By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience
Oracle OpenWorld 2014 was quite the whirlwind this year. As Floyd Teter (@fteter) said, trying to keep up with the press releases alone required real work. (This is a great summary of his perspective, by the way, and worth the read.)
Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, center, showing off the user experience for Oracle Sales Cloud
Cloud UX Strategy Day
It is an exciting time to be on the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team, and I really think this was our best year ever. We had our largest Oracle Applications Cloud UX strategy and roadmap day yet. Attendees encompassed the gamut of the OAUX community and included Oracle ACE Directors, UX Sales Ambassadors, key Applications Cloud partners, and a few select customers. They are a pushy lot, so you get you get with these guys, but it’s also time well spent if you want to put your messages and vision through a crucible of refinement.
It was a great place to launch our FY ‘15 plans. We started the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), vice president, talking about the overall trends and strategy that are shaping our user experience investment areas including wearables, Internet of Things, and session portability. Also, on display were the Oracle Sales Cloud UX Strategy, with Killian Evers, senior director; Oracle HCM Cloud UX strategy with Aylin Uysal, director; and Oracle ERP Cloud UX Strategy with David Haimes, (@dhaimes) senior director. We also had a packed house discussing user experience extensibility with Greg Nerpouni and Tim Dubois, and our complement to the PaaS4SaaS space, the simplified UI rapid development kit, with Ultan O’Broin (@usableapps). It was also the first time Oracle’s UX innovation history was put into perspective by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramot).
A special bonus for me was getting to see some of our UX Sales Ambassadors, Mike Klein, Tuan Nguyen (@tuan735) and Anand Subramanian (all the way from Dubai), and to witness their excitement at what was coming next.
Everyone was genuinely excited and pleased to see how much progress has been made across the board – from SaaS to PaaS – in moving Oracle’s cloud user experience strategy forward.
Oracle Applications Cloud User Experience Exchange
As most folks who have crossed paths with the user experience team know, partners and customers get their biggest “ah ha!” moments when they see the work firsthand. I liken it to the difference between telling you how well a car drives, vs. handing you the keys and saying, “take it for a spin yourself.” There is nothing quite like trying out the next-generation design work for yourself to really digest where things are going and what the enterprise possibilities are. We had excellent participation from the Oracle Partner Network, Oracle Analyst Relations, and Customer Connect.
Sherry Mead, Architect, discusses next-generation UX technologies.
Special thanks to Vlad Babu (all the way from Romania) and Bharath Ram and Sona Manzo (@sonajmanzo) of Hitachi Consulting for hanging out at the Simplified UI Rapid Development kit station to talk about their own successes.
So what was the reaction to the user experience message at OpenWorld?
For a quick digest, read the Usable Apps Storify post to see what folks Tweeted or otherwise posted. And here are a few additional comments:
Floyd Teter (@fteter), Oracle ACE Director, said “user experience is not only important, but is a value-add product in and of itself.’’Read his thoughts yourself.
Debra Lilley (@debralilley), Oracle ACE Director, calls out her particular interest in the investment in PaaS and user experience as well as her interest in the growing capabilities of Voice.
Lucas Jellema, (@lucasjellema), Oracle ACE Director, writes perhaps more than anyone I know. I’m not actually sure he sleeps. You can read his lengthy and thoughtful analyses of all things OpenWorld and UX-related.
Jeremy Cox of Ovum, center right, chats with Oracle’s Ultan O’Broin, far left, Vlad Babu, and Tim Dubois about extensibility in the cloud at the OAUX Exchange.
A special bonus was running across a Tweet from Debra Lilley via Ultan calling out the Constellation Research mention of user experience at OpenWorld.
Ray Wang (@rwang0), Constellation Research, said: "One of the things that was really astonishing was going into the UX lab. There was a UX lab that was set up. And you could see where Oracle was thinking about different paradigms. Where consumerization of IT could match back to what enterprise applications could look like. So anything from that to what was going on with BLE (Blue Tooth Low Energy). They had a whole BLE lab."
Dr. Natalie Petouhouff (@drnatalie), Constellation Research, also wrote about the UX labs at OpenWorld: "I did see that, and I thought that was really interesting and really forward-thinking. Because that is what customers expect. Being on the CX side of things, really that's what people expect apps to look like. So that they are thinking about that, what that says to me is that they actually have the customer in mind.”
Analyst Rebecca Wettemann, of Nucleus Research, gets checked in and set up on a personalized wearable that will help guide her around the demos at the OAUX Exchange thanks to Raymond of @theappslab team.
Find out more
If you want a quick way to find out what you missed, download our Oracle Applications Cloud UX strategy e-book.