My Road to becoming an Oracle ACE Associate

My Road to becoming an Oracle ACE Associate

Even though that it has been a couple of months since I received my Oracle ACE Associate award, I hadn’t written about it, so I’m taking the time now.

One the coolest things that Pythian has , is that you get to sit down with the leaders of this company on the first weeks of joining, I wrote about my first week in this blog post , and even though I am no longer working for them, they still remain good friends.

But what I wanted to get to, is that on one of those talks, I sat down with their CTO , ACE Director Alex Gorbachev , and one of the things he asked me, was; What was one of my professional goals at Pythian? And my answer was to become an Oracle ACE, and one of the things he mentioned was that he wasn’t going to put a nomination or recommend me. I won’t say that it didn’t sting a bit, as I had been been active on social media, blogging for 4 years and already presenting, and one of the reasons I got hired at Pythian was due to this.

But this only fuelled the passion, so I did put my mind to it to achieve this goal. In the meantime, got accepted at OOW,Collaborate, wrote an article for OTN, presented in Mexico for the ORAMEX group,did a Webinar for the LAOUC group, featured in the RMOUG newsletter. So after talking with my mentor and great friend , Kellyn Pot’vin (@dbakevlar) . She decided that it was time to put the nomination in.

I won’t lie to you, I thought that I had it in the bag, and to my surprise, my nomination got rejected, and that wasn’t a sting , that was a full out blow to the head, as at the same time, several personal stuff was happening. I started to think if everything that was already doing and still got rejected, what else was I supposed to do.

So for a couple of months I wallowed in my non-ACE’dom pain. But finally got up again, continued blogging, and presenting, until finally one day, Francisco Munoz (@fcomunoz ), Ronald Vargas (@rovaque),Paola Pullas (@paolapullas) and Kellyn ( To whom I’m forever grateful) , ganged up and sent the nomination but for the newly created ACE Associate, and this time, I was lucky to receive the distinction.

This was a much tougher road that I had expected,and my personal thought (and this is not a rant, just a thought) is that as being from Latin America, you do get less exposure to the program than your counterparts in places like North America, making a bit tougher to get this award if you were. I am honoured to have been included in this list of people, because it is a group of people that work hard for the community and to share their knowledge all around, and all of this for the great price of awesome friends, more knowledge acquired and 0 dollars.

I won’t say that this will be your road, but I do say that it’s a road worth travelling and adventuring yourself out to. The status of my ACE’dom has been put on hold, as right now I’m working for Oracle, but this won’t stop me from sharing my little knowledge and adventures that I keep having with you.

I wish you the best down this road!

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Rene Antunez
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4 Comments
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