Just in time for 2022 I've returned to my customer focused roots, jumping into the role of Cloud Architect for the Perth Oracle team helping WA government customers moving to Oracle Cloud/OCI. In my first 10 years in the workforce I spent plenty of time consulting for government customers, and to my delight in returning to this market many of the systems and people I worked with nearly 20 years ago are still alive and kicking, very much more mature and sophisticated then when I visited last! The Cloud Architect role is a multi faceted role, on a daily basis I might switch between wearing many different hats: that of a solution architect, pre-sales engineer, trainer and enabler, customer success manager and more. Regardless of which hat I wear principally its a role focused on customers, keeping their wheels turning, being the oil in their machinery to help them and their projects to success.Key tasks include:• Lead both sales & pre-sales customer engagements from CxO level to tech• Act as trusted technical advisor for customers• Multi-task across multiple simultaneous customers and projects• In-depth discovery and awareness of customer topologies and workloads• Understand customer overall IT portfolio and business priorities• Detailed sizing & cost estimates of customer workloads with focus on value• Manage and own full customer lifecycle from project concept through expansion• Working across LOBs to manage & coordinate specialists to assist projects• Continuous learning of the evolving OCI platform and value proposition• Prepare and present on a wide range of the Oracle cloud tech stack• Organize customer and community events to amplify Oracle’s brand

Based on my previous cloud experience in 2018 I was invited to join Oracle’s internal HR IT group to assist & guide their team in adopting Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure platform (OCI-classic and later OCI-native). This role has transitioned as HR IT has matured in their OCI understanding, from providing guidance & teaching, to defining the OCI architecture and fleshing out their cloud tenancy, as well as building bespoke systems on OCI, and more recently managing their DevSecOps team.A danger for such roles is becoming detached from the skills needed for development. However recently I am the sole developer of the internal Oracle Learning and Career Slack App hosted on OCI serverless functions running. This application integrates a large set of OCI services, keeping me well grounded in the day-to-day tasks facing OCI developers.Other tasks included:• Established DevOps roadmaps, guidelines and processes• Educating and influencing development teams in adopting DevOps best practices like GitFlow• Managing and guiding my team DevOps team in their day-to-day responsibilities• Designing and sometimes hacking the CI/CD pipeline to keep everything running smoothly …. sometimes the best-laid plans of mice and men is undone by human error, so it’s essential to be able to get in and solve problems by hand• Designed & implemented HR IT’s OCI cloud reference architecture, and remaining nimble to continuously learning and adopting new OCI products• Lead and managing projects and liaising with teams to capture business goals and articulate solutions, while pursuing a keep-it-simple philosophy• Have an intimate understanding and worked within Oracle’s strict corporate security policies

With 20+ years in the IT industry I recently wanted to challenge myself. A change of pace was in order. In late 2017 I returned to university to study a graduate certificate in energy systems and renewables, allowing me to pursue my interests and return to my engineering roots.

Oracle's Cloud & Mobile Development Tools Product Managers within the Customer Enablement Group are an internationally distributed team reporting to Oracle HQ in San Francisco. The team performs an outbound commando role with a wide range of tasks focused on enabling customers, partners and sales staff across the globe to be successful with Oracle's cloud, mobile, middleware and web development solutions. Generically speaking the role could be described as: 'solution architect', 'trainer', 'evangelist', 'pre-sales', 'engineer' and 'customer success manager' all rolled into one. It's never a dull day!Overall the role breaks into 2 areas. The 1st publicly visible outbound area focuses on evangelism & enabling customers & staff to use Oracle solutions through the likes of YouTube videos & training. Recent key deliverables include:* Oracle Mobile Platform YouTube channel including Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, overall ~150 videos 4K+ subscribers 200K+ views * YouTube ADF Architecture TV channel: 78 episodes 5K subscribers 110K+ views* Oracle Magazine author, 500k subscribersBehind the glitz of being a YouTube star, the 2nd part of the role includes mainstream core day-to-day tasks:* Working with Oracle high-profile customers to solve project issues, liaising with Oracle engineering to progress these issues, new features & designs, to ensure success for all parties* Assisting sales & pre-sales to engage potential customers & partner opportunities, in all parts of the sales lifecycle, tender responses, building POCs* Creating & running workshops, writing articles, papers, training, blogs, interviews & marketing measures though Twitter, LinkedIn, G+, meetups, plus lots and lots of presenting* Promoting user groups and community, along with presenting at various conferences including Oracle Open World & international user groups such as UKOUG, ODTUG, NZOUG and AUSOUG* Establishment 5000+ member global communities

At SAGE Computing Services run by Oracle ACE Penny Cookson, the goal has and always been small creates BIG. SAGE employees don't pride themselves on the number of employees, multi-million dollar revenues or Fortune 500 clients. Instead the pride is simply getting the job done.My day to day role at SAGE focused on consulting with clients based on the core Oracle technology stack, namely the database & traditional dev tools like SQL, PLSQL, Forms and more. In recent years my focus has been on Oracle's Middleware platform including JDeveloper, ADF, SOAP/REST JAX-WS & JAX-RS web services via Weblogic. From a technical point of view my skills went where ever the task at hand requires me, so today I might dabble with Kerberos, tomorrow Excel spreadsheets, that's what I need to do to get the job done.Having grown with SAGE for a number of years, my last position was as a team leader for clients on a full time bases, with focus on system architecture and the whole software engineering process. My role included running 5 day training courses in the ADF sphere based at clients around Australia.Our clients were wide and varied and included: Department of Finance of WA, Australian Finance Group, Essatto, Callista Software Systems, Department of Agriculture, Department of Conservation and Environmental Protection WA, Department of Water WA, Edith Cowan University WA, Landcorp WA, Melbourne Ambulance Service, Western Australian Police DepartmentThere's plenty more, just too many list and keep this interesting.In the last few years my role was leading a team of developers at the Department of Finance of Western Australia, building several ADF project, introducing Oracle's FMW products into the department, completing one of the largest Federal-State web service solutions known as "Standard Business Reporting", assisting with upgrading Oracle Forms infrastructure and more. This successful work was a focus of 2 key customer case studies by Oracle Corporation.

The typical "junior programmer straight out of uni job" where I learned to cut my teeth in IT as a coder. Lots of different roles, lots of different technologies: C, C++, SQL, change control, Microsoft database systems, Digital UNIX and much more. Varied clients including government agencies, Australian and US railways, chemical plants, SCADA clients, fire and rescue, we did it all. It's so long ago now...MITS no longer exists, it was bought out by Logica CMG that became Logica that then exited the Perth market after I left.