Oracle OpenWorld 2016 - it's (almost) all about the customer

There seem to be two recurrent themes here at Oracle OpenWorld:

1) Oracle is superior to Amazon and
2) the customer experience is imperative

I feel I've heard enough now about the strengths of Oracle compared to Amazon, a theme that's carried over from last year. Looking at my Twitter feed as Larry Ellison spent the best part of his Tuesday keynote on that subject, others seemed to be enjoying the sparring so perhaps it'll continue into next year. Watch this space.

The customer experience theme hasn't been as prominent in the keynotes so far but it has come out strongly in meetings I've had with Oracle over the past two days. I met with the Oracle Global Customer Programs (GCP) team on both Monday and Tuesday and heard about the 'Guided Journey' that's being put together to provide advice to customers throughout each stage of the SaaS lifecycle from planning, through onboarding to adoption and expansion. 

I was invited to a focus group on Monday and amongst other things we discussed the content of this Guided Journey. The participants in the focus group will be given a link to the draft Guided Journey site and we'll have the opportunity to feed back and identify any gaps to ensure that it becomes the 'go to' site for customers moving through each phase of their SaaS project. The SaaS Guided Journey will be the first site to go live but more sites are planned for other cloud solutions.

We didn't just discuss the Guided Journey initiative in the focus group, the main driver for me attending was the opportunity to share real life customer experiences of Oracle cloud and ensure that customers voices are being heard . This is where membership of the UKOUG can make a real difference as being a significant Oracle community, representing around 1,000 Oracle customers, our views are listened to and we're provided the opportunity to influence that individual customers can't hope to achieve. 

I went into the meeting with a long list of feedback and as a group we were in general agreement about several areas where customers tell us that Oracle needs to improve its cloud offerings. I'm going to follow this up in writing to Oracle to make sure that all the points are captured but it was refreshing to have an honest and open debate with the people at Oracle who can make a real difference.

On Tuesday I dropped into see the UX team who are working with customers to improve the user experience of Oracle products. I recommend visiting the team if you get the opportunity as you get a real feel for the thought that Oracle are putting into their solutions and how they work with customers to do this. While I was there I completed a survey about the use of chatbots with the chance to see one working in practice. The Oracle UX team will be at the UKOUG conferences in December again this year so if you're not here at OpenWorld you can catch them at Apps16 in Birmingham.

Larry Ellison had also demonstrated chatbots in his Sunday keynote, using one to update his business cards to his new job title. Oracle are still working on this and gathering feedback about the ways that customers prefer to interact with a chatbot (e.g mobile, voice, PC, SMS etc). I'm looking forward to seeing chatbots in the live product , and seeing if the feedback I gave in my survey is taken into account.