 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Oracle OpenWorld 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon and this is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. We go out to all the big industry events, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm happy to have two members of the IOUG, which is the independent Oracle user group, Troy Ligon, who is with American Express in his day job, and we've got Michelle Colby, who's with backcountry.com. Both of you, thank you for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you. All right, so Troy, I'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what you do and how you got involved with IOUG. I've been running a regional users group for about 15 years now, and so that got me started with the IOUG and recently stepped up to the board as well, and so been working with their alliances and their partners, such as Cisco, for the last six months or so. Yeah. All right, and Michelle, you know, what are you doing, what's your role with IOUG? With the IOUG, I'm the board of directors over regionals, and I got involved because I live in Utah. I've been leading the user group there for quite a while and wanted to take it more to a bigger stage where I can make more of a difference. All right, so great. The research company I work with is Wikibon. We talk about practitioners sharing with their peers. It's great when you can kind of get those good stories to talk to the other people that have similar kind of things you've done. I spent a lot of time in the virtualization community with everybody who knows kind of the V-mugs that they have. Can one of you give me, just kind of, what's the scope of the IOUG? How's it managed? Maybe, Michelle, you're on the board. What does the organization look like and what's the global scope of it? So Troy's also on the board, so I'll let him fill in if I miss anything. But the IOUG covers all the database, storage, topics. They cover business intelligence, which is what I really care about, big data. Am I missing anything? We run the gamut pretty much of all of the Oracle space and all of the glue that binds all of the apps together. So think tuning and best practices and those sorts of things. All of the Oracle shops have a reason to be involved with the IOUG. All right, great. You know, one of the things we've been talking about this week, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. Oh, absolutely. You know, Oracle came out talking big about cloud. Michelle, you mentioned big data. How often are you refreshing what you're doing? How, you know, what's the interaction with your user community as to what new topics they're working on? I got to imagine there's a lot of things keeping you all busy. Oh, it's crazy trying to keep up. And coming to events like this, it's like you're thrown at so many different concepts that I just want to go home and learn so much more. And I rely on the user group community to help me with that. There'll be a few things that I dig into on my own, but then I rely on the community to help me with all those pieces I'm missing. All right, absolutely. The networking opportunities you get at Open World or at IOUGs collaborate, any of the meetups and mashups and so forth, those are vital to the careers of the current crop of folks. You're never going to get that in an online, just a class, those sorts of things. It's these types of events where you can move your career forward and stay fresh. Our jobs are a constant learning opportunity for an entire career. Yeah, so one of the challenges, of course, you're an independent group. But you need to have a direct feed with Oracle and get updates from them. You know, what is the relationship in, you know, kind of, I don't know, structurally? How is their interaction between, does Oracle give funding towards that? How does all that work? Oracle is an excellent partner. They work with us year round to provide funding for some of our activities, but really more on a sponsorship type of basis. We're an independent organization as our name tells. Back years ago, that wasn't the case, but now it is, and so over the course of the year, we get access to their product management. We get advanced information on things that are coming down the pike so that we can start getting our members up to speed and geared up for the learning opportunities they're going to need to get in front of to stay current on whatever Larry has dreamed up for the next round, right? Yeah, one of the things that's always interesting about the user groups is, you know, it's users that run them, but there's usually sponsorships and you've got, I mean, big ecosystem here, you talk, you know, here we are with Cisco. There's so many companies here giving precious everything. Sometimes you got people that run a group and they go work for a vendor and then they got to go change and everything. Can you maybe speak to some of those dynamics? You know, what do you see kind of the customer in the ecosystem from the user group? Our user group relies on all those different parties. It's people who are in there using the tools in their everyday job. There's consultants that are seeing what many different companies are dealing with and then also our partnerships that we have with companies like Cisco who can help augment what we're maybe struggling with with different tools with their products. Absolutely, and, you know, going even further, you know, we have several big sponsors. Cisco's one of our greatest proponents. They work with us year round. They work with us at our collaborate event. This past year, they sponsored a pre-event learning opportunity for the folks. They sponsored the women in technology and Michelle's a large portion of. So, without sponsors like that, you couldn't run such an organization. There's a lot of moving parts, a lot of things that you have to do to run an organization like this and be able to bring the content. We do road shows and those sorts of things to bring the content to our community, keeping the website up, those sorts of things, driving the speakers to come in and present to the community. So all of that, you gotta have great partners and Cisco's one of those, yeah. And if I could chime in about women in technology, I think it's amazing to have a partner like Cisco helping us in supporting that cause and showing that there really is value in supporting the women in the community, giving them a platform to meet each other, network with each other, and give them that support to say, we know that you're doing amazing things and we want you to keep growing that community. That's great, so, you know, this is like homecoming for everybody that's involved in Oracle. I mean, almost 60,000 people a year. Could talk a little bit about, you know, how many people from the IOUG are here, what kind of events you're doing, you know, how many times you're getting together, you know, do you just, you know, hang out here for a couple of weeks now, you know. Yeah, it's really a community. We've got a group of folks that I see twice a year. We see them here and we see them at Collaborate and I've known them for, you know, in some cases, 30 years, right? And yet, we get to see each other twice a year and talk over the rest of the year, so a pretty good size group. We have a booth on the second floor and it's kind of like a meeting space that we all run into each other and we have that common ground to bump into each other at all times. As far as formal events, there's a lot going on this week and we're all busy trying to balance everything going on. Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I always love the dynamics of this is you have to be local, but you have to share with your peers and you have to get to know what's going on. How do you guys communicate? You know, what kind of, you know, best practices do you kind of, you know, help proliferate right around the world? I'm very active on Twitter and Twitter has this whole Oracle community that supports each other. One of the really cool things that I experienced this week is the Oracle Developer Choice Awards, which was allowing the community to recommend others in that network for these awards of being experts in contributing and the Twitter handle that was going out about that was really fun to watch. It's fun to see everyone communicating over that medium even though there's a lot of miles between us. Yeah. We have a great website as well that has both a member's area where they have opportunities to have forums and discussions with their peers as well as a free section of the site where anybody can get involved and see some of our content, that sort of thing as well. So, got a list server that's been going for a lot of years as well. That's an old-school way to communicate one of the earliest of the social media and so we have a pretty active group of folks on there as well. Yeah, I guess you're bringing up a great point. How do people get involved here? You got the list server, you got the website. Come on, you guys got some Slack channels going. What's the new way that, how does everybody get in touch with the IOUG? She's the social butterfly, right? Our website's our best resource. That's where we have our select journals listed online. We have lots of different articles linked to our events and the presentations that people have done at events. So, the website's the best method. All right, well Troy and Michelle really appreciate you coming and sharing all the good stuff going on with the IOUG. Wish you the best of luck with the rest of the event and I hope everybody checks out the website and helps participate because community's a real important part of everything going on in today. Thank you very much. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.