Goodbye 2021, welcome 2022 – and some thoughts

The second pandemic year is ending – and a new year starts. It’s time to say Goodbye 2021, welcome 2022 – and some thoughts …

Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash

Goodbye 2021

This was kind of a strange year, wasn’t it? It least for me it was. As for many of you, a lot of things were quite similar to 2020 when the pandemic took off. For me this meant zero business related travel. Which was not very amusing on one side since I really miss customers, colleagues, my team – and those Oracle nerds out there. I’ve got invited to some conferences and to critical customer meetings towards the end of the year. But a day before I planned to book my ticket, restrictions or Omicron stopped everything.

Well, that’s life – and I’m certain 2022 will be better.

But apart from this, life is pretty good.

At first, I’m feel really gifted working in such an awesome team as ours. No matter how dark things may be outside, there is always a smile and a laughter. Even better, in mid-2021 we could welcome a new “transfer” to our team: Rodrigo Jorge. And of course, there is always something new to learn every day. Which makes my job really enjoyable. We received really a lot of positive, sometimes enthusiastic feedback regarding AutoUpgrade in the past 12 months. And we’ve had literally thousands of attendees in our Virtual Classroom Seminars. Plus, all these conference talks. I didn’t count precisely but we must have delivered far over 100 hours of talks as a team this year.

Not traveling, besides reducing my carbon dioxide footprint significantly, has another positive effect: I could spend a lot of hours on my gravel bike. As you may know, I live in one of the nicest regions of the world, southern Bavaria. There are plenty of lakes, woods – and the mountains not so far away (well, and tons of hills towards the mountains). And luckily, thanks to Oracle allowing us to use the Job Bike service, I received my bike before container ships got stuck in the Suez channel and bike parts and frames became a very rare sight in local stores.

I could travel privately of course but decided to stay either in Germany or go to my most favorite places in northern Italy. Still, it’s no secret, as many of you I miss traveling and meeting people quite a bit 😉

Some thoughts

Besides these positive thoughts there is something I need to mention here. 2021 was also a very tough year. I’ve lost three friends in the Oracle cosmos. And even months later it is very hard to believe that Joel Kallman, Pieter van Puymbroeck and Daniel Bozzolo all left us in 2021.

Let me share this wonderful photo of Daniel and Joel with you (Foto credits to @afilomeni).

I visited Uruguay many times and Daniel was always one of the people picking us up at the airport, driving us around, helping and guiding us. Such a positive guy with a very fine sense of humor. Missing you, Dani – and I can’t believe that you won’t be there anymore the next time I will be in Montevideo.

If you have a minute to share at the end of this weird year 2021, please take a minute of silence to remember these three great guys.

Welcome 2022

Gosh, the year is already over – so welcome 2022. Or as somebody said yesterday, it gets pronounced correctly “twenty-twenty too” 🙂 I have no idea how many Covid variants we’ll see coming and going, but I have a very positive feeling for the coming year.

We have some great additions to our database PM teams with Martin Bach and Philippe Fierens who both joined Oracle recently. I’m still totally excited.

Thanks to all of you for mostly staying calm when things don’t work as expected. Thanks for sending us feedback, recommendations, advice, thoughts, complaints – just be patient since we are really a small team doing our best to help and assist you whenever possible. It’s a true pleasure to work with you as customers, partners, colleagues and friends. And a very special thanks to all the user groups and Oracle ACEs out there, to all the people spending their free time to organize events, meetups, virtually and physically, promote Oracle technologies, bring Oracle interested people together, even in the most distant places. Thanks to all of you!!

Let us welcome 2022 together!!

Stay safe, take care, seize the day – and I hope to meet you again in 2022 somewhere 😉

–Mike