back, how would we attract more women and girls to to study STEM subjects and to pursue careers in the technology industry?
 
00;04;00;06 - 00;04;20;13
Great question. I think there are a number of different ways in which we could do that, but I think I'm going to focus just on a couple of them, if that's okay. And I think for me, the first the first way that we could could attract more women and girls to study STEM subjects is through more. Having more role models.
 
00;04;20;13 - 00;04;47;25
And I guess if I take girls first and we can talk about role models, but they could be in terms of, you know, the school children, in terms of toys or books or literature, you know, making sure that there are resources for young children to show that there you know, there are roles and opportunities and leaders for you know, for women.
 
00;04;47;27 - 00;05;24;28
I think that's really important. And we we need to think about all curriculums across the globe as well. So to have a broader digital curriculum, which is relevant to everybody and I think also for girls in in particular, it's very important to show that there's such a, you know, there is such a huge variety in tech jobs. So and it could yes, it could be coding, but it also there are, you know, user experience or, you know, lots of different roles within tech that mean a different different skill sets could be used.
 
00;05;24;28 - 00;05;59;19
So actually an ad or at Oracle, we have a program, a Spanish Oracle women's leadership team have created Oracle for Girls. So that's really about getting girls aged 4 to 16 really excited about the cool technology that there is and building kind of a sense of community amongst those girls that, you know, and seeing these role models that they can consider that tech might be somewhere where they would want to explore further with their studies as they get older.
 
00;05;59;22 - 00;06;36;14
And then I think role models, you know, from a from an organizational point of view, I wonder many of the people listening might have heard of the term the only. But there are so many examples where women are still the only woman in their team, in their company, potentially in their organizations, or part of a project team. So it's it's it's really, you know, for those women in particular that serve all women, it's really important to have role models in the organizations to be able to see someone who looks like you.
 
00;06;36;14 - 00;07;04;03
That's been successful, that's faced different challenges. But you know that, you know, you can progress and will be supported and have the right environment to progress within that particular organization and have the right culture to enable you to do that. And that comes down also to organizations having the right policies and practices really to ensure that their, you know, their environments are inclusive.
 
00;07;04;05 - 00;07;37;29
And I think you know, tying in to this as well is this sense of fostering a community and belonging and community is extremely important in terms of attracting anyone to to work for organizations or to study particular subjects and enabling a culture, an environment of belonging is really important to attracting more women and girls to study and to pursue careers in the I.T. industry.
 
00;07;38;02 - 00;07;52;15
So talking about the community and ecosystems, corporate ecosystems, why do we need more women than we think need this approach?
 
00;07;52;17 - 00;08;20;10
Well, you know, Eleanor, I think, you know, overall, we need more people in tech, as you outlined at the beginning, this massive skills shortages and the tech industry is shaping our world and shaping the future. So, you know, we really need to think about that. But the as we know, the proportion of women working in technologies is going, moving, increasing, but at a very glacial pace.
 
00;08;20;10 - 00;08;50;09
So we do we do really need to consider how to get more women into tech. I had I read the other day a recent report published in the UK by the Professional body for computing, and it said it was going to take 283 years before women make up an equal share of the workforce in the UK. And we need the gender gap in I.T. to close much more quickly.
 
00;08;50;12 - 00;09;20;09
The pace of technology, the pace of change. We we just can't be moving that slowly. So I think, you know, for organizations, we need our emerging tech like artificial intelligence to reflect the society that we that we live in. And we you know, the tech helps our industry innovate and rise to the needs of society in a meaningful and responsible way.
 
00;09;20;11 - 00;09;59;20
So and I think for for women, it's really important. The tech tech, there are brilliant career opportunities in the tech industry and we need women in the and much more kind of diverse employee bases to bring different perspectives to help teams work differently, to empower them to solve problems differently. And, you know, we need it's all about kind of ensuring that our workforce and our people with expertise are reflective of the societies that we live in today.
 
00;09;59;20 - 00;10;12;07
And there are 51% of women across the globe so that, you know, we should we should be reflecting their needs in the tech industry because that is what's shaping our future.
 
00;10;12;09 - 00;10;37;29
So being already almost seven years with our women's leadership and talking about the need for the community and for the things and for the companies, what would you say are the benefits of having a strategic program like Oracle Women's Leadership.
 
00;10;38;02 - 00;11;17;11
That many benefits actually. And I think if I start from the level of business support. So as you mentioned, this is a strategic program and we have buy in from all CEOs, suffocates and active support of our senior executives and the impact of that on the organization is is critical because it demonstrates that our leadership teams are invested in increasing the diversity and inclusion of our organization and creating an environment where everybody can belong.
 
00;11;17;14 - 00;11;53;03
And when you create that environment for an organization, the benefits are huge. You do become a place where people want to work. You want to attract more diverse employees, you retain more diverse employees. And through that, you know, we we can deliver to our customers, which is really important. You know, we can be more innovative because we have more diverse thinking in our organization, more diverse perspectives, and we're better placed to meet our customers needs and expect exceed their expectations.
 
00;11;53;06 - 00;12;28;19
I also think a huge benefit of having a program like Oracle women's leadership is that it increases collaboration. Oracle's a massive organization around 170,000 employees globally, and a program like Oracle Women's Leadership crosses all employees, all lines of business, and that gives huge opportunity for collaboration and for knowledge sharing, you know, for individuals developing their own knowledge bases and and increasing their skills.
 
00;12;28;21 - 00;12;56;15
I also think there's a huge benefit because having a strategic program like this is it's a data driven program. We we know we we can link in with external research such as the McKinsey Women in the Workplace study. And we can understand from that study of corporate America that there is still a huge challenge with this. What they class is the broken rung that first step up to manager level.
 
00;12;56;20 - 00;13;40;26
And we can then take those insights and look at the data Oracle and, you know, really develop programs that meet the needs and supports our employees and we I would say kind of the one of the biggest overall benefits is around our alignment with our diversity and inclusion strategy more broadly. And this offers so many opportunities to drive that sense of belonging that I'm, you know, I feel passionately about to to work together with other internal groups and organizations to truly create that inclusive culture, to help everybody to thrive.
 
00;13;40;26 - 00;14;10;24
And and I guess in a program like ARC, women's leadership, finally, you know, that helps create a pride in amongst so many people in the organization that you work for. You know, we recently received an award as one of the Forbes 2023 best Employers for Women, and that's helps create that sense of pride and commitment to diversity inclusion more broadly.
 
00;14;10;27 - 00;14;42;20
As you mentioned, the role is is part of Oracle's diversity and inclusion strategy. And next Friday we celebrate International Women's Day, and this year's theme is inspired inclusion. So what actions do you think we can all take to inspire inclusion to create a more gender equal world so that we avoid spending the next almost 300 years trying to catch up.
 
00;14;42;22 - 00;14;44;12
In the UK? It needs to go well.
 
00;14;44;15 - 00;14;47;19
It's pretty much the same in Europe as well.
 
00;14;47;21 - 00;15;23;01
International Women's Day is a massive day of celebration, sharing and reflection at Oracle, and each year we embrace the International Women's Day theme and create and deliver events across all communities wherever they are in the world. So I mean, this theme, the theme this year, Inspire inclusion, is is really saying that when we inspire others to understand and to values value women's inclusion, we forge a better world.
 
00;15;23;01 - 00;15;47;04
So I think there's a number of ways in which any individual could take action within their sphere of influence. And I'm one of those. And, you know, tying so well into Oracle Academies around education and really individuals to take that initiative to educate themselves about gender equality issues and experiences of women in the workplace, that's that's really important.
 
00;15;47;04 - 00;16;17;29
Every every individual is unique and everybody's experiences will be different. So ensuring that you talk to and educate yourself and understand different unique experiences, I would say it would be a really good action to take. We all have the power to be allies, so to be actively support colleagues who are women, to speak up against any bias or micro-aggressions that might manifest themselves, whether that is in our friendship group.
 
00;16;17;29 - 00;17;02;13
So, you know, our learning environments or in organizations as well, and to offer that support and understanding. And I think, you know, finally, it's really important. I think, to amplify the voices so actively listen to women's perspectives, to their experiences, and to make sure their voices are heard. And I, I talked about the concept of the only. So, you know, pay attention is that somebody who is the only in in one of the environments that you're presenting and how can you ensure that their voice is heard?
 
00;17;02;16 - 00;17;23;28
Paul I couldn't agree more. And definitely Oracle Academy is also focusing on making education accessible to all inspiring girls. So as a final question, if you could give one piece of advice to the faculty or students, what would it be?
 
00;17;24;01 - 00;18;19;28
You're making it difficult with one piece of advice, but I'll try and I think my advice would be to to take a look around you and in your faculty or your course in your team, your organization. Is it reflective of the society that you live in? And if not, what can you do within your sphere of influence to impact that, whether it is, you know, amplifying the voice of an underrepresented group or the only that's in the room, or whether that's taking the time to educate yourself or adding elements to a curriculum to ensure that you're showing more examples of women who have been successful within that particular field.
 
00;18;20;00 - 00;18;30;27
I Yes, that would be my advice. Take a look around you and we need our organizations, faculties to represent the society that we live in.
 
00;18;30;29 - 00;19;10;29
Right? So in a sector that faces a massive skills shortage, we definitely need more I.T. professionals and therefore we definitely need to increase the number of women in the sector, their presence, their leadership. It's crucial for the sectors, but also for the economy's growth. And we all can benefit from from the different perspectives and the huge pool of talent that women can bring into the sector.
 
00;19;11;01 - 00;19;55;12
It's certain that we need to go back into schools, into university colleges, adopt the curriculum, change the culture, make it more open, more inclusive, trying to inspire more girls and women through role models, through women that have already succeeded in STEM. So that we can see a more tangible and quick change in society and then, of course, companies need also to invest in developing women's leadership and skills.
 
00;19;55;15 - 00;20;05;22
So that's also the corporate ecosystems can benefit from from them. Thank you all for speaking on women's leadership.
 
00;20;05;22 - 00;20;09;07
Thank you, Linda. It's been my pleasure. And thank you so much for inviting me.
 
00;20;09;12 - 00;20;27;06
To learn more about Oracle Academy and Resources. Visit the Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to encourage girls to get involved and study computer science and support women who aspire to become.
 
00;20;27;09 - 00;20;33;28
That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat Podcast, Host Tyra Crockett Peirce speaks with Bill Mc Michael, Senior Director of Software Development from the Oracle Infrastructure group. Bill and Tyra discuss the construction engineering industry, what it is, and the tools students pursuing a construction engineering career need to know when they step into the workforce.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;27;21
Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started.
 
00;00;27;29 - 00;00;55;12
Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tyra. Today, I'm joined by Bill McMichael, senior director of software development in the Construction and Engineering Industries Group at Oracle. Bill directs product teams responsible for application development and product documentation for portfolio management software applications, including Premiere Therapeutics.
 
00;00;56;05 - 00;01;18;27
Bill has held various development and management positions at Converse Systems prior to its acquisition by Oracle in 2009. He's a B.S. MBA from Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bill is a certified project management professional. Welcome, Bill. So a little bit to start off, and you give me a bit about your background and your role at Oracle.
 
00;01;19;20 - 00;01;45;11
Yeah. Thank you, Tyra. I have a diverse background that encompasses project management and technical ability. My journey with Oracle began through the acquisition of Primavera Systems, a company that specialized in project and portfolio project management software. And currently, I serve as the senior director of software development for Primavera P6, a well-known project management solution in the construction industry.
 
00;01;45;23 - 00;02;11;03
So I've been helping construction companies solve their project and resource planning needs for 35 years. As you mentioned, I hold a PMP certification reflecting my commitment to project management. So my role at Oracle is a unique combination of my construction management and technology expertise. It's a role that's both rewarding and dynamic given the ever changing nature of technology and project management.
 
00;02;11;17 - 00;02;15;17
So my next question what exactly is construction engineering?
 
00;02;15;28 - 00;02;51;11
Well, construction engineering is a specialized field within civil engineering that focuses on the planning, design and execution of construction projects. So a distinction from the broader civil engineering discipline is that construction engineering is a subdiscipline primarily dealing with the on site execution and management of the project. It involves the application of engineering principles to ensure the successful completion of construction projects such as buildings, infrastructure, bridges and much more.
 
00;02;51;26 - 00;03;23;19
Construction engineers play a pivotal role in coordinating various aspects of a project, including cost estimation, project scheduling, quality control and the management of resources and labor. One of the key distinctions of construction engineering is its emphasis on the practical aspects of construction. Construction engineers translate architectural designs and engineering plants in reality. They're responsible that the project is executed safely and within budget.
 
00;03;24;07 - 00;03;52;21
So they're managing issues that arise throughout the project. They're managing the risks. And at the same time, ensuring the quality and integrity of the structures that are being built. In essence, construction engineering is all about applying technical expertise to transform a vision on paper into a working structure, all the while adhering to best practices, regulations and engineering standards.
 
00;03;53;02 - 00;04;01;29
So the field requires a thorough understanding of both engineering principles and construction management, making it a crucial part of the construction industry.
 
00;04;02;09 - 00;04;17;17
That is actually interesting to me. I always thought that civil engineering and construction management are separate, so I. I learn something new, so I'm very grateful for that. So my next question, what are some of the software tools used in construction and sharing?
 
00;04;18;00 - 00;04;47;29
So of course at Oracle we make software tools and my division specifically makes tools for the construction industry. So in the area of construction engineering, Oracle provides a comprehensive suite of software tools designed to optimize construction project management and enhance collaboration. These tools are widely trusted by professionals in the industry, but we offer integrated solutions for various aspects of construction engineering.
 
00;04;48;14 - 00;05;26;18
So let's start with the first class tools I'm going to discuss and that project portfolio management and we have Oracle proof of our P6 and Oracle Primavera Cloud. So the value these tools bring to construction engineering is effective project management, project portfolio software like or Oracle's of P6, allow construction engineers to efficiently manage multiple projects concurrently. It's a centralized platform for project planning, scheduling resource allocations.
 
00;05;28;01 - 00;06;12;17
It helps teams stay organized to meet project deadlines. Another benefit of Primavera is resource optimization. Construction projects often involve a complex web of resources from labor to materials and equipment. So project portfolio software helps optimize that resource allocation, ensuring the resources are used efficiently across all projects. Another benefit includes budget control, risk management and collaboration communication. So in summary, project portfolio software is instrumental in streamlining construction project management.
 
00;06;13;14 - 00;06;46;01
The next tool, it's really an important tool in construction engineering is construction collaboration platform. Construction Collaboration platform such as Oracle connects Oracle EC and AX offers a wide range of capabilities that cater to the specific needs of construction engineering projects. One of them includes document management, so it connects is going to provide a centralized platform for document storage, tracking and version control.
 
00;06;46;13 - 00;07;26;07
There's a lot of documents and in construction, these documents include engineering drawings, specification actions, contracts and reports and other important capability. And it connects is workflow management. It connects, streamlines the approval processes and workflows, ensuring that documents and changes progress through the necessary reviews and approvals efficiently. And another critical capability is transmittal management. It connects simplifies the process of sending and receiving documents and drawings, tracking their status and ensuring they're reaching the intended recipients.
 
00;07;26;17 - 00;07;58;02
Those are just some of the key capabilities of EC can access in a cloud based collaboration platform. Another tool is building information modeling that's referred to as BIM. It's a digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a building or infrastructure. So it's going to provide a detailed, accurate 3D model of a project. It has not only the visual aspects, but other information about the project's materials, spatial relationships and more.
 
00;07;58;24 - 00;08;38;26
It connects, integrates with them tools, facilitating the sharing of 3D models and aiding with design coordination. Another tool probably you would want in your tool chest as a construction engineer is a tool to aid with payment processing. A software like Oracle Tech Store. It simplifies payment processes by automating pay application, Lean waivers and compliance management. In a nutshell, NEXTDOOR helps minimize payment disputes and delays so these Oracle tools cater to the unique needs of construction engineers offering integrated solutions for project management.
 
00;08;39;10 - 00;09;03;25
Document Management Cost control and leveraging BIM technology. Moreover, Oracle Academy partners with top universities to provide students and faculty with the opportunity to learn and apply these construction engineering tools in an educational setting. This partnership ensures the next generation of construction engineers are well prepared with the skills and software tools they need to excel in the industry.
 
00;09;04;06 - 00;09;11;05
That leads to my next question. What are some of the career options for students studying construction engineering?
 
00;09;11;18 - 00;09;40;06
Well, there's a wide range of career options available to someone who studies construction engineering. I'll describe some of the most common and promising career paths. Number one Construction Management. Construction Manager. Construction managers oversee all aspects of construction projects. From planning and budgeting to onsite supervision. They ensure the projects are completed on time within budget and in compliance with quality and safety standards.
 
00;09;41;18 - 00;10;17;25
Second, Common Career Path is a project engineer. Project engineers work closely with construction managers and they assist in the planning and execution of projects. Now they're all often going to focus on a specific aspect of a project such as scheduling, cost control or quality assurance. Another career path is an estimate. Estimates calculate the cost of materials, labor and equipment needed for construction projects, so they play a crucial role in determining the project's budgets.
 
00;10;18;09 - 00;10;55;08
And they help companies with contracts and your various engineering positions. I'll describe a couple of them. One is a site engineer. A site engineer is responsible for the onsite management, including coordinating with subcontractors and ensuring safety protocols are followed and monitoring the project progress. And you have a design engineer. A design engineer works on the technical and structural aspects of construction projects, creating detailed plans and specifications for buildings, bridges and other infrastructure.
 
00;10;57;01 - 00;11;20;28
And then you even have, you know, you have some other, you know, career, such as you could be a construction software specialist with expertise in construction technology, like the tools that we we just discussed a minute ago. Some professionals work a specialist in implementing and using these construction software solutions. So that's just a few of the career options available.
 
00;11;21;09 - 00;11;28;06
It's a diverse range of opportunities and that often depends on the individual's interests, their skills and their career goals.
 
00;11;28;24 - 00;11;37;03
So that leads into my next question. What are some skills that a student pursuing a career in construction, engineering or construction management should have?
 
00;11;37;14 - 00;12;10;20
Well, students pursuing a career in construction engineering should develop a combination of technical, soft and project management skills to be able to excel in the field. So here's just some key skills they should focus on. I would say the top three are technical knowledge project management and communication. So let me talk about technical knowledge. You would want proficiency in construction techniques, methods and materials.
 
00;12;11;12 - 00;12;50;03
You want to understand structural engineering principles. You want to be familiar with construction, soft wear and building information modeling tools. So a lot of the book knowledge you're getting at the universities, you need that strong base of technical knowledge. Second skill set is project management skills. So this includes planning skills, schedule management, resource management and allocation budgeting, cost estimation, risk management, problem solving, exposure to improve and and training to improve.
 
00;12;50;03 - 00;13;18;10
Your project management skills are are very valuable skill to have. And I talked about soft skills. Communication skills. Clear and concise. Written and verbal communication. Being able to effectively collaborate with poly disciplinary teams. Being able to effectively communicate with clients and stakeholders. So there are the top three, but there's some others that I'd like to point out.
 
00;13;20;13 - 00;13;57;24
I think one of the emerging skills you're seeing is environmental and sustainability awareness. So any that you should develop knowledge of green building practices and sustainability principles and just, you know, an overall great skill to have is client customer service. Understand understanding and meeting client expectations, excellent customer service, relationship building skills. So developing these skills will help students become well-rounded construction engineers capable of successfully managing and executing construction projects.
 
00;13;58;03 - 00;14;06;22
Additional continuous learning and staying updated with industry advancements is essential for long term success in this dynamic field.
 
00;14;07;03 - 00;14;12;28
So my last question would be if you could give one piece of advice to faculty, your students, what would it be?
 
00;14;13;12 - 00;14;46;12
Well, Tara, if I could offer one piece of advice to both faculty and students pursuing careers in construction engineering, it would be to embrace lifelong learning and adaptability. The construction industry is constantly evolving with new technologies, sustainable practices, changing regulations. So to excel in this field, it's crucial to stay curious, keep a curious, an open mindset. Continuously seek to expand your knowledge, explore emerging trends in the construction and construction engineering.
 
00;14;47;00 - 00;15;17;16
You need to embrace technology in there. Be comfortable with technology. It's going to continue to play an increasingly significant role in construction. Familiarize yourself with the construction software that we discussed earlier building information, modeling and other technological advancements. You want to network. You want to build and maintain a strong professional network, collaborate with your peers, industry professionals and other experts to gain insights and stay updated.
 
00;15;17;17 - 00;15;49;19
Like listening to podcasts like this. You want to be environmentally conscious, be mindful of sustainable and environmentally friendly construction practices. Sustainability is becoming a key focus in the industry, and the last thing I'll say is just remember that learning is a lifelong journey big by continuously seeking knowledge, adapting to change and remaining committed to professional growth. Both faculty and students can thrive in this dynamic or rewarding field of construction engineering.
 
00;15;50;06 - 00;16;01;09
A big thanks to Bill for giving me an overview of construction engineering. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening.
 
00;16;01;17 - 00;16;10;02
That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

Artificial intelligence or AI is everywhere from movies to healthcare. In this episode, Tyra Crockett Peirce speaks with Oracle database expert Ace Director, Jim Czuprynski, about how AI is changing the jobs of database administrators and the skills that students need to learn if they want to pursue a career as a DBA. 

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;27;21
Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started.
 
00;00;27;29 - 00;00;57;02
Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tyra Crockett. Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., is everywhere, from the movies to health care. In this episode, I speak with Oracle database expert and ace director Jim Czuprynski about how it is changing the jobs of database administrators and the skills that students need to learn if they want to pursue a career as a DBA.
 
00;00;57;14 - 00;01;24;03
Jim Czuprynski has been an Oracle DBA for 20 plus years. During that time, he's taught 2000 plus students in the finer points of Oracle database administration. As an Oracle University instructor coauthored four books on Oracle technology and has spoken dozens of times at user group conferences around the world. During that time, he's seen plenty of dramatic changes to the DBA role, especially after autonomous database was introduced.
 
00;01;24;14 - 00;01;25;09
Welcome, Jim.
 
00;01;25;19 - 00;01;27;05
Thank you, Tyra. It's great to be here.
 
00;01;27;11 - 00;01;32;15
To go ahead and get started off, can you give me a little bit about your background and your current job role?
 
00;01;32;26 - 00;01;56;08
Absolutely. These days, I'm more of a technology advocate, but to be honest, I'm still at heart an Oracle DBA, as I have been for over 20 years. I go back all the weight. Oracle 81723. So as you might imagine, I've seen quite a few changes in the Oracle database and the hardware that it runs on over that time.
 
00;01;56;18 - 00;02;20;18
These days I'm actually kind of back into some of the really neat features that are built into just about every Oracle database. Especially Oracle 23. See our latest release that's almost ready for general availability. And most platforms. And I really enjoy delving into things like graph and spatial and machine learning and analytics.
 
00;02;21;18 - 00;02;31;27
So my next question is kind of a little bit along those lines. The Oracle Autonomous Database was launched a few years ago. How does it differ from previous versions?
 
00;02;32;15 - 00;02;59;12
Wow. The autonomous database, or most of us call it ADB for short. It has features that are already present in the most stable release of the Oracle database. That's typically on premises right inside an organization's local data center or maybe even an on premises data center. But the big difference about autonomous database, first off, is that it runs inside ORCL cloud infrastructure.
 
00;02;59;19 - 00;03;27;25
And best of all, it runs on, in my opinion, the best hardware ever built for Oracle database workloads. Oracle Exadata, which is an extremely robust environment. It eliminates a lot of performance bottlenecks that are inherent in traditional on premises database hardware and I speak from experience. I built servers back in the day to run Oracle 8 and 9 even 10.
 
00;03;28;19 - 00;03;35;22
It's not trivial to build a robust database working environment.
 
00;03;36;09 - 00;03;44;00
So let's kind of go on to AI a little bit. So how is a I used in an autonomous database or ADB?
 
00;03;44;27 - 00;04;20;19
That's a great question. EDB uses A.I. in many different forms underneath the covers, and it really automates a lot of tasks that a typical DBA doesn't necessarily have the bandwidth to perform everything from something called automatic indexing. We'll talk about that a little bit later, I hope. Things like automatic scaling of CPU's based on demand that it observes automated database patching, and even the ability to automatically identify.
 
00;04;20;19 - 00;04;47;01
And this is really cool, a poorly executing SQL statement and essentially quarantined them so that somebody from the DevOps slash DB 18 can scrutinize them and go, Why are these things taking up so much bandwidth as the next release? Oracle 23 C rolls out for ADP. There are several new AI controlled features, including and these are really cool.
 
00;04;47;10 - 00;05;17;29
Automatic transaction rollback, for example, a transaction might be holding a roll lock and blocking a higher priority transaction. You can actually configure that so that that will happen within boundaries automatically. Another thing that's really neat is automatic generation of materialized view, and I worked with projects even in the last 12 to 18 months where materialized views are a tricky thing to build out.
 
00;05;17;29 - 00;05;50;01
You really have to kind of know what's going on when you build them. Now, in latest release, that's going to happen automatically. By the way, these features I'm talking about, you do have a choice as a DBA to go in there and if necessary, turn them off. I get that question a lot. So, you know, you can definitely deactivate them or essentially turn them down and make them advisors temporarily and then decide whether or not to turn them on in full for your environment.
 
00;05;51;04 - 00;06;29;04
Perhaps the most intriguing new ADB feature is retrieval augmented generation or RG or RAG for short. RAG employs several large language models or limbs that translate a request for information. For example, find the top five customers within a mere based on their average percent increase in sales for the last six months and simply by prefacing that with the words select a I, I hope you're sitting down as you're listening to this, it literally will build the skill statement for you.
 
00;06;29;18 - 00;06;49;03
You can even say, just show me what the SQL statement looks like, that you just built your ADP and it'll show it to you. So again, one of the ways people are using A.I. these days, right, is more of a helper. You know, don't don't write it for me, but show me what it would look like if you wrote something like this.
 
00;06;49;12 - 00;06;55;14
And now you can do that with Rack. That's to me, mind. And amazing.
 
00;06;56;07 - 00;07;11;16
Then kind of one of the things that always comes up is if we're using AI for all these other things, like, you know, writing SQL statements or like helping all in patch or data, how does it impact our security for our database?
 
00;07;12;13 - 00;07;35;27
Well, another great question. Like I said, I've been doing it for 20 years as a DBA for two years in all different angles. Right. And one of the first things that if I'm on a DevOps team and someone proposes something, the first thing I'd like to ask is, yeah, great idea. Sounds really radical. Sounds cool. How secure is that?
 
00;07;35;27 - 00;08;01;02
Right. I want to think about not just what's going to happen at that database level, but all the way up through that seven layer salad, if you will, all the way out to eventually our firewall. Right. Is this going to be solid and secure for application access layers? What if I have a special purpose database inside of my my firewall?
 
00;08;01;03 - 00;08;32;20
Right. Maybe something specific to spacial or graph or mapping or whatever it is I like to think about How easy is it for a bad actor to do something as simple as SQL injection to gain access to either the data insider databases or even the infrastructure. I mean, a day doesn't go by that we don't hear about some sort of hack or some sort of ransomware attack that has happened because of someone ignoring a business risk.
 
00;08;33;01 - 00;09;00;27
So one of the things I like about ADB and Rack is that I'm eliminating several possible attack vectors. Right. One of the things that I'm doing with using select a I, and then a question is I'm letting before called database write the query. It's a lot less likely that hopefully at least I haven't seen it do it yet.
 
00;09;00;27 - 00;09;40;03
I've been playing with it where Rand might go ahead and write some kind of weird thing that would do SQL injection inside my database. I haven't seen that happen and I don't anticipate that would happen. So I really like that aspect of API being implemented and if you will, really within the environs of the database itself. Also, one of the things that is evident to me, having talked to people about all the other kinds of databases, even open source databases, Oracle is well known within the industry as the most secure enterprise database.
 
00;09;40;20 - 00;10;08;13
That means that even if someone were to gain some sort of access, I have excellent tools at my disposal that will identify that access immediately. And this is a big advantage, especially for the concept of what we call converged database, which I've been talking with several other ace directors and other DBAs and developers for almost three or four years now.
 
00;10;09;01 - 00;10;44;02
The whole idea is more likely than not if you're building a graph. DB solution heck, even a vector database solution with some of the new things that are coming with the next release of Oracle and maybe even a spatial solution, all these things are already built in to my database environment. If I'm doing a spatial solution, a graph data property graph solution, a machine learning solution, there are dozens of machine learning algorithms built into an Oracle database.
 
00;10;44;10 - 00;11;05;28
Why would I want to take a risk of having something outside my environs that compose my database and even my computing infrastructure? So from my perspective, a I, especially an oracle, is going to be something that presents a lot fewer security challenges.
 
00;11;06;22 - 00;11;25;19
That is very comforting to know that. But then one of the things that I hear about AI is moving to ADP, and we've been working with it at least on our team for the past three plus years now has an autonomous database. And then I change the work of a database administrator.
 
00;11;26;04 - 00;12;00;13
Hmm. Great question. Again, let me go to one example that I kind of alluded to earlier for ADB. There's really two subsets, if you will, main subsets, one called Autonomous Data Warehouse, which, as you might guess, is aimed at data warehousing and data lakes and more very driven type activity. There's also an autonomous transaction processing ADB flavor. I have one up and running right now in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure environment for three years.
 
00;12;01;08 - 00;12;45;05
I've never had to mess around with all of the things that I would have if I was not running autonomous. So one thing I alluded to earlier, this feature called automatic indexing, it's really specific to autonomous transaction processing or ATP ADB instances. I actually did a test study with the transaction processing counsel's TPC e workload and built out quite a large database with that and then ran the query workload against my database with no indexes, no secondary indexes.
 
00;12;45;05 - 00;13;11;29
Right. To be more specific, primary key indexes and other things for referential integrity were there, but no indexes that would normally help a query perform better. And it was so neat that automatic indexing, once I turn it on within a very brief period of time, within about I believe 45 minutes had identified critical indices that needed to be added to my database.
 
00;13;11;29 - 00;13;38;09
And in one case, I remember I had one query that actually performed its improved performance, improved this performance by 1 million times by adding a single index. Now, if you're indeed one of the reasons that's important is we spend a lot of time hearing complaints from our DevOps team or even our end users going, Wow, it's running slow.
 
00;13;38;09 - 00;14;05;23
Why is it running slow? And one of the typical ways of solving that is slapping index on this particular table, right, to make it run faster. That could have amazingly deleterious effects on transaction processing. So one of the cool things where AI is actually being used underneath the commerce is this automatic indexing tool. It adds only the indexes that need to be index added to the database tables, which is mind blowing.
 
00;14;05;23 - 00;14;32;01
To me. It was really cool to see another one and this is relatively recent. We've had tools like this since early TNG, which is like 1518 years ago. There was a concept of automatic sequel tuning and this has been around for a quite a bit of time, but in more recent releases, yeah, like ten years ago, this has been around actually, and it's gotten better and better.
 
00;14;32;10 - 00;14;59;19
Automatic SQL tuning will look at a particular query or DML statement, even and go, No, there's a better execution plan that you should be using and it can either just give you the advice as a DBA and you can go evaluate it, decide to implement it or not or actually and this is really cool what you build confidence in it, right?
 
00;14;59;19 - 00;15;24;13
I said many of these things are actionable. You can turn it on when you have a certain level of confidence. So the stuff that I used to worry about as a DBA back 20 years ago, heck, even ten years ago, because of the learning algorithms and the AI that are underneath the covers of ADP, I don't need to worry about that stuff I haven't looked at.
 
00;15;24;13 - 00;15;46;19
And for my DBA colleagues, you'll know what I mean. I haven't looked at it a lot for my ETP database in literally three years because it just was fine. And if you were what I would like to call a helicopter DTA and always hovering over your database, you don't have to do that anymore. So what can you do instead?
 
00;15;46;21 - 00;16;16;18
Go help your team, build better systems, get in front of your DevOps, pick up efforts to build better systems, worry about things like better data modeling, worry about more efficiently written code from the start instead of, Oh my gosh, that's running terribly and then patching it later making that SQL statement or even application one better. So it's been quite revolutionary, to be honest from my perspective.
 
00;16;17;10 - 00;16;29;13
So then I'm going to transition to my next question, which is, if I'm a student, what are some of the skills that a student should learn if they're planning on working in a department database?
 
00;16;29;13 - 00;16;53;22
The one that I would advise for all students who are going to work anywhere near any kind of database these days, structured query language as well, Right? It's funny, I talk with younger people and their eyes kind of roll when I say that the same way my eyes would roll when someone said you should really learn assembler never worked in assembler, never worked in C courses like that was COBOL, right?
 
00;16;54;05 - 00;17;20;18
But the thing is, that school sequel is going to be around for a long time. Even for the Notorious not only or no SQL databases, you really do need to understand and if not, learn how to write SQL statements because you really need to understand what's going on underneath the covers. And that's just for manipulating and retrieving data from or inside your database.
 
00;17;20;28 - 00;17;51;14
And then the next thing I think that's really important is to think about how data relates to itself. As we talk about these days, especially things like graph databases where we're really mapping out not so much the fact that this invoice has a bunch of line items, right, but that this customer, because they purchased this item, influenced another customer who influenced another customer, who influenced another customer to purchase that same item.
 
00;17;51;23 - 00;18;16;17
So things like property graphs and vector databases, these things are really coming to the fore. So learn a skill for sure, understand it so that when you see it, you can interpret it and understand what's going on because it's simply not going to go away. There have been movements to try to kill it, but I don't know how much longer it's going to be around.
 
00;18;16;17 - 00;18;22;21
But from what I'm seeing, it's going to be around for a long time. Why not learn it? Why not master it?
 
00;18;23;07 - 00;18;42;29
I do want to add one follow up question to that is what about with Chat GTP and how it can write cycle statements? Should I still learn how to do SQL if I've got like my modern language processing skills or some of these language tools coming up, is it still really important to learn like the basics of sequel?
 
00;18;44;02 - 00;19;11;00
Absolutely. You know, sequels really simple that it's elements. It's about 20 verbs, and that's really it's super simple. And once you understand it and more importantly, that you understand it's set based, right, which is different. It's the Venn diagram stuff that all of us probably struggle from or through in grade school and even maybe even high school. Right?
 
00;19;11;04 - 00;19;38;20
But set theory is at the heart of effective processing of data, right? So it really comes in handy, number one, because that's one of the most effective ways to handle relationships between data. And secondly, I really hate to tell you this, sooner or later somebody's going to say, C'mere here, here's some SQL from 20 years ago, I'll fix it.
 
00;19;38;23 - 00;20;06;05
I'll figure out what's wrong with it and enhance it. You're going to end up having to look at it anyway minus will learn it now. Right. And as long as we're talking about Chartbeat and these other things, like I mentioned, us select a AI statement that you can use inside Adbe right now. You can use that if you want to learn how to build really good sequel statements, right?
 
00;20;06;05 - 00;20;30;18
So you can use it, if you will, as sort of a modeling tool so that you can see how a really good optimizer, a really good tool, builds well-written sequel statements. So I'm not saying throw it away, I'm just saying make sure you're using the right flavor of cheap, which by the way, the air to a rack is sort of built on.
 
00;20;30;18 - 00;20;42;28
Right? A good elements of it, many elements of it are built on, I believe Chachi beat 3.5. So you're not throwing away anything you were learning there. It's more synergistic learning, if anything.
 
00;20;43;10 - 00;20;53;25
That that was actually really helpful. And so now to my very last question, If you could give one piece of advice to faculty, your students, what would it be?
 
00;20;54;03 - 00;21;15;27
The advice that I didn't listen to when I was younger is the advice I'd like to give you. I spent my time believing that if I can master the code, that's all I'll need to be successful. And boy, was I an idiot because I had people, my mentor would go, You know, Jim, you're a really good coder. You're really good at what you do.
 
00;21;15;27 - 00;21;38;12
But to be frank, you're really upset. People don't interface with them very well. You're a little you come off as arrogant, you come off as mean. You don't seem to really care about people as much. You should really concentrate on making those things out, making those things better. What do you know? Oh, my gosh. I wish I had spent time doing that.
 
00;21;38;26 - 00;22;13;26
I really believe that. Secondly, what I found and this is an interesting piece, I mentor quite a few younger folks, even folks that are leaving the U.S. military in the Navy right now. My biggest piece of advice is network, network, network. You've got to build a network of humans because to be honest, almost every single opportunity that I've had, whether it's been within a company or maybe even a new job or a new opportunity, has come from 90% of the time.
 
00;22;14;04 - 00;22;44;04
Someone I knew it in my network. I wish I had built that network out much sooner. Again, you have a lot better tools these days. You've got social media and LinkedIn and all other kinds of tools. We didn't really have some of those 40 years ago, but there's no excuse not to build that network out. Seriously, that's twice as important, soft skills wise, than even learning how to write sequel.
 
00;22;44;12 - 00;23;00;10
I would actually say I agree with that. My very first job out of college was actually a neighbor that I knew that I, in fact said I was sitting next to him at a wedding reception and we were talking about how I just graduated college. I was looking for a job and he's like, Oh, I've got a job.
 
00;23;00;22 - 00;23;27;20
I might come apply for it. And that's that's exactly how I got my very first job out of college was through networking. So I wholeheartedly espouse that as well. So a big thank you to Jim for speaking with me on an autonomous database and the changing roles of a DBA. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast.
 
00;23;27;20 - 00;23;28;16
Thanks for listening.
 
00;23;29;04 - 00;23;37;19
That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

Hearing from changemakers and innovative leaders can inspire students to become the leaders of tomorrow.

In this episode, Evan Goldberg, NetSuite founder and Oracle Executive Vice President, speaks with Oracle Academy Vice President, William McCabe, about what it’s like to be a leader today, and the skills students need to succeed.

As NetSuite celebrates its 25th anniversary as the first cloud company, Evan will also talk about the challenges of being the disrupter and what he thinks is next for the technology industry.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;35;03 

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. 

00;00;35;17 - 00;01;00;04 

I'm your host, Tyra Crockett Peirce and this special two part episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. Oracle Academy Vice President Willie McCabe speaks with Oracle Executive Vice President and NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg on what it's like to be a creator and leader and the skills students need to succeed as they become the technology innovators of the future. 

00;01;00;12 - 00;01;33;01 

Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Oracle Academy Fireside chat with Oracle EVP. NetSuite Founder, Evan Goldberg. I'm Oracle Academy Vice President Willie McCabe, and I'll be your host for today. Evan and I will focus our discussion on net suite key qualities of leadership and skills. Students need to succeed in today's workforce. As Net Suite celebrates its 25 year anniversary as a first cloud company. 

00;01;33;13 - 00;02;14;13 

Evan and I will also talk about the challenge of being a disruptor and what he thinks is next for the technology industry. A little bit about our guest, Evan Goldberg, Executive Vice President, Oracle NetSuite, Global Business Unit. Evan leads the Oracle next week, Global Business Unit. He and his team are responsible for the product strategy, development and delivery of next week's Unified Business Management Suite, encompassing ERP, financials, CRM, e-commerce and many more. 

00;02;15;03 - 00;02;50;15 

In 1998, Evan co-founded NetSuite, and as mentioned, it was the first cloud computing company ushering in a new era of cloud computing. Prior to Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Evan was CTO and chairman of the next Suite board, and before founding that suite, he spent eight years at Oracle Corporation as a vice president. Credit He was involved in a variety of projects, all focused on making powerful database technology more accessible to users. 

00;02;51;26 - 00;03;04;11 

Evan holds a B.A. and Summa Technology and Applied Mathematics from Harvard College. Welcome, Evan. Thank you for joining us today. 

00;03;04;24 - 00;03;05;19 

Thanks for having me. 

00;03;06;04 - 00;03;30;04 

We're all very privileged to have you join us and also to share your experiences. Today, we have an audience of faculty, students and colleagues from around the world joining us. And while I'm sure they all know you as a creator of NetSuite and for leading the Oracle Net Suite Global Business Unit today, we'd like to delve a little bit more into your thoughts around skills that students might need. 

00;03;31;07 - 00;03;43;09 

I'd like to start with some specific questions. First off, and I'm sure this is an easy one for you. Can you tell me a little bit more about your career path? 

00;03;43;10 - 00;04;26;03 

Yeah, well, I've always been interested in technology programing applications would have been a dream from an early age that someday I'd be able to use my programing skills and product design skills to build something that would make life easier for people. And I sort of fortunately, was very I've been very fortunate to be able to achieve that dream in that, you know, we now have nets, we helping, you know, tens of thousands of organizations and hundreds of thousands of people within those organizations achieve their whatever their dream is. 

00;04;26;18 - 00;04;57;24 

So the path hasn't been straight and narrow and narrow, but eventually got there through, you know, probably some luck and a lot of hard work. Yeah. You know, I came out of college. That's college on the East Coast, as you as you mentioned, and immediately moved out here to California, seeing that there sort of was a tectonic shift in our you know, just to use another metaphor, the center of gravity for the technology industry was rapidly moving west. 

00;04;58;14 - 00;05;25;26 

And I got connected with Oracle, actually from my sister, who was working in the financial industry at Fidelity and was investing in Oracle and was really high on their on their prospects, you know, really bullish about their prospects and said, if you're going to go out there, that's a company you should work for. This guy, Larry Ellison, he's going to change the industry. 

00;05;25;26 - 00;05;49;22 

So again, I was fortunate that she had that insight and that led me out here. I started in the database team at Oracle where I was working on sort of the core database software, and Larry kind of handpicked me to go in there over the objections of the management and were like, he doesn't even know see, which was the programing language that Oracle was built in. 

00;05;50;04 - 00;06;11;22 

And Larry said, Oh, he'll get a book. It's kind of like when I started that suite and I was getting an accounting book on the first day. But anyway, but actually I and this is a it was an important point in my career, I think, you know, I was always attracted, as I said to building applications that people will use to make their daily life easier. 

00;06;11;29 - 00;06;42;09 

And of course, at its core, Oracle does that. But I was so deep within the innards that I felt disconnected from users. And again, serendipity to some degree. Marc Benioff We ended up starting Salesforce.com and building got into a great company three months after we started. Next week, the second Cloud Company was starting a group to make Oracle available on the Mac and make it much easier to use and and build next generation kind of applications on top of Oracle. 

00;06;42;18 - 00;07;04;11 

And I was really attracted to that and I was torn which direction should I go? Because I felt like I was in this great position that was every was very desirable for programmers to be working in the group. It was called the kernel group at the time. Was I going to let that all go to test these new waters? 

00;07;04;11 - 00;07;23;16 

Who knows whether it would work out? I had no idea who this Marc Benioff character was, and Larry passed me in the hall one day and he said, I hear you're thinking about going to work in the Mac group. And I you know, he said, if I were if I were getting out of call, you know, just out of college, that's where I would go work right now. 

00;07;24;04 - 00;07;44;06 

So, of course, you know, when he was anointed with Hall and did that kind of comment. And so, you know, that steered me in a direction I think was a really good one. And and you can kind of follow the line from there, because I got very interested in making applications that people could use every day build on these powerful databases. 

00;07;45;00 - 00;08;07;00 

I did another start up soon after that that was sort of related to that, making websites easier to use. And so that that's kind of the you know, I can't say that I had the vision that eventually I'd be building next week, but, you know, I did at that moment when I made that choice, I was kind of steering my ship towards what I think was really my northstar all along. 

00;08;07;01 - 00;08;13;26 

So those moments are important moments when you got to think long term, you know, where where do you want to do. 

00;08;14;20 - 00;08;24;08 

The amazing and that decision to move from coast to coast was that that's a difficult decision at the time. 

00;08;24;08 - 00;08;58;17 

AH yeah. I mean, I didn't know anybody in California. Fortunately, the year before I came out to Oracle. One student from Harvard had gone to Oracle. Oracle had typically hired from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Harvard wasn't. I mean, you know, people now think of Harvard, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, obviously, you know, great computer science department, etc.. But back then, it was very much a fledgling department and people didn't really people were like this Harvard even do computer science. 

00;09;00;09 - 00;09;28;18 

But fortunately, one one student came the year before and it worked out so that the next year Larry decided to basically hire half the graduating computer science class and a few other stragglers like me from applied math. So I had lots of my classmates coming out to California, and that helped. And it was a great culture at Oracle in those early years were only 900 people there, lots of them young recent college grads like myself. 

00;09;28;18 - 00;09;52;23 

So that sort of became the the family, because as I said, I didn't really know anybody anywhere else. So I you know, and that's sweet. I think we've some in some cases created that sort of environment. People moved to Austin, for example, which is where a place where we have tons of people working on that suite and they, you know, just starting their careers there along with lots of other people. 

00;09;52;23 - 00;10;02;13 

And it reminds me of that culture that Oracle had way back in the day. So that was very helpful, offering to make that make that transition. 

00;10;02;29 - 00;10;20;15 

Fabulous and a true story of classroom career, which really ties in with with Oracle Academy as well. So thank you for that. Just moving on a little, when you were founding net three, was it a particular problem that you were working to solve? 

00;10;20;24 - 00;10;48;26 

Yeah, Yeah, that's a great softball question there. Thank you. There was because as I mentioned, I did do a startup around in 1995. The Internet was really just sort of turning lights on, you know, getting getting up and running. And there was tons of excitement. And Oracle was doing some work in the Internet, but I had always dreamed of having my own software company, and that seemed the right time to make the leap, so much opportunity. 

00;10;49;13 - 00;11;11;23 

And so where I started initially was something that was my idea, which was building on some of the things that I worked on at Oracle, but really leveraging the web to build more interactive, more engaging experiences than just the static websites that you saw. Because I've worked on some of that kind of technology. In fact, my last thing that I worked on at Oracle is Oracle's interactive TV initiative. 

00;11;11;23 - 00;11;28;22 

People probably don't remember much about that, but Larry had a vision that one day soon, not quite as soon as he thought you'd be able to watch movies on demand or TV shows on demand, on your television, crazy ideas, just that idea. 

00;11;29;06 - 00;11;29;22 

Wonder from that. 

00;11;30;14 - 00;11;52;23 

It just goes to show you that you can have great ideas, but you have to have the timing right up. So I had that was my last project. So I took some of the things that we've done to make engaging experiences on television, set top boxes as they were called back that again, I'm really aging myself here and said, Let's do that kind of thing on the web. 

00;11;52;23 - 00;12;14;11 

So that was my first company giving tools to Web site designers to make their sites more interactive. And we had a great product. People loved us, but we never really could get traction because we had competition that had a lot more muscle in us. It turned out to be what is now Adobe, part of Adobe. They had something called Flash and that sort of took over and we couldn't get a lot of traction. 

00;12;15;03 - 00;12;39;11 

But I learned a ton about running it, running a company. It was my first company, my first time as CEO. We had at our peak, we had 15 employees and it was 15 boys. There's a lot of complexity. People don't necessarily appreciate how businesses can get complex fast, and we had lots of different systems. I mean, literally, we probably had six different systems that we were using to manage our operations. 

00;12;39;11 - 00;13;06;14 

That's like one system or two and a half people, too many systems. And so like they were all disconnected. We had like five different customer lists, and the key information about the business was sitting in QuickBooks, which was on somebody's desktop. And if they were like, you know, using the computer to whatever shop to surf the web, as it was called back then, I couldn't get in for any information about my business. 

00;13;06;14 - 00;13;31;01 

So that was the problem that I set out to solve that like it's hard enough to build a company. You don't need all this technology standing in your way. What you want the technology to do is, is be easy fast to get information, to get insights and help you and stay out of your way in a lot of cases so that you can do the work and really building your business. 

00;13;31;14 - 00;13;52;16 

So that was my vision, is to build software for start ups. And Larry called one day and he said, How's your graphic stuff doing? That's what he called it. Now, Larry, you know, I was very fortunate. Larry helped me out with that first company and I put all my savings in into it. And he put a very tiny amount of savings of his savings into it. 

00;13;52;24 - 00;14;13;07 

Those are, by the way, equal amounts of money and so and yeah, so he was you know, he called me in to see how it was going. He wasn't super interested in it. But when I said, you know what I want to do next, Larry, I said, it's not working out great. We're getting crushed by the competition. Even though we have a great product, we just don't have the marketing muscle to keep up with them. 

00;14;14;24 - 00;14;35;01 

And I said, what I want to do next is build software for businesses like mine that's out there. And he said, Oh my God, that's perfect. Because what I've been thinking about is that someone should build something like QuickBooks for Accounting and delivered over the Web, that that's how all software should be delivered. And I was like, Huh, Accounting. 

00;14;35;01 - 00;15;12;01 

Okay, well, I was thinking of starting with sales because that's the most important thing to me as a CEO is where's my next deal coming from? How much am I going to do this for all of my sales? You know what? How can I help and help build the company faster or help the company grow faster? And he said, Oh, yeah, well, we'll have to do sales eventually, but we'll start with accounting because that's where all your core information about your business is your products, your sales, your people, all that information ultimately is in your financials and then we'll go the other things. 

00;15;12;01 - 00;15;38;09 

And so we agreed that we'd start with financials or accounting and build an entire suite. And he was adamant that it should be delivered over the web. Mind you, this is in the course of a five minute, literally a five minute phone conversation. Maybe it was 6 minutes, it was not long. And he said, you know, these companies don't want to have to manage software and run their own computers and try to deal with upgrades and and run databases. 

00;15;38;09 - 00;16;01;03 

I thought it was definitely was especially for, you know, self-aware of him to know that people did not want to run databases. That was not what most people considered fun, even though he might have it. And so yeah, and so the whole vision of the company came together in that one phone call, and it really was meant to solve the problem that I saw as an entrepreneur. 

00;16;01;03 - 00;16;05;01 

And Larry and I used to joke, it's a company built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. 

00;16;05;29 - 00;16;28;13 

Phenomenal on timing. Then next week was and is the first fully cloud based business management system. So timing wise code is a revolution, though. This was 25 years ago. So what we did next, we disrupt the entire software industry. 

00;16;28;29 - 00;16;56;25 

Well, as I said, timing is everything, Larry got the timing wrong on interactive television. So he got the principle, the concept right. Well, in this case, we nailed the timing and we were the first mover. And that gave us the opportunity to over the years, you know, become a leader. That's not always the case. There's a first mover advantage, but that doesn't always play out that way. 

00;16;56;25 - 00;17;24;23 

But the timing was right because ultimately we ended up sort of riding the wave of the growth of cloud technology at the beginning, using a lot of metaphors. Here at the beginning, it was like pushing a big rock up a hill. Yeah, but unlike in the Greek myth, where it rolls back down and you have to push it again, we pushed it for a while and then it started rolling down in the right direction, not backwards. 

00;17;25;15 - 00;17;43;13 

We got it over the hump, as it were. And in those early years, you know, we had to convince customers that the right thing to do is put their data in the cloud. It was called the cloud back then, put it on the Internet, put it on the Web. There was a lot of skepticism there, especially when, you know, we always led with accounting. 

00;17;43;13 - 00;18;04;20 

Like, that's the first thing you do is switch from QuickBooks to Net Suite and then you can expand into having your salespeople use it, having your, you know, h.r. People using what have you. I mean, that suite ultimately, for those in the audience that I'm familiar with, it is a system to help you manage your business as you grow. 

00;18;04;20 - 00;18;33;24 

It's sort of everything you need as you grow. And it's all in one place. It one system. Everybody logs in and uses the same system. There's one source of information. Information sort of flows seamlessly across your organization because it's all there in one place. And so, you know, so we would be leading with financials and we'd talk to these controllers, for example, about switching their system and they'd say, Oh, I'm really nervous about putting my data in on the Internet. 

00;18;33;24 - 00;18;55;26 

And I had two answers to that. Usually it would be like, Well, I've seen where you put your data because it's in this computer that's sitting right next to you that has a copy machine on it. And like anybody could just rip it out the plug out of the wall and take it home. We actually put your data in a professionally managed data center where you need to get a you need a hand for it to get in. 

00;18;56;05 - 00;19;15;23 

I think you're going to get an improvement in security, not it's not going to be a negative. And then I'd also say and by the way, your salespeople are using Salesforce dot com, so all you need is already in the Internet. I mean, what do you think your competitors want? They want your customer list. They don't want your income statement. 

00;19;16;10 - 00;19;43;29 

So anyway, we you know, we definitely wrote the sort of Marc Benioff hype machine for sure, which helped. I mean, he really made the world in some ways safe for Cloud solutions is his tagline No Software. While we would tease it at the time, did really, while not being completely accurate, did get at the fact that it was no longer we were no longer as software developers just making software and throwing it over the wall and daring you to use it. 

00;19;44;13 - 00;20;04;13 

We were providing a service day in, day out. We as Larry said in that first phone call, we manage the computers, we manage the operating systems, we manage the upgrades so you don't have to and we have to do that day in, day out, 24, seven three, six, five, so that you can use that suite where we do things. 

00;20;04;13 - 00;20;18;15 

We used to say at the time, any time, anywhere, that was a big part of our day. We had to and it really is the net and the suite. It really I mean, the company was the marriage of those two ideas. I gave Larry a lot of credit for the net, give myself a lot credit for the suite. 

00;20;18;15 - 00;20;42;01 

And and so our two big things were we'd say one system, No Limits was one of our taglines, and that that was all about the suite. And the other thing we'd say is any time, anywhere. And that was all about the net. And so with that and with Marc Benioff Snow Software, it started the whole tide started changing. 

00;20;42;16 - 00;21;07;21 

And when we'd go to controllers, they'd be, you know, we what we suddenly realized is that our competitors who were delivering software the old way, they were the ones that had to do the explanation. They would be getting the hard questions like, why would I want to manage my software, my interest in that? So when the terms of the debate changed, that's when that suite saw this sort of hyper growth that led us to go public. 

00;21;07;21 - 00;21;28;14 

And in all the success we've had, we've had since that now, and for many of you in the audience, I think it's probably completely taken for granted. You would look at someone very strangely if they said you should. You know, we have a new social network, but you host it yourself on a computer and you have to manage in your in your house. 

00;21;28;26 - 00;21;46;05 

I mean, there probably are such things, but they're not use above board. So yeah, that would be very strange for someone to tell you that. And so there's maybe and so I can just tell you that back then it was a not it was really a novel and sometimes strange concept to put it. 

00;21;46;17 - 00;22;01;29 

And date but normality. No. And I a team as a disruption as as a leader within your organization and you're obviously tracking disruptors. What do you see as the next big disruption? 

00;22;03;10 - 00;22;12;18 

Yeah, well, that's the key about disruptions. You usually don't see them coming until there's like this exponential growth. You know, it doesn't look like it's growing very fast and all of a sudden it's everywhere. 

00;22;14;18 - 00;22;39;02 

And, you know, I hesitate to say all because I don't necessarily consider that a disruption for a couple of different reasons. Everybody is doing it. I mean, like literally everybody. So it's not the same kind of thing as the cloud where there were a few sort of obscure players that subtle, you know, So I mean, you could say to some degree of maybe open AI's is is that. 

00;22;39;19 - 00;23;06;04 

But I just think the speed with which it's been adopted and become sort of just table stakes means more it's it's it maybe it's overall it's a disruption to the overall industry but it is an opportunity for everybody, not just the disruptors. And, you know, I think what's interesting about and I think it's as tech, it is as tectonic, a shift as the Internet was. 

00;23;06;04 - 00;23;26;27 

And so but but everybody's sort of on board and it's a very, very exciting time is obviously going to be some amazing new companies. There's going to be lots of failures as as there always are in these situations. I was you know, I was an Internet failure. My mandatory sort of Silicon Valley startup failure. And, you know, that's okay. 

00;23;26;27 - 00;23;32;08 

I mean, that's a thousand flowers bloom and not all of them turn into, you know, redwoods. 

00;23;32;15 - 00;23;41;17 

So the disruption, maybe the creation of companies rather than rather than shaping the whole industry, maybe, though there are some key players that that. 

00;23;42;10 - 00;24;28;20 

So I think it is reshaping the industry for sure. It's an enormous opportunity to deliver on the vision that I've had and that we've had for years, which is to give great advice and assistance to organizations to help them achieve their vision and transform their organizations. So that's how we're focusing on it at Net Suite as a great tool, but it just sort of embedded within our user experience to give great insights to help explain patterns in the data, help predict what might happen in the future, suggest courses of action that you might want to take, and then actually assist you on taking those courses of action. 

00;24;28;20 - 00;25;08;19 

And across that and you know, it's it's sort of can become your dream shooting chief of staff. That person that knows everything about your business can see patterns, bring them to you, have you met them and if you decide to do something about them can go help you execute. Yeah. Amazing. And it's like sort of like every effort and what's and it can be very democratizing in that way because again, my whole vision and our whole vision early on was to give very powerful tools to organizations that otherwise wouldn't have access to them by using the cloud and by making them really easy to use. 

00;25;08;19 - 00;25;43;01 

That was always a big focus for me in my career, is let's make stuff easy to use so that everybody can take advantage of it, not just the technologists. And we had our first, you know, back in the day when you were a budding Internet startup in 1998 or 1999, and where everybody was getting funded and had lots of money, the thing that sort of your coming out party was your billboard on the one on highway one on one in in the Bay Area. 

00;25;43;12 - 00;26;20;20 

This route that went from San Francisco down to San Jose populated on all sides by Internet startups. And so we had one. We got our mandatory one on one billboard and it had a baby in a fighter jet. And that got some hate mail. Yeah. So, you know, maybe I wouldn't do that again. But the the ultimate point of it was this powerful technology in the hands of people that don't necessarily how technical skills to do it, but it's available. 

00;26;20;20 - 00;26;43;20 

It's available to them. And so thereby very democratizing. And that's exactly what where I think AI is headed to giving people this power that normally you'd have to hire, you know, an army of consultants or, you know, find, you know, just these all these assistants all over your company. Well, now and again, people are still incredibly important to your company. 

00;26;43;20 - 00;27;04;28 

You're going to still be hiring lots of people. Yeah, but they're going to be more productive. They're going to be more effective and and you're going to get better information. And so you're actually going to be able to grow faster, which means you're going to hire more people. People worried that AI's going to replace people. Yeah, I think the success it's going to drive in companies and the growth that it can help drive in companies is going to pop. 

00;27;05;08 - 00;27;06;23 

It's going to employ more people. 

00;27;06;23 - 00;27;38;07 

Fascinating. Well, thank you for that and a fabulous insight as well into your thinking of how it's going to to drive organizations. Moving on a little, I've been following you on socials for for many years and you continually to impress me as being an inspirational leader, someone who really focuses on inspiring and influencing people. And I like to tap into that a little, as I'm sure our attendees would like to know more too. 

00;27;39;04 - 00;27;48;04 

So diving in, what individual qualities do you think helps make a great leader? 

00;27;50;18 - 00;28;21;14 

Well, I would say the vision and the ability to communicate it and inspire people with it. And then empathy. Empathy is they're not orthogonal. They're very related. You have to have you know, it's a basic you know, there's a there's a process called design thinking. It's pioneered at the Stanford School. And empathy is a big part of it. 

00;28;21;14 - 00;28;42;21 

I mean, that's the first thing you have to understand is, you know, who am I doing this for? And what what what problems are they having? And I need to deeply understand those problems and then I can move on to a solution to those problems. Don't put the solution before the problem, which I think technology has a checkered history of doing. 

00;28;43;28 - 00;29;06;02 

Here's this great technology. Let's find some problems for it. And so that, you know, I think that's one of the ways you develop a great vision is by having that empathy. But furthermore, empathy is incredibly important in achieving your vision because just because you have it, you have to execute on this and build something to actually achieve this vision. 

00;29;06;12 - 00;29;35;03 

And that involves people. Yes, it involves the people in your company. It involves the people that you're trying to sell your product to or it involves or if you are a nonprofit organization, it involves the people to whom you're delivering your mission. And so having empathy, the willingness and ability to really listen and understand which all of us fall short of that many times, and that's okay. 

00;29;35;16 - 00;29;46;25 

But it's always something everyone can work on that's going to make it help you execute and deliver on your vision much more effectively. So I would put those those two together. 

00;29;47;10 - 00;29;48;25 

Fabulous. Thank you. 

00;29;49;06 - 00;29;57;22 

That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening. And stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. 

What is cloud computing? This is one of the questions Oracle Executive Vice President Applications EMEA answers in this episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat Podcast. Cormac also gives valuable insights on data sovereignty as well as defines the differences between public, private, and hybrid cloud.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;36;25 

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Okay, So welcome to Oracle Academy, Texas, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generations workforce. 

00;00;36;27 - 00;01;13;22 

My name is Orelon and I'm your host today. And in this episode, I'm joined by Oracle executive vice president of Applications for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Cormac Waters. And we discuss cloud and why understanding cloud is beneficial to both faculty and students. But first, a little bit about my guest. So coworkers based in Dublin, Ireland. He's a dedicated sports and especially rugby fan from what I know, and his sporting background enables him to value the power of collaboration and teamwork to grow and innovate high performance teams. 

00;01;13;24 - 00;01;31;00 

So welcome, Cormac, and thank you so much for agreeing to our podcast today. It's lovely to have you here. Hey, thanks, Ira. It's great to be here. We have to be careful with our accents. We don't let them slide back to proper Irish accents and nobody understand a word we're saying. I think you're right there. Yes, There could be two Irish people. 

00;01;31;03 - 00;01;59;06 

Exactly. So maybe we could just start off with learning a little bit about your background and your role as Oracle. Okay, so you get my title. It's actually it's off of the ground with all those words. Basically. I live in Dublin, Ireland. I work at Oracle, and my job is to lead the team that sounds and implements AR applications, which are business applications across Europe, Middle East and Africa. 

00;01;59;08 - 00;02;24;23 

My background is I've been working in technology my whole career, so and I grew up in Dublin actually, and I actually went to my left secondary school. I went straight to IBM as a student for a year and did all their training courses and then they got a job in the software company and went to university, Dublin City University, at night to study computer applications and computer applications rather than computer science. 

00;02;24;23 - 00;02;48;01 

Computer applications was actually a bit of both. It was the scientific which I kind of like and naturally gravitate towards, but I was always worried that there's no point in deciding to do it if I couldn't play it to business or how to. How do people actually use it? And I joined Oracle in the middle of the pandemic back in 2020, and there's about four and a half thousand people in the team. 

00;02;48;03 - 00;03;10;13 

And we have people working actually to about 75 countries across the region. So it's a it's a wonderful job and I'm very lucky. It's a difficult time to start during the pandemic, but things have changed, thankfully, since then. We were going to talk about cloud computing and its benefits, but what exactly is cloud computing for those who don't know what it means? 

00;03;10;16 - 00;03;26;23 

It's one of those things, actually, and we often talk to people about like you talk to most people and say, Oh, we're moving to the cloud. And everyone goes, Oh, that's great. There's no real standard definition. It can be a multiple of things, actually. So how I describe it, I mean, you have to go backwards a little bit. 

00;03;26;23 - 00;03;48;12 

So computing and I guess the original ones were mainframes, big computers, they like fill a room type of computer and they would do very specific tasks. And then in the early eighties and personal computing, our PCs came in and with IBM and then Microsoft and and they took over and it was big. Everyone had a computer on their desk. 

00;03;48;15 - 00;04;13;09 

I'm not sure people knew what they'd use it for, but they had 100 ask and then it became clean server to talk about. And then, and then it moved into computing cloud. So what is cloud computing? I think the best way of describing it is that it's how do you use the power of a computer that's not physically on your premises, which you can get access through an Internet connection. 

00;04;13;11 - 00;04;35;13 

So it could be a massive computer that you can use one day a month, one day a year or every day, and all you're doing is connected to the Internet. And then how do you utilize that massive computing power? Because it's a different technology and how you develop or how I would secure it. So all of that is needed in the cloud, actually. 

00;04;35;18 - 00;05;04;02 

So the cloud is effectively Internet connected to develop and run applications. That's where the computer is, not on your premises. And can you maybe describe a little bit as to how the cloud computing works, the functionality behind us? I think there's there's multiple layers to it and there's effectively three layers to it as we talk about it from a tech perspective. 

00;05;04;02 - 00;05;25;00 

And people have talked about SAS, and I asked them so, so what would it be? And I asked, is infrastructure as a service? So that is, I want to connect to a computer that's not on my premises and use that storage and computing power. So it like into infrastructure, but I'm getting it as a service pass or platform. 

00;05;25;00 - 00;06;04;01 

As a service is the middleware. That's typically how to play the balance. How do I integrate stuff? How do I have clouds talk to each other and, and very relevant if you're looking at security and then all of that stuff and then SAS or software as a service, that's the stuff that that my, my particular part of the business worries about since the applications and so but it's also from a consumer point of view it might be I think SAS covers things like Tok or Snapchat, Facebook, these are applications that you're accessing through an Internet where it's actually accessing the software as a service to the cloud. 

00;06;04;04 - 00;06;39;29 

To me, the exciting part is the applications, right? And that's because I'm biased. And and for us and we do consumer stuff as well, but mainly we're aimed at businesses. So we do things like your your system or your finance system or you procurements system or your online shopping system. So I often talk about it's when you're at home on the way to work in the morning unkown to Oracle quite often so it might be that you're buying the ticket for your train or plane and or you buying your cup of coffee in Starbucks and you're using an oracle point of sale. 

00;06;40;00 - 00;07;10;23 

We you look at the actual cash register it's typically Oracle and or you're paying your electricity bill or water bill and or you're buying something online from credit, if you're very lucky. And all of those things are actually using applications that are connected back to the cloud into what we do. Oracle applications or you're doing online banking. So we're we're actually kind of used a lot in the world, but we tend to be the invisible part of what people are using. 

00;07;10;25 - 00;07;32;25 

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. The business to business part, I think they're for the everyday person. They don't realize just how much technology is using Oracle technology. And you know, you mentioned social media platforms, Facebook, etc.. So it's it's just huge the amount of customers that we touch, etc. out there. So and on itself, yeah, it gives huge opportunities to students. 

00;07;33;01 - 00;07;56;18 

Absolutely. It's it's I mean it's it's everywhere. It's all around us. Right. So I think you encounter an Oracle piece of technology. I think everyone encounters it every day, actually. You just don't realize it. But it's very interesting. And you mentioned there a security thing that brings me on to a term that we are familiar with data sovereignty, and that's something that's becoming more widespread and being used. 

00;07;56;18 - 00;08;14;26 

So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and explain what that is and why it's so important to to do that. You're going to have to imagine that. So you have an Internet connection and you go into the cloud, right? So where is the cloud? Actually, where are all where are those compute? So you actually have different kinds of you've got private accounts and public clouds. 

00;08;14;28 - 00;08;33;21 

And so a public cloud will be something that's you don't really know as a customer, As a user, you're not you don't care. You're using the same cloud as everyone else. So you don't mind the fact that the resources are being shared. Now, you want your data protected, but you don't want the resources feature. However, it is also a private cloud. 

00;08;33;21 - 00;08;54;26 

So it's like if you're a government and you typically want your sense of the citizen data to be held discreetly in a place that's actually using cloud technology. But the actual this cloud is not connected to anything else. So it's private and therefore there's no data leakage or whatever. Not what actually data sovereignty gets into is more and more. 

00;08;54;26 - 00;09;17;10 

And particularly in the US, actually we have a requirement to keep data within national boundaries. And you probably heard of things like GDPR and slightly less and this is about, yeah, how do I know that my data and you've often hear some high profile cases with some of the big social media platforms that their data has been shared somewhere else. 

00;09;17;13 - 00;09;50;18 

So how do I make sure my data is kept in the geographic location that I want and for national security or for health, for example? And these things are very private. And, you know, individuals want their permission to be shared beyond a known boundary. So what we're seeing is more and more countries or regions saying that the cloud data has to be within my country or region, and and I need to make sure that it's even if it's public and that there's multiple customers using the same infrastructure. 

00;09;50;21 - 00;10;07;24 

The data is separated by each customer, but the data itself doesn't go beyond that region. So you've got public clouds, private clouds and then data sovereignty. So it's it's not as complicated as it sounds when you think about it practically. Yeah, that's really interesting. Especially, I suppose, from a European perspective and the GDPR and all the rules around that. 

00;10;07;24 - 00;10;31;12 

And I think more and more countries are looking at that as well and developing legislation around it. So it's probably something that's going to become more universal, so to speak. I think it is. I think it's going to be a common conversation and this is where it enters. And so you develop applications and you develop your you say so so-called platforms, services like how you integrate Twitter, all of that stuff needs to be developed for a cloud. 

00;10;31;19 - 00;10;59;22 

But then can I set up a cloud in in the box? Can I utilize that same applications and security standards? But how would this that this cloud is only for my use? So it's very, very private. I'm very, very small. So and can I put that into every government on the planet? But they all have the role. They're all using the same software, but they're all working within a separate entity that there's never any way of data leakage across them. 

00;10;59;22 - 00;11;23;28 

So it's it's going to become a big topic, actually. Excellent. Okay. So and that leads me on then to the next question, which is like, why do you think it's important for faculty to teach their students around about cloud computing? And how does having cloud computing skills prepare students for future jobs? Good question. I think it's it's it's absolutely the future. 

00;11;23;28 - 00;11;50;05 

Everything we do an ATM, we're all living in a very connected world. So so all that we do and all that we use is actually in the cloud, right? So if I'm an engineering perspective, you need to understand how that works. So it is a different to the old days. Yeah. And you you're now looking at making sure you know how to minimize traffic, maximize traffic and make sure that you can access multiple clouds are actually the same cloud. 

00;11;50;05 - 00;12;35;04 

All of that conversation is vitally important and understanding why clouds are commercially important. And I mean and as well as that wider important for society because actually cloud computing can be a way where we do minimize greenhouse gases because if we use fewer but bigger computing power, we can actually take away a lot of the redundant capacity that these servers have all around the world and focus them at the smaller and smaller footprint, which can then we can manage the both the power and the what the what they see you miss at the same time. 

00;12;35;04 - 00;13;11;15 

So I think it can be very good for society perspective as well. So it's important that people understand how they work and then how they connect and then how they are secured and protected. And then the last piece is pretty sure everyone in the in the academic space right now would refer to generative air. So these eight technologies, they're actually they only work when you've got access to huge datasets or very large datasets, and that means access into a cloud dataset. 

00;13;11;17 - 00;13;42;09 

So you can add anomalies to data and then give access to it. You can then start to pick out trends and learnings and have generative a produce and relative and meaningful output. And so not just write a poem, but actually how to make it meaningful from a business perspective. And I'm actually what they say is if we can actually get to grips with the potential of generative AI and then there's actually a much, much greater potential here than any other technology that's been come to this space in the last 20 years. 

00;13;42;11 - 00;14;02;23 

20 years might sound like a short time. It's actually a huge amount of time in waiting. So I think it's a real thing and everybody should just instinctively gravitate towards it at this point. Yeah, and I think I know I've heard recently that database is going to become database skills and understanding is going to become more and more important as AI takes off. 

00;14;02;26 - 00;14;24;14 

It's all about data and understanding the structure and the content of data, structured and structured, all of that stuff. So and I got I've got three kids and all their friends. So for the last five, ten years, I've be telling them all, if you don't know what to do, do data science. That sounds like very good advice. Okay. 

00;14;24;17 - 00;14;43;08 

Well, I was going to see if you could give a final piece of advice to faculty or students. You know, what would it be? The data science is one, right? And yeah, the other piece that I find and I trained hard in this conversation, that's why I paused a few times, not to use all the jargon, because it's my world is full of jargon. 

00;14;43;08 - 00;15;09;25 

I mean, I can probably give you a full sentence and three letter acronyms like, you know, I am I need to use the post that updates the ERP value to HCM to get to the C, external drive to CRM and all that mean. And actually we all make a bit of sense in the bizarre kind of way. So I think it's people use jargon to protect themselves and to almost make it make it a little bit of a barrier to entry. 

00;15;09;25 - 00;15;39;07 

So don't be put off by the jargon. It's just words. And be curious. Ask the obvious question I ask them every day when someone puts up a three letter academic, What is the album? So that's the first thing. Don't be put out by the jargon. And then I would say, try to discover the good side of it. And I mean, we have several customers and I don't want to make this sound like we're trying to be making myself sound grander than we are on this basis. 

00;15;39;07 - 00;16;10;02 

But and there's some fantastic organizations that do humanitarian work that need access to high level computing in very unusual places on the planet where it's either war or natural disaster, where comms and so on are stretched. And and they need to be able to get there quickly and deploy humanitarian aid. This is good stuff. And there's lots of I.T. that can help in all of that, which I think people could be interested to go go explore. 

00;16;10;05 - 00;16;44;22 

And then the last thing is, I do think the sustainability, the Green planet, I think we need to be ultra aware of this. And then like, for example, all of Oracle's data centers in Europe right now run on 100% renewable energy, which is fantastic. How do we get to carbon net zero? So I can cloud computing has a greater opportunity for us to achieve that than having every single consumer and business have their own servers in their own premises and they're all doing their own power consumption and emitting whatever they emit as a result of that. 

00;16;44;24 - 00;17;06;08 

So I think it's and those few things, the last one, which is topical in Oracle, Oracle's perspective is actually global health. I mean, they joined in the middle of a pandemic. I think what we discovered was actually all of our health systems were not that connected in reality. So I think there's a lot of work going on now to see how can we overcome that. 

00;17;06;08 - 00;17;29;05 

I mean, and not that I would hope that it would be another pandemic, but how do we get better and use it better to provide excellent health care to every citizen on the planet no matter where they are? That sounds like a bit of a far fetched idea, but that's something that's real and something that I think everybody could get involved in and try to drive it. 

00;17;29;11 - 00;17;55;07 

It's about knowing who you are in an anonymous, secure way, knowing what your own personal medical history is, so that if you take me as an Irish person, I go on vacation to California where they had offices and I break my arm. How do I how do I make sure that my medical records are available to the emergency center in California, even though they're actually stored in Dublin? 

00;17;55;09 - 00;18;24;21 

And how do we get in the activity that security of moving across the planet as aware in a seamless way? And then how do I make sure that the right vaccine that's the start in or how do we develop vaccines in the first place by looking at global data sets. Now, once we have them, how to make sure that they're deployed globally so I think the use of cloud i.t for global betterment in a health perspective as well as sustainability are very real. 

00;18;24;24 - 00;18;49;24 

Well, thank you so much, Cormac, for that insightful, very interesting discussion on cloud computing that brought its true touch on the environment. How can we be better citizens in relation to the environment and health, which of course is a hot topic as well with Oracle and making us realize just how much we have technology in our lives and how important the skills will be for the future generation. 

00;18;49;26 - 00;19;10;06 

So thank you so much again, Cormac. Much appreciate it. Thank you for asking me to learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thank you very much for listening. Bye bye. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. 

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