#Sangam18 Day One: Experiences,Observations, Learnings and Photos

Sangam2018, the annual conference of All India Oracle Applications User Group (AIOUG) was held at Hotel Oterra, Electronic City, Bangalore on the 7th and 8th of December, 2018.

I attended  both the days. Here are my observations from Day One of Sangam 2018.

Today was day one of Sangam18, the Oracle conference organized by All India Oracle user Group (AIOUG). It was a very professional event very well organized. The leader of the event and the president of AIOUG is Sai Janakiram Penumuru. An amazing guy, Sai. Very energetic and dynamic.

With Sai, (wearing Specs), the dynamic organizer of Sangam 18

As I do when I attend these sessions, I had planned to tweet as much as possible. That will help me keep track of the sessions that I attend and will help me keep notes and references. One thing that I have never done is taking selfie with someone and posting it on twitter. As things would have it, the Organizers wanted to encourage networking as well as Social Media exposure. They linked the receipt of the T-Shirt to our taking a selfie with one of the two persons whose names they had given in the welcome kit. You have to take the Selfie, post it on SM and show the proof to the Organizers for you to get your T Shirt. I was supposed to take selfie with Basheer Khan  There was one more name mentioned but I have forgotten.

Basheer Khan is kind of famous in Oracle Forums. He regularly responds to tough and complex

With Basheer Khan, KNEX Technology

questions that others are not able to respond and then he replies to those queries on the community forums. I remember that I had also asked him one or two questions in the forums, I forget which forum and what question I had asked, I have also forgotten if Mr.Khan had answered the same.

But the name stayed with me. So it was a coincidence that I was asked to take Selfie with him. I am reasonably certain that without this incentive of a T Shirt, I would not have taken the selfie with him. I am an over proud and stupid person, that way.

Basheer Khan is impressive. He is the CEO of KNEX Technology. Despite being a CEO, he keeps touch with technology and explores the application to a very detail level. He knows for example, how OTBI reports work as well as how to download and use FBDI templates and ADFDI templates. (See how I am throwing these terminologies!). It is impressive.

During coffee session, I met up with him and took the selfie and posted on twitter. I went and registered for T Shirt. They told me that I was the first person to post the Selfie on Social Media and register for the T Shirt.

I attended many sessions. The program started off with a talk from Sai. In his talk, he mentioned about the efforts that have gone in to make this event a success. 'We have become event managers', he mentioned.

In his session titled ‘Make, Break, Build: the new community', Connor McDonald told of the various ways in which one can become a contributor to Oracle User Groups. There are ACE programs and Groundbreaker programs for developers. I will have more to say about it later  in my blog.

These are the sessions that  I attended on Day 1:

Oracle E Business Suite: Update, Strategy and Road-map: Veshaal Singh:

I got into this session midway. Mr.Singh showcased some of the features of Oracle Cloud Manager. I was very impressed with 'One Click' cloning. He assured the customers that Oracle will support EBS till 2030.

Oracle Fusion Cloud: Best Practices for performance: Kandasami Nainmalai / Lakshmi Reddeppa Noolu

In this session I understood what is meant by ‘Cold Browser’. A cold browser is one whose Cache is cleared. If you access the same page a few times, cookies will get installed and the browser will ‘Warm Up’. There will be performance issues while accessing the Cloud over cold browser since the initial cookies have to get installed. It will become faster as the browser warms up.

Fusion cloud ERP - What does it mean for the EBS Techies: Anil Passi

Presence of Anil Passi along with Basheer Khan was one of the reasons why I decided to attend Sangam 18. If you are an Oracle Professional, you can’t miss these two guys if you search for any

With Anil Passi

issue on Oracle Apps. Anil has written three books with Oracle Press, two on Fusion, I think. In this session, Anil discussed the differences between EBS and Fusion. It turns out these two products are as different as apples and Oranges. Fusion is different from EBS in terms of Architecture, Ease of Navigation, Security Design, Reporting Capabilities (ESSBASE Cube is embedded with GL_Balances Table in Fusion, in addition Analytics is embedded in Fusion, Configuration Snapshots, Data Migration (This was good. The ownership moves back to the Functional Consultant, I like it), Integration Approach (No direct integration with Fusion, any third party integration will be through UCM), Mobile App Capabilities, Implementation, Support Skill Sets, Upgrades and Patching is streamlined, Data Encryption capability, Weaker and less flexible Approval Rules configuration in Fusion than in EBS, Custom Extensions and External Mid Tiers.
I liked two things about this presentation. One, at the beginning Anil assessed the expectations of the participants and tried to focus his presentation to meet the requirements. Two, at the end of the presentation, he presented participants with Selfie Sticks. This is my first exposure to selfie stick.

Oracle Cloud Applications: Technical Training: Basheer Khan

Mr.Khan took the participants through two features of Fusion. One is the reporting, he showed how to identify the list of tables in Fusion and how to create an OTBI reports. The key point was that if you 

create a custom report, you should place it in a new subfolder under ‘My Folders’ or under the subfolder ‘Custom’ under the main ‘Shared Folder’. A report placed in any other folders will be removed by Oracle during the upgrade.
He also showed how to do data conversion using FBDI (File Based Data Input). While Anil Passi decried it in his previous session, in my opinion, this is the best feature from the perspective of a functional consultant. The ownership of the data conversion comes back to the consultant. I saw the efficacy of this in FRM Implementation at DU.
Mr.Khan’s hands on knowledge of application was impressive.
I asked a question whether ‘Oracle Cloud Applications’ and Fusion Cloud Application was one and the same thing. He replied that they are. He told the Oracle is replacing the use of the term ‘Fusion’. This was countered by Debra Lilley in the next session. She told that Larry Ellison has used the term Fusion in the latest OAUG.
So there is that.

Cloud Applications: Back to Basics: Debra Lilley

Debra Lilley is a ACE speaker and reputed Oracle Blogger. She has been working on Oracle from

With Debra Lilley, an amazing speaker

 Apps Version 10.6 which was a Character based user interface where you had to type out the commands in the command prompt. 10.7 was the first GUI based Version. I couldn’t understand most of what she said, partly because I had a headache and couldn’t concentrate more and she had not prepared for  the session, I thought. The slides were not good and were not readable and the messaging was not focused. I am waiting for the slides to learn more about the transition to Fusion Cloud.
I have to say that Debra is a very good speaker. She says nice anecdotes with a straight face. For example, while talking about how expensive Oracle Products were, she said that if you read Oracle in reverse, it will read ‘El Caro’ which is Spanish for ‘Expensive’.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Smart Manufacturing: Muralidhar Reddy KVS / N Suman Moses

This was a very good presentation on the complexities on eliciting intelligence from Operational

reports from Production Shopfloor information. The team made a very good case for how Oracle is using Artificial intelligence to benefit manufacturing companies. It was a typical Indian presentation. Understated and monotonous, but with great content.

In conversation with Khurshed Batliwala & Dinesh Ghodke

This session started at about 6.30 P.M. Attending this session was mandatory to receive the T-Shirt. So I attended.
Khursheed and Dinesh came from Art of Living. They were there to talk on how to handle pressure at work. They have co-written a book called ‘The Happiness Express’ which they repeatedly exhorted the participants to place a pre-order. Apparently if a book is Pre-ordered, the chances of it being prominently placed on the bookstore is very high. While taking a question from a participant on how he is not able to handle the stress of the job, Khursheed told the story of two lizards sitting on a ceiling. One of them asks the other out for a drink. The other refuses saying that if it moves away the ceiling will collapse.
Dinesh guided us on meditation. He asked us to do Bhastrika Pranayama followed by meditation. It was cool for me since I am doing 300 Bhastrika every day. During meditation, it was amusing to see how Dinesh was the clone of Sri Sri Ravishankar. He had the long locks of Sri Sri and his intonation during the meditation, his way of saying ‘Relax’, ‘Focus’ and other terms were almost like Sri Sri. Since I was doing the meditation with another guru, I could not continue the meditation since I was always comparing styles.

Most important outcome for me from Day One sessions are the following.

• I realized that I knew many of the stuff on Fusion that was being discussed. I know much more Fusion that I thought I knew. That is an eye opener.
• I have a lot of expertise and experience. Had I channelized it effectively, I would have been attending Sangam18 as a presenter and not as a participant. After all, how many people out there has about 25 ERP Project experiences with an average CSR of 90%. How many of them have 360 degree experience in Oracle Ecosystem, having also played the role of CIO? I am an elephant who do not know how to project its strengths.
• Fusion has scared the shit out of DBAs and Developers. Developers have to learn new skills, PL/SQL doesn’t work anymore and DBAs will become redundant as more and more customers move to Fusion and Database Administration will be handled by Oracle.
• There were many sessions that I wanted to attend but could not due to clashing sessions. For example, on session on Blockchain clashed with that on Analytics Cloud (this was on Day 2). Another session Settlement Process in GST clashed with the one on Smart Manufacturing. I am waiting for the presentations to be made available.
• One quote that stayed with me was ‘Earlier, people avoided Cloud due to Security concerns. Now people are coming to Cloud due to Security Concerns’

I also met up with some Interesting and smart people.

Mr.Murugadoss Narayanan, CEO of Quadrobay. His company is into SCM and PLM

Mr.Nirav Gupta of ADP. I was surprised to know that he is not in any Social Media.!. He sure will be missing a lot of communications since many people are communicating only on SM nowadays. But then again, you cannot be in all SM, so all of us will be missing some communications, right?

I also met many more people. I have taken Selfie with most of them and you can find the details HERE

There were some coincidences that I have to mention here.

Before I went to the sessions, I had decided that I was going to network with as many people as possible. The first person that I spoke to was Sai. So far Sai was just a name for me, but he told me that he worked with me as a DBA in WCPM project where I was the project Owner. That was the first of a series of coincidences in the day.

The second coincidence was when I met Janak Desai of Atul. I remembered that when I was the Head-IT of Allana Group, I had interviewed him for the post of AGM OPM in my team. In fact I had also interviewed his son Niletra Desai, whose CV was shared by my team mate, who was his colleague in the previous company.

While we are on coincidences, let me move to the third one of the day. I met a guy named Ashish Nabira from Oracle. He was coordinating the blockchain stall. He told me that he was related to K L Chandakji, the ED of WCPM and that Chandakji was staying with his son in Bangalore. He has retired from WCPM now. I remembered Chandakji from my meetings while we were implementing Oracle Apps for WCPM. Talking to him made me remember those days.

What are the odds that three total strangers at a conference are somehow related to the same project?

The sessions got over at about 8.30 P.M and it was 10.00 P.M when I reached back home. Tired but elated. It is not everyday that one gets to meet so many smart people.