With Oracle OpenWorld 2016 now behind her, Alyssa Johnson, president-elect of the Oracle Applications Users Group, reflected on the latest developments and initiatives emerging from this year’s Oracle conference for users and partners, as well as how she sees the role of the Oracle users group changing to address new challenges.
What was the key takeaway from Oracle OpenWorld this year?
Alyssa Johnson: Customers will be leveraging the cloud in a hybrid model. They will be moving to the cloud where it makes sense to support their business.
What were the most significant product announcements?
AJ: One product announcement that our members were especially excited about was E-Business Suite in the Cloud. This offering will enable E-Business Suite customers to ‘lift and shift’ their EBS applications into the cloud using Platform as a Service and Database as a Service. Another significant announcement was the launch of next generation Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data centers.
What are the key choices and challenges OAUG members will face ahead?
AJ: This is an exciting time to be an Oracle customer because we have so many options. This fantastic opportunity is ironically one of the biggest challenges because it will be more imperative to understand what those options are and how best to design a roadmap to support your business.
How do you see the role of the OAUG evolving as the Oracle increasingly emphasizes public cloud and cloud at customer installations?
AJ: The OAUG sees this as a great opportunity to fulfill our mission statement. It is going to be more critical than ever to provide education on all the options that are available. We also provide a forum for our members to network with each other on cloud implementations – best practices, what worked, what didn’t – a valuable commodity when laying out a cloud roadmap. Finally, our strong partnership with Oracle enables us to provide feedback from our members on the products and how our members are using them.
How will what was announced at OpenWorld shape OAUG presentations at COLLABORATE in April 2017?
AJ: We will be including many presentations that address the Cloud across the stack – Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service. We will also have session on implementing a hybrid cloud module. We will also provide some key presentations from Oracle on their cloud roadmap and strategy. And finally, I’m excited for attendees to be able to talk with one another and with Oracle about their current systems, their strategies and their roadmaps.
For more information about the OAUG, go to http://oaug.org.