5 Minute Briefing: Information Management visited the COLLABORATE 10 conference for Oracle users last week in Las Vegas and had an opportunity to meet with new Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) president, David Ferguson. The conference, held at the Mandalay Bay convention center in Las Vegas, was jointly sponsored by the OAUG, the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and Quest International Users Group. Attendance was estimated at over 5,000 with excellent attendance at the sessions and brisk exhibit floor activity during the breaks.
According to Ferguson, all three of the sponsoring user organizations joined forces to present a "Fusion soup-to-nuts" program on Sunday from 10-6. Focusing on the Oracle Fusion strategy from a technology and a functionality perspective, Ferguson estimated that over 700 attendees packed the educational sessions on Sunday - a day that typically had been devoted to the various special interest group meetings. Sessions dealt with everything that Fusion touches - applications, databases, middleware - to provide clarity and a broad educational opportunity for users. The Sunday program, indicated Ferguson, was an example of how the complexity of the Oracle product suite is causing OAUG to rethink how it presents information to users, while working with the other Oracle user communities to create a program that is as broad and practical as possible.
For future educational efforts Ferguson noted that even more effort will be made to reach out to the line-of-business and management to attend COLLABORATE driven by a focus on business intelligence and performance management. To learn more about the benefits of membership in the OAUG, go here. http://www.oaug.org