Attending Oracle SOA Training

What a great way to start the month of November with a fresh week of training. I can't really remember when was the last time I went for a week long training. The closest I went to was attending the Oracle Demand Generation Training at Sunway Hotel last September. As you've guessed it, lately I've been exposing myself a lot to Oracle. The way I see Oracle is that if MySQL open source database is a normal compact car where everybody can buy, Oracle database is a luxury car where only people with a lot of resources can afford to buy. The function is generally the same, it gets you to point A to point B but the features, performance and the experience are entirely different.

It doesn't really matter which product is the best or not, it is a matter of preferences. If I can afford to buy a BMW, I would definitely owned one. Unfortunately, I can only afford a basic car at the moment but I can still dream of a BMW nevertheless. Back to my Oracle training of course. The training was held at Oracle's HQ up in Level 38, Menara Citibank Kuala Lumpur. Check out their front desk:

 

I can only wish I am working with a huge corporation such as Oracle. It must be really tough trying to score a job there, don't you think?

Anyway, my trainer is a guy name Sachin, I am guessing he's from India from his thick Indian accent. Prior to this training, I have no idea what SOA or the longer version Service Oriented Architecture means. Even after reading Wikipedia, I still couldn't picture what SOA is all about. My trainer tried to give some clue on what SOA is all about but all I see is a bunch application pool represented by jargon linking with each other. I must give credit to Sachin although his presentation was a bit bored, he's quite a tech nerd when it comes to hands-on training which came in late in the afternoon since the Oracle JDeveloper installation file was almost 1GB and had to be copied manually from person to person. The requirement was 3GB of RAM for the training laptop just for the VMWare containing the SOA suite to run while I only have 1GB of RAM. Lucky there was an alternative.

 

The training class became more livelier when the hands-on approach began. With Nescafe coffee served, it was very enjoyable to crunch the tutorials given. Right up until my developed SOA scripts got corrupted and could not be deployed apart from the wireless networking changed setting. The journey continues tomorrow morning.

Oracle Demand Generation Training @Sunway Resort Hotel

Yesterday, I had the privilege to be part of a sales training at Sunway Resort Hotel next to Sunway Pyramid. The event was organized by ECS Pericomp together with Oracle. I did some Googling and found out that ECS Pericomp was just appointed as Oracle’s Value Added Distributor last month. Since the company I work with is a partner in some other products they are representing, they’ve invited us to come for this event. Becoming a business partner is not an easy task, my guess is they are looking for alliances with the others for them to achieve their sales target. Basically, leveraging on other people’s contacts, time and energy is the best way to kickstart their venture I supposed.

I wished the event was held after the fasting month, this was because I could have enjoyed the drinks and meal that were provided. ;-) Anyway, since I arrived at the place early (The event was supposed to start at 9am but the majority of the people invited only came in at around 10pm), I’ve gotten myself one movie voucher at Cathay Cineplexes (Thanks ECS).

 

4 years ago, I had the opportunity to come an Oracle event also at Sunway. You can refer to my blog post here. That was like a long time ago when I was just started off in the technology area. Bringing back the memory, I wrote that I was going to get an IT degree. Well that didn’t happen because it was just too expensive at that time. My mother just last week asked me whether I did think about continuing my studies because my younger brother had plans for it. I replied to her that I wanted to get married first and later on think about it. Then again, what can I gain if I pursue for further studies when all I can get is a better paying job. The question remains, is it a fulfilling one?

Enough about my ramblings, let’s move on to my sales training yesterday. The title of the training was “Oracle Partner Demand Generation Training”. Confused? Me too. It sounded like a name of product but its not. The trainer was a guy from Oracle, Nick Tielman. Before that, we had the Oracle channel’s manager giving a brief of what how Oracle company and product doing these days.

 

Getting back to the training session. Nick did a great job at presenting his presentation. I really like the first part which is the Goal Setting. That is one aspect that most of us or mainly me neglect the most. The rest is just like the usual sales training but from the aspect of technology industry which I also found is interesting considering I haven’t been on a sales training for a very long time. Anyway, relating this training to my job. I wear many hats in the company that I work with. I can still recall the time when I was a telemarketer and failed badly (this was before I landed at this job right now), it was one of the most difficult job I had ever done. I never enjoyed a moment of it.

Basically what Nick presented was a refresher course for me. However, I love the part where the Customer Relation Management system usage that Oracle themselves are using. I’ve implemented an open source CRM but hardly use it. There’s no harm in trying after learning all of what the sales training has provided, right?

 

By the way, Nick is from the Oracle application business development unit and what he had said about Oracle’s product is fairly true, with all the 60 acquisitions within 4 years and humongous amount of applications under Oracle’s umbrella, there is no way a salesperson could remember all of them. What they can do is basically get the ball rolling by bringing in pre-sales, consultant and tech-guys into the picture before getting the sales transaction completed.

What I saw yesterday was only just to sell Oracle’s product as if it was a box of software being presented to the customer and we need to close the deal as fast as we can. I am more into looking on how the implementation and services that we can provide because a lot of the clients that I’ve seen doesn’t have a clue on how to operate the software. Apart from that, the services and implementation area are more profitable rather than making a small percentage of profit margins of the product itself. By doing that way, the cash flow business can be sustained longer and the effort can be justified. I am just writing what come into the top of my head here.

Anyway, the sales training is a good approach in knowing what Oracle businesses is. I wonder if entering into Oracle University would be a good move for me. I guess I’ll have to look more into it as I reorganize my own personal goal.

Learning The ABCs of The New ERP

I'm waiting for the live webcast from ZDNet to start. It's 2am in the morning at the moment. Check out the webcast presentation window I'm staring at right now:



What is ERP? ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. Opss..My class is starting right now. I'll elaborate what I've learned when I finish this class. Got to concentrate on my class now. Bye..

RM50 Workshop: The Art of Software Development

Because of my previously active participation in doing networking around seminars and events, my e-mail fell into the mailing list of iTrain. I must say that iTrain provides a good number of IT training, not that I am promoting their courses but I see that their prices are considered reasonable and I do wish to enroll for one of their classes one day. On the 23rd of April, I got an email offering The Art of Software Development Workshop.

It's only RM50 so it didn't take me long to sign up on their online web form. 4 days later, my seat was confirmed. I recently updated my about page so you'll probably know that I have no formal education about programming or software development. Still, web programming is still part of software development, right?

After a month of waiting, last Saturday I went to Stamford College PJ located just nearby my former office where I used to work. BTW, I paid the RM50 fees from my own pocket just to attend this workshop. I'm thinking of making a claim from my company but I forgot to ask for the receipt. Oh well, I think the knowledge of The Art of Software Development is far more valuable than RM50. So, who was the instructor for the workshop, head over here and read all the details about the program. Basically it's a 6 days training program but this RM50 is just some sort of preview to get the feel and some general idea of The Art of Software Development.

Dr. Chai, the instructor is kind enough to share with me and the rest of the attendees his knowledge and experiences. There were only 10 people who turn up. It was kind of scary if the other people know what my background is yet I've seen stranger career change that other people has done. Most of what Dr. Chai was telling during the workshop was alien to me but then, I was not alone. I guess only 2 person know or at least heard of Unified Modeling Language (UML).

I would have never known that software development is a very serious thing if I haven't attend this workshop. Mission critical software such as the heart pacemaker or software that is used on Air Traffic Controller, one tiny code error could make a different between life and death. Dr Chai also talked about documentation control, how to design those geeky documents and why it is important to have hundreds of pages requirement when making proposals to clients. Awesome stuff!

We then learned about some tools used for designing those programming codes rather than blindly leaving it to the programmers. One of the software is called StarUML. I recently installed it on my computer but I have no clue how to use it. I guess Microsoft Visio is a lot easier to use but Visio lacks the functionality that UML has. Anyway, here's an ugly diagram taken from a sample from the StarUML example:

If you are wondering why the diagram is so ugly, there is no need for the diagram to be beautiful. For programmers or developers, it's just a waste of time. Unless if the diagram needs to impress the clients, then it is worth to have a nice one. Another software that was introduced to us was WinCVS. It's basically a version control software that tracks changes done for all the files for your software project. I haven't really test that software yet but it sure is something that is quite important even for a web developer like myself.

We were supposed to design a bluetooth system using the tools that were given to us but after a couple hours discovering something out from my world, my head experienced a condition called 'information overload'. After the workshop finished, there is one thing that I've learned, if you really want to excel in becoming a developer, have the word architect at the back of whatever position you are holding for example, my role would be a Web Development Architect. Being an architect is the highest peak achievement one would ever achieve. Hhmm...sounds really ambitious of me..haha..

By the way, I met a Securities Commissions IT Manager during the workshop. She's looking for a .NET programmer for a few positions available in her department I guess. If any of my readers happen to know someone or you yourself might be interested, send me a shout and I'll refer you to her. After jumping into this IT career, I realized that there are so many job opportunities in the IT industry yet so few people can really fulfill the vacant position. Now I wish I had a Degree in IT.. :-(

If you need more information about The Art of Software Development Training Program: Click Here.

For more information about the RM50.NET workshop: Click Here.

Interested links I found:

• Develop like an architect, not like a cowboy by ZeMMs. (I wish I had read your post ZeMMs before I went to the workshop..hehe)


• Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus by Hacknot.

How To Be Comfortable In Front of Your PC

If you spend a fair amount of time in front of your PC at work or home, most of the time you are not aware of you bad habit. If you don't know what your bad habit is, maybe it is time to take an ergonomic course (click on the image to open up a new browser window and start the course):

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine went to see a doctor because he had this slight numbness on his hand. It was told that he might have carpal tunnel syndrome as he used to sit in front of his PC most his waking time and holds the mouse all the time. Since then, he takes regular break in between jobs.

I'm too also guilty of having a lot of bad posture habits in front of the PC and I'm working on to practice good ergonomics as I spend a lot of time in front of the PC too.

But what about people who are using laptops? I used to work with a laptop and I'm thinking of buying one soon (I had to give the laptop back to company when I changed job). The angles might be different but I guess you will know how figure out yourself though.