Heraclitus was and is still correct. Seems that whenever I make a statement regarding permanence, I am forced to retract. That’s not always a bad thing. If I have talked to any of you over the past couple years, you have heard me state how much I loved working at Oracle and how I could see myself retiring there in 20 years. I loved my job – Public Sector BI and Analytics pre-sales – and the people I worked with/for. However, life presents interesting opportunities sometimes.
I started out at Oracle focused on BICS and OBIEE. I had gotten pretty burnt out on EPM consulting and wanted to work with new technology and with scenarios where I could fully use my undergraduate degree. Although I used the Information Systems part of my degree regularly, I really missed not using my Quantitative Analysis degree. My position at and the direction of analytics at Oracle afforded me the opportunity to do statistics as part of my job as well as use the R training I received in college (although I had to relearn the code basics as that was 14 years ago…). I remembered how much I loved analytics. I loved the math and visualizations. I loved working with organizations that were trying to implement a new or upgraded BI and/or analytics system. I really enjoyed presenting Data Visualization and watching people’s eyes light up when they saw how easy it was to use and build visualizations from an Excel document. I loved working with the DoD and Federal teams. I felt like I was back at home with my “people”. The Sales Reps I worked with were top notch. My teammates were fun, driven, exciting, and hard-working. There was never any competition, only collaboration. I loved my job. In fact, it was the best 2 years of my career and I hope the rest of my career will live up to my time at Oracle as I never felt I was going to work one day in the 2 years as an employee.
But sometimes an opportunity comes up out of the blue for you to stretch your wings a bit and throws you off the course you had planned through retirement. Starting January 18th, I will be the VP of BI and Analytics for Accelytics. I expect this to be an interesting position as I will be building up the BI and analytics team and working with customers implementing these tools. I’ll be working with Oracle Analytics Cloud immediately and that excites me given the tool offering is still less than a year old and evolving rapidly. I hope to have more time to dedicate to writing more OAC blog posts. I’ll still be involved in the conference world so I’m not going anywhere! If anything, you may see/hear more from me, like back in my pre-Oracle days. I could not be more thrilled that I am still working with Oracle technology. Accelytics is an Anaplan partner and I look forward to learning that technology, as well. Always good and fun to learn new technologies!
With that said, I hope you’ll welcome me back to the Oracle partner/customer world with open arms. I’m excited to be back and continue my work with and for Oracle with a partner for the community!
Upcoming Conferences and Presentations:
Indiana Oracle Users Group: January 26, 2018, presenting “The New BI”
Anaplan HUB: March 5-7, 2018, as an Exhibitor
Analytics and Data Summit: March 20-22, 2018, presenting “Oracle & R – Advanced Analytics on Steroids”
Kscope 2018: June 10-14, 2018, as a Bronze Sponsor (and hopefully presenting!…TBD)
RealTriGeek 