UKOUG at Collaborate 2017

I didn't attend Collaborate as UKOUG but I am always representing them.

As I said in my main Collab blog, I met up with up with James Jeynes the UKOUG Executive Director at the airport. 

We have a stand at Collaborate, which James manned on his own. Kerry, the UKOUG head of sales was meant to also attend but unfortunately she has to cancel as she was unwell. Without Kerry, James had very few give aways on the stand, and was very busy but he did a great job, talking to many exhibitors and delegates about UKOUG.

We had a number of meetings whilst we were there:

We meet with the DOAG directors attending, there is an EMEA Presidents' meeting in June and so it was a great chance to catch up and talk about what is important to us.

James also got to meet Jeremy Whyte , Senior Director, Global User Group Management at Oracle when we met with him as a courtesy.

Along with two of the UKOUG JD Edwards' committee who were also attending Collaborate we met with the Lyle Ekdahl and his team to discuss how we could deliver the best experience for our JDE Members at conference this year.

I also attended a session with Cliff Godwin for partners that talked about E Business Suite. I don't implement EBS any more but went along as a user group leader to understand what is and more importantly unpick the myths around EBS. 

I truly believe that user groups should be officially recognised as partners, it would mean we would get local briefings on all things Oracle, in a simple way.

Finally we met up with Quest, to understand their new initiative OC²  , for those customers who have moved to SaaS cloud. We talked about how we can work together and deliver for UKOUG cloud members as well. 

What I got from Collaborate was a long list of things to follow up, and James clocked up many 1,000s of steps and was immersed in the world of Oracle User Groups.

The three user groups that make up Collaborate, IOUG, OAUG and Quest all made us feel very welcome. Thank you for your hospitality.