I’ve been very honored to be one of 29 influencers from around the world being invited to participate in Oracle Ravello Blogger Day 2 on March 8th. The 8-hour event was held at Oracle HQ in Redwood City, CA and 40% of the attendees had attended RBD1 10 months before. Throughout the day there were much interaction with all presenters and a ton of questions. The sessions were inspiring and all the questions gave the day new angles and thoughts to be discussed throughout the event and after.
Ravello
Ravello Systems was founded in 2011 in Palo Alto and was acquired by Oracle in February 2016. It focuses on seamlessly deploying existing VMware or KVM data on Oracle Cloud infrastructure without any modifications to the VM’s, network or storage. The workload will run on Ravello’s own hypervisor HVX and does not require the use of ESXi.
Ravello differentiators
There was a big focus from Oracle Cloud team on SLA and the differentiator here is that Oracle cloud offers performance SLA together with manageability and availability SLA.
Being a VMUG Leader I’m always naturally interested in customer cases and I always think this is a great way to show the real use of product. There were two Customer presentations – One from Informatica University.
One of the differentiators with Ravello is their training portal. The portal makes it easy to set-up and deliver instructor-led training and self-paced training sessions. With this training portal you can deliver education for customers, partners or prospects. Informatica University has 125 Self-paced courses and 45 instructor-led courses. This was a great use case for them and they showed it as a very cost-effective solution as they had 70% reduction in training costs.
International Women’s Day and female tech bloggers
#RBD2 was on March 8th which is International Women’s Day. I had some virtual high fives and saw some very cool initiatives from vendors on this day. VMware in Norway had invited tech women for a lunch to celebrate and network – what a great idea.
My compliments to Oracle Ravello and TechReckoning for bringing the record number of 4 female tech bloggers to this event. Let me introduce you to them
Michelle Laverick. I’ve known Michelle for years and last time I saw her was in 2014 at VMUGDK and NLVMUG. Michelle decided to take an Adult Gap Year and we’ve been keeping in touch now and then to catch up. As soon as I arrived at the hotel I wrote Michelle and we went out to dinner. We had a spectacular night with great conversations e.g. Power of Difference project at VMware. Michelle has amongst other things been a VMware instructor and worked at VMware with technical marketing. She contributed throughout the #RBD2 with her deep technical knowledge together with not being afraid to ask about anything. Visit her blog here
Lauren Malhoit Last time I saw Lauren was at VMworld 2013. At that time she had a well-known Podcast called AdaptingIT which focused on all the women of IT. I was very proud to be interviewed next to a lot of women I truly respect. Lauren currently works at Cisco as a host on Techwise TV and is a co-host on Tech Villagge Podcast. She already wrote a blog post on #RBD2 here
Becky Elliot I’m always very happy to meet new tech women and this was the first time I’ve met Becky. She is a System administrator who is interested in automation and virtualization and has a blog here
I’m not finished
I wrote a more personal blog post about my awesome week here
*Oracle has sponsored my travel and accommodation for me to attend #RBD2.