2019 - Cloud Applications Experience Event

On 6th November UKOUG held their first Cloud Applications Experience Event in London.

I am very passionate about all UKOUG communities but my heart is in the apps. 

I'm not sure I personally agree with the decision to split the apps and tech conference, but I understand it was based on user feedback. Although the techies still get their techfest in December the Applications people as the better half, have to wait till next summer.

However all is not woe, there have been many events over the year and although my time on the board is well over, I am still supporting.

The Applications community can be split many, many ways, product, industry and many combinations but in general the main areas of concentration are:

• Those using apps unlimited, EBS, JDE & PeopleSoft
• Those moving or interested in moving to Cloud or SaaS applications
• Those who are 'Living in the Cloud'

The last group, is really important to me, I have worried that when users move to SaaS we bleed them dry for their journey story, but what do we do for them? That is what this event was all about.

As with events, there is a committee and we were led by Phil Wilson from Inoapps, not too hard a task master but got us all to pull together and delivered along with the rest of the committee and the office, a great day.

What was special about the day was that most presentations were by end users. The morning looked at product pillars and the afternoon at a couple of industries. 

Phil Wilson kicking off the event

A colleague of mine attended the EPM track and shared this snippet from a presentation from Fruit of the Loom - their big issue was that 1 USD is about 23000 Vietnamese Dongs, and therefore the money fields weren’t big enough, and Oracle had to extend them in the core products to make them useable in Vietnam.

I facilitated the HCM track and that kicked off with a great presentation from Patrick Haston from Scottish Natural Heritage. Not only did they implement the full HCM portfolio but also Learning Cloud, when of the first in the UK.

Nigel Watson from DHL talked about how they have been early adopters of the Newsfeed UX. I loved this, I was involved in their original implementation and even shared the stage with Nigel at Oracle Open World 2017. 

Remember the idea of the event was to have something for those already in the cloud and these presentations hit the mark.

Then we had a round table to hear what the end users wanted from UKOUG and yes they want the community. 

In the afternoon I was looking after the Public Sector stream and had to stand in for West Midlands Police as due to an operational issue Dean Sweet was unable to present. I wasn't with Accenture when this was implemented but I just love the story and how they have extended their investment and am working with them now on their next chapter.

I also gave a presentation on 'switching on chatbots' within SaaS, one of the things this community can do next.

Thanks to Ian Hayman for photo

After the Public Sector Roundtable the day closed with networking drinks after a successful panel session.

UKOUG photo

The best thing about the day was Cloud customers talking to cloud customers and loved that 2 came from Denmark just for the networking.