27 years ago I lived in Berlin, and it is my favourite city, so the opportunity to return again for the DOAG Apps conference was an opportunity not to be missed. Sounds perfect? Yes but then reality set in, less than a week after OOW and just 3 days before UKOUG_apps13, still you know me and commitment.
The event was held in the Estrel Hotel the largest hotel and conference centre in Europe. I was disappointed that it was billed as Europe's largest applications conference, Apps13 has over 1000 registrations but never mind it was a great event, and thank you OTN for your continued support for me to attend.
The conference had 2 days of sessions with a stream each for EBS, Fusion, Hyperion, Primervera. Agile PLM, CRM, BI & JDE and then a third day of workshops, but I will come back to that.
I was impressed that Fusion had equal billing and my first presentation on Extending Fusion Applications had a great audience, and the conversation was really good. My 2nd session looked at start time very empty and Tim Warner , fellow ACE and speaker suggested tweeting a photo of the empty room, then 5 minutes in the audience arrived. Remind me never to follow Nadia Bendjedou (EBS), I love Nadia but she has so much knowledge to share clocks cannot restrain her.
The 2 days finished with a panel session on Fusion and it made me think a lot. I have spent a lot of time especially in the IOUC telling Oracle their market is bigger than North America, but here was a country telling us they are not the same as the rest of Europe especially UK. With Cloud Fusion services there has been a lot said about where the data is stored and to address this Oracle have been opening new datacentres for their clouds and at the moment we have 3; The original Linlithgow in Scotland, Amsterdam and the latest in Slough, England, but none in Germany. The people I spoke to had concerns that their laws needed specific handling of data, especially social data and did Fusion have the right policies as well as locations for that storage? Additionally Germany is not a 'do I upgrade or go to Fusion?' region, it is a 'how does Fusion compare to SAP?' market and whilst the local sales team are aware of this it does highlight the need for Oracle to understand its local markets and where better to start with usergroups?
On Day 3 there was a whole day workshop on Fusion Apps for partners and without any hesitation I am stealing this idea for UKOUG. There is still a lot partners want answered. It was a great day and luckily for me I have seen Fusion before as the sessions were in German although if I had a question or comment it was in English :)
Thank you DOAG for the invitation and the opportunity to visit Berlin again. Just wish I had more time.
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