My week at Oracle OpenWorld

It has been my 5th Oracle OpenWorld and I have to say that a very special one. This was my first OOW as KPMG employee and manager of the Oracle practice in Spain, in the other four I attended as Oracle consultant so the focus on this event has been a bit different.

On Saturday we departed from Madrid airport the two members of the Spanish KPMG practice my colleague (and boss) Amaia and myself. San Francisco has 9 hours of time difference with Madrid so after 17 hours of travelling we still arrived during Saturday eve. The second flight from Philadelphia to SF was delayed so we couldn’t attend to the EMEA Partner award ceremony celebrated in the MOMA museum where we were invited. We headed straight to the Palace Hotel, the headquarters of KPMG for this year.

Sunday Day 1

I was suffering the consequences of the jet lag so at 7am I went for a walk and to grab a coffee from a Seven Eleven store, then I joined Amaia in the recepcion and we went directly for the registration, this year the location for registration changed from Moscone West to South. We got our full conference pass and it is fair to thank to  Maria Salas (Oracle) and Rogelio Medina (Oracle) for helping with the logistics.

After that we attended to the internal ‘KPMG Global Leadership Meeting‘ where we were the representatives of the different KPMG firms, the meeting was led by Ryan Linsey our Global Oracle practice leader and Thomas Gall our Global offering lead for #PoweredEnterprise.

During the afternoon was the Larry’s moment and his keynotes. The hall was crowded but I have to say that this year was not the best presentation from Larry, maybe because was too technical for me, the key message was ‘Oracle Autonomous Database‘ basically this is about to automate everything that is possible and focus the manual work for specific tasks, if you missed the presentation you can watch it here:

and here me with Larry in the background 🙂

The day ended with a dinner with Oscar García from Acevedo Apps, his company is a Key Oracle partner in the Spanish market and Oscar is a personal friend from some time ago. Thanks Oscar for the invitation, I never refuse to a good burger!

Monday Day 2

On Monday morning we had our official Kick-Off at the KPMG offices in San Francisco, we were around 120 people from KPMG and were invited 2 executives from Oracle.

The day continued with a technical Session: ‘Plan to Report with Oracle Financials Cloud Services‘ the speaker was Xin Wang from Oracle.

During this day I stopped by the IT Convergence booth to say hello to Gustavo Gonzalez, he is the CTO of IT Convergence and an Oracle ACE Director.

We took the rest of the afternoon off and we had some time to visit the Golden Gate Bridge, the cable car and Lombard Street. Here some pics 🙂

In the evening it was the appreciation event of KPMG. This is a great party and I have to say that I received several requests for invitations for this event, some of them came so late that I couldn’t accommodate them so I ask for apologizes. Anyway was a great event where we met with KPMG customers and friends. There are some pictures of that party but I am not going to upload them (by the moment).

Tuesday Day 3

I started the day very early since I had a meeting with my team in Madrid, after that breakfast and again a visit to the second floor of the Palace Hotel where we had our booth. There Sigmund Sing our Director for #PoweredEnterprise was showing to customers our solution, we had also a team for PaaS, Analytics and HCM.

At 11.30 we went to see how the Spanish team of Accenture (Sergio Peris) co-presented with Sergi Jufresa CIO of IESE ‘IESE Leverages Institutional Excellence to Transform and Expand Internationally‘. IESE was the first institution to implement Oracle ERP Cloud in Spain so I was particularly interested in this presentation.

We continue with two more sessions:

• ‘Benefits of Cloud-Enabled Transformation: Before, During, and One Year Later’. This was one of the KPMG sessions where Bob Meister and Linsey Ryan co-presented with Sinclair and Blue Shield the experience of working with Oracle Cloud ERP and PoweredEnterprise.
• ‘Oracle Managed File Transfer Cloud Service Customer Case Studies and Best Practices’.  This was a real case of working with Oracle Managed File Transfer Cloud Service where the company discussed about the issues during the implementation and business value.

At the end of the day we enjoyed another great event this time was an invitation from Oracle for Partners ‘ECEMEA Regional Evening at Oracle OpenWorld‘ at the Ferry Building.

Wednesday Day 4

Again an early start at 5.30 I had a webconference for two hours with the team in Madrid, after that we visited the exhibitors in the Moscone Center. It was really nice to meet old friends like John Nagel and Wijnand Heinen from APRO. Apro has top software solutions for Banking Gateway  and Invoice Imaging.

The rest of the day we had very productive meetings with colleagues from KPMG, learning from the experience of other practices, trying to avoid mistakes and know about the market situation in each country for Oracle SaaS. I think we got some good information to share into our Spanish practice.

And as a tradition the Oracle CloudFest.17 @AT&T Park with the show of: The Chainsmokers and Ellie Goulding

Thursday Day 5

Our last day in San Francisco, and last meeting too, this time at 8 am with an EMEA Executive of Oracle at the Hilton Union Square, also we exchange experience, impression and hopefully all of these will help to hit the Spanish market in the near future.

After that straight to the airport and on our way to Madrid.

In summarize a great event, really good experience and with the batteries loaded for our new fiscal year. Next year more. 🙂