COLLABORATE-13 Conference Highlights

Thank you OAUG, IOUG and Quest for a wonderful COLLABORATE-2013 conference in Denver, Colorado last week. It was an amazing experience as usual - Meeting all my friends, networking, knowledge sharing, Information Exchange etc.

Our OBISIG meeting was held on Sunday April 7th from 1:15 to 2:15 PM. Our SIG Meeting went very well. Glenn Hoormann from Ludus Inc, Our chairman for the OBISIG hosted the meeting. We had two customer panel sessions. Andrea Buckman from Humana shared her experiences about the OBIEE 11g upgrade details. I shared about the OBIEE landscape at Dell. There were a lot of questions from the audience. Very interactive session overall.

I attended a few more sessions and then comes the "Meet the leaders" kick-off by OAUG. It was great to get to know the OAUG board members and the various OAUG leaders. This is truly a unique User group. A group by the users for the users. Go OAUG, go! We had a fun filled event Welcome Reception at the Museum. Lots of knowledge sharing and networking there as well.


Monday morning started off with a key note from Aron Ralston, author, adventurer and the subject of the film, "127 Hours" who shared his perspectives gained from his harrowing experience of being pinned by a boulder for more than five days in a Utah canyon. It was a captivating speech.

I attended a lot of interesting Intercompany sessions and ADF sessions. We also had our OAUG customer support council meeting on the same day (IOUC Global support meeting). We had presentations from Oracle support. Oracle is trying to get feedback from customers through the Customer Advisory Panel. If you are an Oracle customer and are willing to provide your feedback through surveys, you can sign up at http://oracle.com/ORACLECAP

We had our OAUG Education committee meeting that evening. The objective of the Education Committee is to develop, implement and monitor educational offerings, separate from annual conferences, for OAUG members. It was a pleasure to get to know everyone from the OAUG Education committee in person.

Tuesday morning started off with a keynote from Mark Hurd, President of Oracle and Team Oracle Aviator Sean D. Tucker. Very interesting session.

I had my presentation on 'OIC at Dell: An Upgrade to Tell'  on Oracle Incentive Compensation. We had a very interactive session. Lots of interesting questions from the audience. I also talked through the Fusion co-existence strategy proposal especially Fusion OIC now has Quota management module which is not available in the R12 or other previous versions. I also went through some of the tips and tricks we learnt with the OIC module discovered during our POC sessions at Dell. Some of the audience came and told me that they learnt something very interesting and unique from my session - something they have never heard before. Lots of compliments. Overall it was a very interesting session.

I also participated in the Oracle Usability Feedback sessions this time. It was a really interesting and a unique way to participate in the 2 way communication between customers and Oracle.

Overall, I had a great conference. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Look forward to Oracle Openworld and other conferences.