Big Changes…Revealed

On Twitter this past weekend, I alluded to big changes coming…with Big Red gum as the picture. Now that I have informed all parties close to me, I feel I am now ready to tell the general public…

I have accepted a position with Oracle starting this coming Monday, the 29th. I will be a Senior Sales Consultant with the BI Cloud Service (BICS) team. Basically, the technical person providing demo and proof of concept support to the BICS public sector sales team. I feel this is a dream position; if I could have designed my dream position, all parts of this position would be covered. I am very excited about transitioning from EPM to BI, working with cloud software, and getting back to my relational database/big data days from over a decade ago. I have wanted to work for Oracle since my college days, so I cannot stress how excited I am to see this dream come true for me.

Of course, with all new happy beginnings comes sad endings. Although that’s not a fair statement. While my time employed by interRel has ended, the relationships have not. I am grateful and thankful to interRel for opportunities provided and support given during my time with them. Quite honestly, they are some of the best people I have worked with over the duration of my career. …And I hate saying “people”, because they are, truly, friends. Some co-workers have become such close friends that if I were to work with them again, it would be {a good kind of} awkward because of the close friendships formed. The company culture of interRel is the best I have seen in the EPM consulting world. It’s no secret that because of this culture I was able to obtain Oracle ACE Director status. It’s their culture of ‘education first’ that enables them to be a, if not the, leader in the EPM field. I want none of this lost in my transition to BI and Oracle. Also with this new position, I will lose my ACE Director status. I have been proud of this title because I had been working towards it for ~6 years. I failed more times than I succeeded in my desire to be an educational leader in the EPM world. In fact, I am proud of each time I failed. I learned more from my failures than my successes. …And I guarantee I will fail many times in my new role. But that means I am trying! I will still wear my ACED jacket with pride, and hope that I can mentor and encourage more in the BI (which includes EPM) world towards the different ACE levels. This means the BI world is getting stronger and smarter!

So why BICS? I have had the desire to learn cloud analytics/computing for some time. It is the direction of the industry and Oracle, and I desire to be on the leading edge of that technology. As has been seen on my blog recently, I’ve been learning APEX over the past few months and have fallen in love. I also love SQL (have for years, really). I love playing around with analytics. Naturally, BICS falls directly in this sphere of love. I also can’t wait to get my hands on Data Visualizer! There is so much coming down the pipeline for Oracle BI and big data that my mind is going 100 mph on directions it can go. And I’m excited and proud to be on that team leading the way.

This blog was given a new URL a couple weeks ago to minimize the future posts on EPM in an effort to maximize future posts on different BI topics. Hence, the move from EPMQueen to RealTriGeek. I feel it better represents the future direction of this blog. …And, of course, you will see some triathlon related posts along the way. …And some neat analytics of training and races using BICS.

I hope you will join me in my excitement on my new journey with Oracle and BICS. It’s been hard to contain my excitement about starting a new technology, but it’s all out there now. I hope to catch up with you online and at Kscope in Chicago. While my new role prevents me from staying on the ODTUG Board of Directors, have no doubt that my faith and trust in ODTUG is as strong as ever. I hope that I can continue with ODTUG as an Oracle advocate and ambassador for the BICS tool by giving webinars and being a part of the BI Community.

A tradition I have held for many years is when I share a bottle of wine with friends, I will have each person sign the cork and save it to put on the wall in my wine cellar. I only do this with people I respect and consider friends. I have many corks from my amazing times at interRel and with ODTUG. I hope that I can continue this tradition with new friends with and through Oracle. If you read this blog and we happen to share some wine, please ask to sign the wine cork. That would be a great honor.

With that said…cheers!