My objectives for attending CloudWorld are to hear about the direction of travel for Oracle OCI, Database and other services that are beneficial to PeopleSoft customers and to learn about new features in OCI and understand what's coming in the future.
Of course, meeting people in-person is a compelling reason for attending any event like this and the opportunity to network with Oracle product management and PeopleSoft customers is priceless.
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| Oracle ACE friends |
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| Kyle (psadmin.io) and Tom (athenahealth) |
My top takeaways from the conference naturally have a PeopleSoft focus.
(1) Artificial Intelligence
AI seems to be everywhere and it's hard to see the real value for all the noise and gimmicks. Like all new technological evolutions, the inventors need try all sorts of ideas to develop and refine the product. Steam engines were not perfected overnight. Watching this space for innovations, other than digital assistants and smart algorithms, that can add real value for PeopleSoft customers. Image processing of expenses and invoices is one promising area.
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| AI Gimmick |
I walked past this “bar” many times on the way to CloudWorld event and never saw anyone drinking there. Yes… a robot can make you drink… but people need people. Do we really need a Robot to make our drinks? This is AI gone too far in my opinion.
(2) PeopleSoft Investment Strategy.
Oracle's commitment to investing in PeopleSoft is as strong as ever. There was a packed room for the session on Leveraging Oracle Cloud Technologies as a PeopleSoft Customer. Hosted by Robbin Velayedam (Senior Director, PeopleSoft Product Strategy, Oracle), we heard again of Oracle's continued investment in PeopleSoft, and particularly PeopleSoft running on OCI. The rolling 10-year support for PeopleSoft applications is ongoing and includes a unique value proposition in taking PeopleSoft to OCI. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has some unique benefits for PeopleSoft customers which makes OCI a natural home for PeopleSoft applications.
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| Robbin Velayedam (Oracle) addresses a packed room of PeopleSoft customers |
(3) PeopleSoft on OCI.
Running PeopleSoft on OCI is an established route now for PeopleSoft customers looking to optimise their investment in PeopleSoft and to reduce costs, improve performance and increase operational agility. I tried to tap into as many sessions on OCI as I could. Here are some of my highlights:
OCI Stack Monitoring
https://blogs.oracle.com/observability/post/monitor-psft-using-stack-monitoring OCI has the only Observability & Management framework which is PeopleSoft aware out of the box. The PeopleTools and OCI Stack Monitoring team continue to enhance this experience for PeopleSoft customers to give real-time monitoring and alerting to key infrastructure events in PeopleSoft and the Database. Oh... and you don't need to be running PeopleSoft in OCI to benefit from this as you can point OCI Stack Monitoring at your on-premises, AWS and Azure deployed PeopleSoft systems too https://www.oracle.com/manageability/stack-monitoring/features/#Enterprise. Principal Product Manager, Aaron Rimel hosted a live lab session on Stack Monitoring and a Hands On Lab is available if you wanted to try this out for yourself. https://apexapps.oracle.com/pls/apex/r/dbpm/livelabs/view-workshop?wid=3909
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| Aaron Rimel (Oracle) talking through the OCI Stack Monitoring |
OCI Log Analytics and AI
Steve Lemme from Oracle's Observability Management Team gave a fascinating live demonstration of an AI Digital Assistant operating against OCI Log Analytic and Stack Monitoring data which answered the question "Users complain about the app performance, is the wineStore app ok?". This was a clever data correlating AI which could help a system administrator mine the complex layers of log data from the network, Load Balancer, Firewall, WebLogic and Database layers of the stack. Looking forward to seeing where Oracle takes this going forward. You can see a snippet of the conversation below.
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| Asking the AI engine "is my app ok?" |
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| Steve Lemme (Oracle) from Observability & Management team chatting with the AI |
OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery
OCI has an automated disaster recovery orchestration solution – OCI Full Stack Recovery. https://www.oracle.com/uk/cloud/full-stack-disaster-recovery/ Version 1 customer, athenahealth, is running PeopleSoft FSCM on OCI and we’ve recently worked with their team to implement an entirely new disaster recovery solution using OCI Full Stack Recovery service. In addition, we upgraded them to PeopleTools 8.60 and migrated to Oracle Autonomous Linux. Tom Adams, athenahealth Systems Manager, was invited by Oracle to CloudWorld to present the details of this DR project and the very real benefits they had gained. You can read more on this here https://www.oracle.com/customers/athenahealth/ It was great to meetup in-person with Tom and some of the Oracle FSDR team at the CloudWorld event. Version 1 is very excited about what can be achieved for clients using FSDR service.
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| OCI Full Stack Recovery (FSDR) Customer Panel |
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| Tom Adams from athenahealth talking about their FSDR success story |
Oracle recently recognised the innovative work at athenahealth and have awarded them PeopleSoft Technology Innovator 2024 award for their work with PeopleSoft on OCI. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E52319_01/infoportal/feature_innovators.html#cloudmgr
OCI Base Database
OCI Oracle Base Database Service is an established platform for running PeopleSoft and Kyle Benson from psadmin.io and Petr Lensky from Los Rios Community College presented an excellent session on the features and benefits of OCI Base Database.
Most of Version 1 customers running PeopleSoft on OCI are running their database on Base Database service. Read more here https://www.oracle.com/uk/database/base-database-service/
OCI Fleet Application Management
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/fleet-management/home.htm A very exciting new OCI service which provides centralised operations across your entire cloud including resource management and patch compliance. This service allows you to define and execute a patching regime for applications like WebLogic, Java and EBS. An upcoming feature in the roadmap is the ability to create your own runbooks. If you can script it, you can encode it in a runbook. This paves the way for automating patching across just about any application. It sounds like PeopleTools patching may well be in the product roadmap.
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| Demonstrating Custom Runbooks for WebLogic Patching |
I’m looking forward to exploring in more detail the things I’ve learned about and to put them into practice to generate value for the PeopleSoft customers I work with. I think it’s going to be another busy year ahead !
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