The spotlight is on Lilian Barroso Yamaguti, Cloud Solution Engineer, Oracle, Brazil.

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti is a Cloud Solution Engineer at Oracle Brazil in São Paulo. Her role is to partner with Oracle sales and product development teams in designing architectures that address customer business problems. An important part of the job is to drive adoption of Oracle Cloud services by providing customers with demonstrations, Proof of Concepts (PoCs), and advice on how best to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

In addition, over the past four and a half years at Oracle she has become a strong asset to the Brazilian Oracle Academy team, reinforcing what students learn in universities and schools through face-to-face and virtual talks, lectures, and solution presentations. So impactful has been her outreach that in 2025 she was appointed an Oracle Academy Ambassador for Brazil.

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti is known for her rich and engaging talks, an infectiously positive personality, and a desire to share knowledge. She holds an MBA, specializing in Information Security, from Veris IBTA, São Paulo, and currently is studying for a master’s degree in law and technology from Universidade de Mogi das Cruzes. Prior to joining Oracle, she worked for over 12 years as a training consultant in Oracle and MySQL databases, SQL Server, and in Linux, Windows, Solaris, and AIX operating systems.

Oracle Academy: Congratulations on becoming Oracle Academy Ambassador, How do you feel about this new role?

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti: I have two responses to that. Firstly, I’m a bit daunted, somewhat afraid of the responsibility. But that’s good! My motto in life is to go with your fear, hug it. Fear is like a roller coaster, you have to hold tight, conquer it, and above all enjoy it. Which I do, because I love challenges, love problem solving. Let me add that I am proud to be a representative of Oracle Academy and it’s an honor to be an Ambassador. When asked by the Oracle Academy team in Brazil if I will do outreach here or there, at the university, in the office or online, my reply is ‘if I can, I’m in!’

The second part of my answer is that education, for me, is an absolute priority. Education changed my life: it's what helped me leave an extremely poor community in the interior of my state and raise myself to a comfortable life, helping my family in the process. Contributing to education in Brazil is one of the things that I love about working at Oracle, which has powerful educational and volunteering initiatives. I hope I can show myself as an example of what learning can lead to. I want to contribute a little to the lives and future careers of students, just as I have been inspired by incredible people throughout my own.

Oracle Academy: It looks like you are well on track…

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti: I just love to connect, involve people, and share my passion. Being able to talk about technology to young people aiming to succeed is wonderful. Our careers are shaped by knowledge and also by the people that we meet. One of my favorite things is studying, and I strive to pass on the rewards that learning brings — encouraging people to acquire knowledge, be curious, develop a taste for new things! The events I take part in have shown me how good it is to learn, teach, share, and interact together.

Increasingly, in my day job and wearing my Oracle Academy hat, I see that computer science is not only about dealing with machines but making a better life for people.

Oracle Academy: Can you recap for us some of the events you have participated in?

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti: For sure. I calculate having made more than 30 appearances at dynamic technology events in São Paulo attended by customers, Oracle Academy member institutions, and the public at large, notably Oracle Cloud World in 2023; DBA Brasil Data & Cloud; Oracle Academy Summit 2024; The Developers Conference (TDC), and a string of online events.

I have visited universities and colleges, have received their students and faculty here in the São Paolo offices, and have connected through webinars. Recently, we hosted a girls cybersecurity forum in which I was a panelist, explaining Oracle's solutions for protection against fraud. A short while back I had 2,000 students online concurrently for a cloud computing class. This was for Ser Educacional, an organization which encompasses a multitude of universities across Brazil totaling 300,000 students.

Ânima Educação is another private higher education institution with a broad network of universities and colleges in many states of Brazil. I had the privilege recently in talking with students from Anhembi Morumbi, part of that ecosystem, sharing the technologies offered by OCI that are driving digital transformation.

In the state of São Paulo, there is also FATEC, a network of 62 public higher education institutions, many of which are Oracle Academy members, which focus on multi platform software development. Frequently they visit us, and I present our broad platform of solutions. I have led discussions on what modernization means, what the future may hold, and, because jobs are uppermost in their minds, I continually stress the importance of Oracle skills for boosting careers. I share with them my role as Cloud Solution Engineer, the PoCs I help customers with, and the very many Oracle solutions that combine into business architecture — OCI, Real Application Clusters, DataGuard, Exadata, Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle Autonomous Datawarehouse, the new AI database - Oracle DB 23ai — and much more.

In other get-togethers, I have shared tips on how to study and attain Oracle Database and Oracle Cloud certification, again giving myself as an example. Those chats go down well, with students knowing how their CVs will be enhanced by professional certification.

I also have had the pleasure of talking about Oracle to those more familiar with SQL Server, in which I had ample experience before Oracle, demonstrating that competing worlds have more in common than we imagine! At one such meeting I met exceptional people, found long-time friends, learned a lot from the others, and even had a little fun “gate crashing” other people’s talks with the Oracle stack in my backpack.

All of this has been tremendously inspiring. And yet… sometimes I have to work hard to get students to listen up to a talk on Oracle.

Oracle Academy: Well, one would not know that from the glowing student and graduate feedback on LinkedIn and other platforms... what’s the secret sauce to breaking down the barriers?

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti: I take the bull by the horns. I like the challenge, so I dive in, grab their attention, kickstart their enthusiasm. Sometimes there are 300 students in front of me, distracted, playing with devices, wondering what this has to do with their comfort zones of Amazon, Google, Instagram, Microsoft. I’ve travelled two maybe three hours to their college by train, metro and bus, and the last thing I want is apathy. I clap my hands and say who knows Oracle, who uses Oracle? Very few, it seems. Of course, Oracle, being a B2B company, does not have the household name of those others. And so, from my bag of tricks (for example during and after the last elections) I tell them that the Brazilian electoral system runs on Oracle Engineered Systems–Exadata, and how all the voting is handled by OCI; and that the websites of principal companies are powered by Oracle, while Java is what makes their Android phone tick. Oracle may be business-to-business, but all of us use its products directly or indirectly. They wake up, they ask questions.

Let me read you an email I got from a student at Paulista University after one of my talks: “I was surprised to discover that many of us use Oracle services without even realizing it! You provided a new perspective on how Oracle solutions are present in so many areas of our daily lives, in ways we never knew.”

In other talks, we get onto the 4th Industrial Revolution, and Oracle’s pivotal position driving innovation, cloud, AI, autonomous databases. ‘Have you ever stopped to think,’ I ask, ‘how crazy this moment is, how we are simultaneously writing history and experiencing the future through technology? Do you realize that Oracle Corporation is at the forefront of that transformation, is number one in relational databases and that you, as students of Oracle Academy institutions, have free of charge all the tools at your disposition to become skilled engineers — to occupy jobs such as mine and many more?’ Now we’re talking! Now I have their attention. It’s a great moment.

Oracle Academy: You know how to light fires! But tell us, in your Ambassador role, we assume you also will be highlighting the elements of the various Oracle Academy curriculum when meeting students and faculty members.

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti:. I make sure to ask the team what is being used before such encounters. To be effective, it is especially important to integrate with the learning environment; if not, we can’t get their attention, similar to what I mentioned earlier.

When it comes to faculty, I spend time — and intend to spend more time — helping teachers in simplifying their lives. I know — my mother was a teacher — how time consuming it is to prepare classes, grade, supervise and so on. I tell them that the Oracle Academy Member Hub can cut down that effort significantly. Some of the teachers I meet, even though their university is a member institution, feel they don’t have time to implement or teach the Oracle Academy coursework. My role here is to unlock for them the advantages, for example the well-organized, prebuilt curriculum, workshops, Oracle Academy Education Bytes, in the Member Hub. I point to the technology resources at their disposal — OCI, Oracle software, tools — and I emphasize the teacher training available: free courses, webinars, self-study, certification.

Sure, they have challenges, and I believe they lack the necessary time, but after my motivational speech, I think I can help things change. I also inform teachers who do use the materials that when I talk to their students on visits or here in the Oracle offices, I am in fact reinforcing what they have been teaching, showing a real-live Oracle engineer who also went through higher education to arrive where she is. The teachers love that, see me as a partner, and start thinking about adding courses to their syllabus: AI/ML, cloud, business applications, whatever it might be…

Oracle Academy: To finish on the awareness theme, what for you is the overall value of Oracle Academy?

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti: I think it comes down to improving education, in a country, or the whole world, which is so much in need of good teaching resources in math and technology. And the fact that these resources are offered free of charge is a massive gesture and value to those who become members. Thousands of students per year go out into the job market with Oracle skills that can only bring them success in their career paths.

At the same time, Oracle Academy contributes to spreading the word, marketing the Oracle brand, which is not so visible as the usual suspects I cited earlier. All students are exposed to Oracle technology whether they know it or not, so if we educate them about Oracle products, we are generating word of mouth that can only increase the perception and market share of the world’s leading technology company. So, it’s better education, and a strategic way to amplify Oracle’s voice and presence.

Oracle Academy: Thank you. Changing the subject, do we detect a Japanese connection in your name?

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti: Funny you ask that. As a teenager I wanted to learn Spanish, but the cost of courses was too high. Then my father, who considered Japan to be the best in engineering, in automobiles, suggested Japanese, of which there is a significant population in São Paulo state. I started a course at only ten dollars a month and kept on for two and a half years. That led me into volunteering in a Japanese community and I got deeper into the culture. I met my husband there, of Japanese origin, hence my name. In fact, he’s almost more Brazilian than I, despite his looks! We married 13 years ago. Today, I love karaoke, especially songs about animes, such as Naruto or Dragonball.

Eventually I caught up on Spanish, which I speak quite well, and later English. When I was twenty, selling Microsoft products, I won a competition for the best Windows XP sales pitch; an Xbox was the prize. Ten years later, in another company, someone asked if anyone knew Oracle Database and SQL Server and had a US visa. Me! It was at the time when Microsoft was announcing SQL Server for Linux… and I got a trip to Seattle. That really kickstarted my English, which today I use in contact with Oracle product development and English-speaking customers with whom I interact.

Oracle Academy: Thanks for sharing! And what interests do you have outside of work?

Lilian Barroso Yamaguti: Well! I sometimes used to think I was a fish, a cat and bird all in one, wanting to swim, walk and fly. I love movement, I love sports: volleyball, five a side soccer, muscle building — lifting heavier and heavier weights, part of what I told you about overcoming fear and challenges!

Running as well. A couple of years back I joined an Oracle team in a 5-kilometer race event in support of the fight against childhood cancer. That was exceptional! During Covid I did an 80km cycling circuit, another of my favorite sports.

Otherwise, I walk my dog, have a passion for gardening, and I love road trips. My husband prefers to map read — well, keep an eye on the GPS — but together in our Volkswagan UP we have covered half of all Brazil. I love cars and I know the ins and outs of the engine, the tips and tricks — yet, you will laugh — I have never been able to change a flat tire!

So… balancing work/life is a big challenge for most people, the old conundrum ‘do you live for work or work for a living?’ I believe I’ve found the magic formula.

I am expecting a baby before Christmas so have to take it easy for a while, but I’ll pick it all up again later — and do my utmost to represent Oracle Academy going forward!

Thank you, Lilian Barroso Yamaguti, for volunteering to be an Oracle Academy Ambassador.