2019 - Oracle Open World : London

In the middle of January, Oracle brought Open World to London. I'm not sure it is actually Open World but it was a great event and much appreciated by those in region.

For me it was my first outing as Accenture in action. We started in Accenture in October just a few days before Open World in San Francisco and although I was really welcomed felt I was still one step removed.

Wind on less than 4 months and its a completely different story. Here I was part of the Accenture team responsible for the booth content. I actually spent Christmas week watching Accenture videos I had never seen, selecting content for a video loop, but it accelerated my learning.

I got to work with Accenture Alliances, Marketing, both UK and Global teams. It was very stressful but I knew it would be fun. Just 4 weeks ago I was posting about having a less stressful UKOUG and here I was front and centre of the action at another event. Obviously no rest for the wicked!

Accenture were a major sponsor and had a large stand on the floor, as I was also speaking and having customer meetings I was only on the stand officially the first morning,, but I was back whenever I was free.

We had the WeDo team on our stand and I love how they bring the PaaS to life.

WeDo and Accenture Spain team

Accenture's Yves Bernard was part of the keynote and gave a great talk on Accenture's vision; I say talk because this was powerpoint free and he used holograms to get his point across. Watch his talk here

Accenture also have a non powerpoint way of taking about what we do as well. This MyConcerto was launched at OOW in San Francisco and I'm looking forward to using that more in my day job,.

As well as Yves, Accenture also had a place on the Security panel and sponsored both the ERP and HCM solution keynotes. My colleague Lucia spoke on ERP with her customer Dean Sweet from West Midlands Police.

Dean, Yves and Lucia

West Midlands Police have implemented both ERP & HCM to support their Shared Service. However not all their information is held there, some is still in specialist, industry or shared solutions which are somewhat static , so they use RPA to run reports from those frequently and expose all the information through a number of portals created using Oracle CX cloud. This gives them information in minutes and all has been checked by their officers. Read more about this story in an interview Dean gave to Diginomica. (although they exaggerate a bit, it talks about £30m savings and I thought Dean said only £28.5m).

Dean and Lucia speaking

The HCM keynote was led by Chris Leone who heads their development organisation. He talked about the innovation Oracle are delivering in the next updates and then my colleague Tim Warner tased about the pace of innovation and how to handle that. I then demonstrated some innovation Accenture are working on with Oracle PaaS, specifically Digital Assistants and our own MyConceierge. Finally Dean talked about how he is using the innovation implemented.

Other customers also spoke, Skanska on a HCM panel and the Home Office talked about their METIS project, where ERP is now live and HCM under way. Again Diginomica covered their story.

The stand became a real hub, I met up with old friends and colleagues, including Viswa who I posted about previously, and got to meet lots of new colleagues, but what touched me most was old and current customers, throughout my 25 years in the Oracle world, making the time to say hallo..

Tim Warner, Mark Sweeny & I

My event finished with a back stage meeting with Eddie Izzard. Did I tell you I love my job?

10,000 people attended this year and I understand the event will be back again next year. I loved it and I hope to be part of 2020 too.