The spotlight is on Salman Shaikh, Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Oracle, India.

Oracle Solution Engineering, also known as Presales or Cloud Engineering teams, operating in every region and country, are experts that assist enterprises in successfully using Oracle technologies to meet their business goals.

Salman Shaikh is Senior Director of Cloud Engineering for India, based in Mumbai, leading a team that helps customers and partners to drive data, AI, cloud, and transformation projects. He has a proven track record of harnessing emerging trends and technologies to the expectations of customers.

Shaikh joined Oracle from Sun Microsystems in 2010, helping with the adoption and widespread utilization of Exadata and Engineered Systems before driving customer adoption of Oracle’s PaaS and IaaS cloud platforms. In 2018, he began a six-year period as country leader for Engineered Systems before being appointed to his current position.

Today he is additionally an Oracle Academy Ambassador for India, focusing on spreading the educational benefit of implementing the Oracle Academy curriculum in universities and colleges.

Oracle Academy: Please tell us about your Ambassador role.

Salman Shaikh: As an Oracle Academy Ambassador, I see an opportunity in helping drive deeper engagement and adoption across universities and colleges. While Oracle Academy has built strong partnerships and provided excellent support, there’s an opportunity to boost knowledge-sharing curriculum implementation with more feet on street. My team and I aim to bridge that gap — amplifying Oracle’s relevance and helping make Oracle Corporation, our technologies and innovations more visible and impactful through the Oracle Academy program for the next generation.

In summary, the Ambassador program will help elevate the image of Oracle, reestablish our value proposition, and create new business for the corporation and its ecosystem.

Oracle Academy: And what is your roadmap towards that end?

Salman Shaikh: Through my team and peers spread across India, we recently have conducted guest lectures and mentoring sessions with Oracle Academy members, mainly those who are using the curriculum in their computer science courses. At the same time, we have hosted faculty members from colleges and universities to accelerate Oracle Academy initiatives.

The idea is to complement and extend the Oracle Academy program, taking it to another level by increasing mindshare, trust — helping Oracle itself to be more visible, more widely accepted by the new generations of faculty members and their students.

Oracle Academy: Great. Could you tell us about the faculty events you mentioned?

Salman Shaikh: We kicked off our collaboration by staging workshops at the Oracle offices in Mumbai and in Noida, a city closer to Delhi. Our strategy was to invite to each event about 30 faculty members from 12 universities to hear not only from Oracle experts but teachers from institutions who are using the curriculum. In Mumbai, we had representatives from M.H. Saboo Siddik College of Engineering, Universal College of Engineering, and Mumbai Educational Trust, and in Noida, lecturers from Manipal University Jaipur, Inderprastha Engineering College, and Galgotias University. These faculty members passionately shared their success using Oracle Academy curriculum and resources.

These peers shared their experiences in sessions called Oracle Academy Adoption Best Practices. Department heads of computer science, engineering, and information systems talked about how their Oracle Academy courses have enhanced student engagement, improved learning outcomes, and equipped lecturers with first-rate teaching materials.

I, along with the Technology leadership team, talked about Oracle as an organization, its technology stack, and drove home the company’s formidable position as a data, cloud, and AI technology leader. One of my solution engineers shared her perspective as a former student and her personal journey from campus recruitment to Oracle employee, illustrating how faculty members can leverage Oracle Academy resources to enhance their students’ employment prospects.

This was reinforced by Oracle Academy instructors highlighting the benefits of the Oracle Academy Member Hub, the rich learning management portal for member educators and students.

Oracle Academy: And what was the result, the feedback?

Salman Shaikh: These experiences sharing practical insights resonated well and, I believe, are currently working as a catalyst to expand our reach on campuses that have signed up to the program but have not fully taken advantage of the Oracle Academy curriculum and resources. We are beginning to bridge that gap, to demonstrate the value of Oracle technologies, why faculty should engage in the curriculum, and the benefit to students and faculty of going through the entire set of courses.

We registered an impressive Net Promoter Score of 81, with 85 percent of participants indicating that they plan to implement the insights and practices they gained within the next three months. That’s already a win!

Oracle Academy: Indeed! And what comes next?

Salman Shaikh: At the close of each event, of which there will be more, we made it clear that these were not one-off sessions. We assured our engagement, dedicated workshops on the topic and technology of their choice — on weekends or after-hours — and we received a large number of requests. So, we are planning deep dives built around the various Oracle Academy courses: Database, development tools such as Java, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle APEX, and Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning in Java. My team is passionately supporting these initiatives.

Oracle Academy: And can you tell us about the guest lecturing and mentoring?

Salman Shaikh: Apart from the events I touched on above, we have visited colleges and conducted online sessions further reinforcing the relevance of Oracle Academy to both students and faculty. There is a multiplier effect in these actions — for students, faculty and Oracle.

Faculty members have stated that the engagements gave them a sense of empowerment, and they will be rolling out Oracle Academy resources. For students, our guest lectures have been like a crash course, offering a lot of knowledge in a short time window, getting them to know best practices and understanding the real-world challenges of industry and the technology solutions. In addition, I believe we are opening young minds to the impact of being skilled in Oracle technologies, seeing opportunities in the job market, moving from the student to professional world.

In addition, Oracle volunteers are excited about these initiatives, realizing that they are contributing to a cause that has a greater purpose beyond their day job, impacting the community as well as businesses. And the Oracle ecosystem — our Independent Software Vendors— are becoming aware that the use of Oracle Academy resources in higher education means skilling up of more graduates that can join their organizations in the future, creating a permanent flow of talent to partners, industry, and government. And, in my humble opinion, as Ambassadors we are helping to create a multiplier effect.

Oracle Academy: May it multiply throughout the tremendous territory you cover!

Thank you, Salman Shaikh, for volunteering to be an Oracle Academy Ambassador.