My OOW16 - Certus

Right from the moment I arrived at Oracle HQ I was on duty for Certus. I met with development and made arrangements to meet with more during OOW itself.

I was joined at OOW by Tim Warner our COO and Richard Atkins our EVP of Cloud Application. We met up at the EMEA Partner Reception on the Saturday night. I ached from my cycle ride and didn't stay too long, but did enjoy catching up with lots of people.

The highlight of our week was our presentation with England Rugby. Patrick McMaster from England Rugby was a guest on the Customer Red Carpet Program, and Richard was his host.

Certus have been beta testing HCM since the early days of SaaS, and for release 11 we included ERP as well. We had a couple of meetings during the week, and testing for release 12 starts in just a few weeks.

We met with not just development but also SaaS Strategy. Certus know working with development is a big investment but with new releases every 6 months we have to keep up and ensure our people know what they are delivering.

We also meet with Customer Success, this is a growing area within Oracle and again our strategy is to work with Oracle.

eclipse lens

Another area we work with is Partner Enablement, not only do we insist all our resources are specialised but we also are a training partner and deliver much of the training around EMEA. They have an annual reception to say thank you to partners and they gave us each a little gift of clip on lenses for smartphones, really fun.

Certus doesn't have a stand at these events. We prefer to market via sharing information, through our LinkedIn Group, Oracle Scene etc, so I was surprised when an old colleague told me they had seen me on a screen in the exhibition hall.

It turned out to be IT Central Station, a kind of 'Trip Advisor' for Software. Both Tim and I had done a video each with them at Collaborate and they had us both playing at their booth; bigger than life size.

It was a busy week, but well worth it for Certus.

Back to my main OOW16 page: