Oracle Open World 2015 - wrapping up with a UX tour

Oracle HQ at the Redwood Shores Campus

The last two days of Open World were as packed as the earlier part of the week and although some conference delegates were already leaving by Thursday morning, sessions continued throughout the day. 

I didn't attend any of the sessions on Thursday because I'd scheduled to go on a tour of the Usability Lab at Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ instead. 

The HQ offices are familiar to almost everyone who works with Oracle products, not least because they're designed to look like the symbol for a database, though, even if visitors don't notice that geeky in-joke, the buildings are still very impressive. 

On the tour we were shown some of the latest mobile apps developments and were given a chance to try them out for ourselves. We also saw a demonstration of eye tracking software used to test Oracle applications before release.

The Usability Lab at Oracle HQ

One of our party was asked to run through some questions about an Oracle application displayed on a screen in front of him. The software measured where his eyes landed on the page and how long it took him to find the information requested. When he was done, a heat map of his eye movements was displayed. This information is used to help inform Oracle about the usability of its new applications. It's good to know that such focus is being placed on the user experience (UX); something that traditional ERP systems are not known for. This, combined with the integrated just in time learning system announced at Open World earlier in the week, will, I'm sure, be welcome news to all users of Oracle applications

We had a bit of fun in the lab too with some futures that aren't in any products yet (as far as I know), including an EEG headset that allowed us to use brainwaves to control the movement of a ball through a maze. Having tried this for myself I shall eagerly await the brain-computer interface in an upcoming Oracle release.

Oracle users in the UK don't need to wait until Open World 2016 to take part in the design of future products because the Oracle Applications User Experience Team are going to be hosting an onsite UX testing lab for attendees of the UKOUG Apps15 conference in December. See you there!

Oracle Open World 2015 Day 2 & 3

Open World is such a busy week that I've hardly had time to stop since I arrived. Luckily, I'm still feeling slightly jet lagged so am finding time to catch up on emails and write this blog in the early hours of the morning. 

On Monday morning Mark Hurd delivered his keynote announcing Oracle's vision for digital transformation to 2025. He started by explaining that that the on-premise operating model is unsustainable, based on 20 year old applications that were built pre internet, pre mobile and pre cloud. The cost of maintaining these applications is rising, not least because of the expense of keeping them secure, with cybersecurity costs rising by 10% per year.

Mark went on to say that this is why cloud has been such an important shift in the industry; because it allows companies to run their applications from a lower cost base with easy , rapid innovation - a simple matter of economics.

Mark announced his predictions for the next 10 years which included Oracle being at the forefront of the transition to cloud. He went as far as to predict that by 2025 only two suite providers will dominate 80% of the SaaS market, with the remaining 20% made up of point solutions, rather than full enterprise suites, and of course, he does expect Oracle to be one of the two.

Eva Harström, CIO of Skanska Nordic took to the stage during Tuesday morning's keynote.

Eva Harström , Skanska

Eva spoke about how the digital shift is transforming what and how Skanska build, with the company move towards an automated construction site. Skanska are already re-thinking what is needed in order to deliver design and construction, with enterprise architects becoming a key part of the design of the built environment. 

This awareness within enterprises of the digital shift has been a recurrent theme of the conference this year. David Bartlett, CTO of GE Aviation explained the rapid move towards digital by telling us that GE had gone to bed as an industrial company and woke up as a software company.

Larry Ellison's keynote on Tuesday afternoon announced Oracle's Silicon Secured Memory, an 'always on' hardware-based memory protection which stops unintentional or malicious access of data in memory. Larry told us that if this had been around at the time of Heartbeat or Venom, it would have shut them down in real-time. 

One of the concerns that many organisations still have about the move to cloud is around the confidentiality of the data. Larry challenged us all to ask our SaaS providers if their technical people can see our data, suggesting that the answer will almost always be 'yes'. 

This, he went on to say , is where Oracle SaaS applications are different; they are all encrypted and only the customer holds the key. This level of security was demanded by financial institutions but is available to all Oracle customers.

I attended a lunch on Monday, hosted by Jeb Dasteel, Oracle's Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, where user group representatives heard about a new community site that's about to be launched. Here, Oracle customers will be able to find a single portal into all the user group sites around the world. 

I'm sure this portal will be developed further over the coming months as more international groups come on board so will look forward to sharing more news as it happens via the UKOUG.

Oracle Open World 2015 day 1

I'm writing this on Monday morning in San Francisco and I can hardly believe I've only been at Oracle Open World (OOW) for one day. There's no time to rest for OOW attendees on Sunday as there were plenty of user group sessions lined up all day including 12 quickfire sessions from Oracle ACE Directors who shared their knowledge of database 12c. I tweeted earlier in the day that Moscone West was looking quiet but the session on 12c was packed and by the time Larry Ellison gave the opening keynote at 5pm, thousands of delegates had swarmed into the hall.

It's always impressive to see how OOW and Oracle branding takes over the streets of San Francisco during conference week and this morning on Fox News OOW is a big news story, showing what a huge event this is. It's clearly also a big hit with local businesses, with Uber drivers reporting takings up 100% higher than normal . 

The opening keynote on Sunday afternoon started with a live link to the Oracle ACE Directors who jumped into the massive ball pit that's been created here at Moscone to resemble a cloud. I haven't tried it yet but it looked like fun.

In the keynote Larry Ellison spoke about how the industry has changed significantly over the past 5 years. Not long ago, Oracle considered SAP and IBM to be its main competitors. Nowadays, Salesforce and Workday are Oracle's main cloud competitors, not SAP. 

In the platform space, Microsoft is the main competitor, not IBM and in the infrastructure space it's Amazon, not IBM or EMC.

Larry went on to say that Oracle are the only company working in all three layers of cloud, platform and infrastructure and in terms of the cloud he sees this as a major differentiator between Workday and Oracle.

We heard that Oracle is No1 in the ERP market with 1,300 customers today, expected to grow to 2,000 very soon. Oracle now have 5,000 HCM customers and although 4,000 of them came via the Taleo acquisition, that still leaves 1,000 core Fusion HCM customers.

One of the main announcements in Larry's keynote was two new modules in the Oracle cloud portfolio; Manufacturing and E-Commerce . With these two additions, Oracle now have more applications than any other cloud services provider.

Earlier in the day I dropped into a session called 'Mobile/Cloud Terminology for Dummies'. I wasn't sure what to expect, thinking that with all the technology experts in OOW this might not be the most popular session but it was a packed room and the speaker, Mia Urman from AuraPlayer was an engaging speaker who quickly captured the attention of the audience. 

Mia closed with a slide that I'm sure most of us have seen before, which compares SaaS, IaaS and PaaS with ordering a pizza. It's still a useful slide for explaining cloud to anyone who may still not get it so I make no apologies for sharing it here: 

So, now on to Monday; I'm meeting up with other user group representatives shortly to hear about the new community platform that's about to be launched. It sounds like it's going to be a great opportunity for customer collaboration so watch this space for more news on that.

UKOUG Partner of The Year Awards 2015

The 2015 UKOUG Partner of the Year Awards (PYA) event took place last Thursday, my first PYA and it proved to be a fun and exciting event. The full list of this year's Gold, Silver and Bronze winners can be viewed here so I won't name them all but suffice to say, all of them are deserved winners. 

The Partner of the Year Awards are unique as they are voted for by Oracle customers. Nominations are assessed by a panel of UKOUG volunteers to produce a shortlist across 19 categories that is presented to members for voting. In 2014 the number of customers voting doubled compared to the previous year. The number of votes cast this year has increased by a further 70% to over 4,600 which goes to show why these awards inspire so much respect and admiration in the partner community.

As I can't name all the winners here, I'll just show you a photo of the winners of one of the fun categories, the best dressed male group of the evening. This award went to Steltix who were all looking very dapper - congratulations to them for winning this fun award (and for their ,rather more serious, bronze award for Middleware Partner of the Year). 

More photos are now up on the UKOUG Facebook page.

Next weekend I'm off to Oracle Open World so will be blogging regularly with updates from the event. 

My first ever blog...

Well it's about time you may say, but with Oracle Open World (OOW) coming up in just 3 weeks it seemed like a good reason to start blogging so I plan to share my experience of the event via this blog with those of you who won't be able to make it to San Francisco this year.

It's been 5 months since I had the honour of being elected President of UKOUG and it's been a busy time. I've met lots of our members but not nearly enough, so with the Summer behind us and conference season back in full swing I'm hoping to meet many more UKOUG members in the coming months. There's certainly plenty of opportunities coming up with the UKOUG Partner of the Year awards, Oracle Open World (OOW) and the climax of the UKOUG year, our annual conferences in December.

The next big event in my UKOUG diary though is the Partner of the Year Awards next week. I've never been to this event before but it's going to be a great evening with, so I'm told, a surprise guest host to keep us all entertained (they haven't even told me who it is). The shortlist of Oracle partners up for awards this year shows the quality of the competition for these coveted awards. Take a look at the shortlisted partners here.

I'll report back after the Partner of the Year Awards with some 'behind the scenes' news and photos from the evening. It's a black tie event so the talk of the UKOUG office is what everyone will be wearing. As someone who's most often to be found in wellies and muddy jeans on my smallholding this is especially challenging for me but I will do my best to dress up for the event, I am presenting the awards after all.

So, back to Oracle Open World, the schedule was released last week so I've started booking in the sessions that look most interesting. The problem is, there's so much choice that I can't go to everything I'd like to. As well as attending sessions and meeting UKOUG members, I'm also hoping to meet up with some key Oracle influencers. I'd be very interested to hear from our members what questions you'd like me to ask Oracle on your behalf, so please get in touch and let me know.

I'll also be following Debra Lilley's blog during Open World as she's a seasoned OOW attendee and seems to know everyone !

I'd love to hear what other UKOUG news you'd be interested in hearing via this blog as well as any views you have on your membership; what works well and what we could do better. If you see me at one of the events over the next few weeks please come over and say hello.