Collaborate 2017 - Las Vegas

Less than 10 hours after I got home from Croatia, I was back at the George Best Belfast City (yes that is the real name); for my flight to London and then onto Las Vegas. I met up with James Jeynes the UKOUG Executive Director at the airport, but I'm going to put UKOUG at Collaborate as a separate blog.

I arrived on the Saturday evening with the conference starting Sunday lunchtime, just time for me to attend the House of Blues Gospel Brunch, one of my little traditions. 

I love the spiritual part of this event, but do know it is still a show, however worship is a personal thing and I enjoyed it.

Then time for registration which should have been easy, I had my QR code so I had my badge quickly printed and couldn't believe it, they had Belfast as being in Wales!!

Apparently their system didn't have N Ireland as an option. They suggested England, but luckily there was a United Kingdom. So 20 minutes later I had a new, Ok, badge.

My first session was Sunday afternoon, 'Extending Your Back-End Cloud Apps to Deliver Your Front-Office Needs:' a talk about using PaaS to extend the SaaS applications. 

Sunday evening I had dinner with Jennifer from the ACE program. 

Then on the Monday I presented 'Extending Cloud HCM with PaaS' with my colleague Christian. I told Christian he could come to Collaborate if he helped with the demo, which he did. Christian is a Taleo expert, and I had him demo HCM Cloud and ABCS. 

I also extended the presentation to include a mobile app using the MAX which is now embedded into ABCS, based on what I learnt the previous week at the PaaSForum.

The more I look at this the more excited I get, and I have written an article on it for the next Oracle Scene. We will be showing this to all our customers, it is a really simple way to extend their systems especially in self service HCM to include all those excel spreadsheets, manual lists and surveys that you have for your employees.

Monday evening was the ACE Dinner and it was in an Irish Pub!! I love these evenings, getting together with all the ACEs and Jennifer had a number of promotions to announce. Congratulations to you all. 

Tuesday my boss Tim Warner gave his presentation on 'The Cloud Implementation Project - Phase 0' - this is a great talk, which looks at all the things you should do, before starting your Cloud Subscription, to maximise your ROI and ensure your project gets off to a great start.

Wednesday I had my final session, where I gave the England Rugby case study we did at Oracle Open World. I got to wear the rugby shirt again. It wasn't a very large audience but the room was at the far end of a secret corridor, some sort of Hogwarts' magic location. Well done to anyone who actually found it.

I did attend the Women in IT panel session, but was really disappointed, it was just a moan-fest, nothing inspiring at all. I understand the WIT lunch was very different, but unfortunately by the time I got my speakers' registration that had been booked out.

The keynote for the event was Oracle's Cloud Strategy from Stephen Daheb SVP Cloud. I have to say it was the best positioning of what is happening I have seen. He also talked about options, and each customer's journey, not 'the journey'. It was well told and each option was backed up by a very short customer video. What I really liked is they were simple use cases, not the enormous, transformation of the biggest companies, that don't resonate with most people. This was good.

I didn't stay long at the party Wednesday night. I tried to get into the 'Bohemian' theme, but I was tired and after saying hallo to everyone. I called it a day and left.

Thursday I had another tradition, my annual pilgrimage to the 'In and out burger', quite a hike across the freeway, but nice to finally get some fresh air although it was quite hot. 

Then time to get back on a plane, or two, to finally get home.